I've started to look at it the other way around, i.e.: what kept all these nutjobs quiet? They were always around, but not nearly as vocal during other D presidents, but not even during any previous R presidents! They were listening to Rush Limbaugh, making racist jokes quietly over in the corner, and they were held in check.
Even when things were pretty divisive, during the Obama terms, I never saw rampant F*** OBAMA shirts and hats, because there wasn't a single, unifying bully at the top, so they all just kept their mouths shut.
And that's my theory: is they're psychologically like bullies - and like most bullies they're f***ing cowards, they only act when they're confident they have the upper hand, and when the president is also a bully, that gives them what they perceived as the biggest upper hand. They're not completely wrong either - when the president, by way of the courts, by sycophantic worship, is able to do anything, say anything, with impunity, it's the bully paradise and that opened the floodgates - and unfortunately I don't think those gates can't be closed again.
I won't ever discount the impact of the hat-in-ring speech Trump made after his descent down that escalator in the Trump Tower in the summer of 2015. On that day, he put the green light up for "those nutjobs" to bring their advocacy of white supremacy to the public square.
Sure, some of the racist and xenophobic remarks of that launch speech were buried in 45 minutes of Trump touting his own (vastly inflated) business acumen and personal wealth, all while delivering a faux anti-establishment pitch discontented Americans on both left and right in the USA.
But the racism was right out there, even though some media outlets didn't focus on it. Others, including Fox, did highlight Trump's casually vile remarks about Mexicans, which suited other right-leaning media because they knew the left would erupt in outrage, and that they could then focus on "owning the libs" for the next 17 months. Trump ran his faux populist pitch about making America great again, while the left eventually mourned Bernie's defeat and kinda-sorta tolerated the idea of Clinton's resurrected "turn" as next logical Democrat to compete for our highest elective office.
The fact that we were in a populist frame of mind on both left and right certainly didn't hurt Trump's chances in the primaries or the general election either. What stunned most of us, though, including Trump himself, was that in November, we actually elected someone so ill suited to the job he'd won.
What shouldn't have surprised us was Trump inviting white supremacists off the porch and into the White House after his victory. Seeing the likes of Stephen Miller land in the White House to guide policy on immigration was a wakeup call that came about 18 months too late for both political parties.
See maybe where we went wrong was trying to analyze either "what makes Trump tick" or "what makes voters go for Trump?". The real point, the real challenge and tasks at hand were always to figure out what to do if he won. He has made that difficult to impossible, just by running all his proto-fascist ploys by the seat of his pants; it's all guided strictly by his narcissism plus a sense honed over decades of how to appeal personally to mases of people looking for entertainment.
Just reacting to Trump is also a mistake, it's like reacting to a three year old after too much sugar. The resulting chaos draws one in and makes one forget how to initiate, how to flip the discussion back to what is real, what is feasible, what is needed in America. But no, we chase after the outrageous tweet or remark dropped into some rambling speech.
The GOP is finally starting to wise up to the downside of letting Trump's insanity wag their dog, but meanwhile the country fell off a cliff in so many ways that one wonders if we can ever recover. Biden's a start and a caretaker (a needed one, clearly) but the way forward after that seems more precarious than it did at the start of the 2020 campaigns back in 2019.
The Dems are so easily distracted. The GOP for all its faults is like a pit bull once it finds its talking points on any given subject. I like that the Dems are more open minded but sometimes we need a referee to blow a whistle and focus on the play at hand. It's why I still like Pelosi as leader in the House, but that's different to a chief executive and I'm not looking for a strongman in the WH.
As for Trump followers, loud minority that they are, they most definitely are looking for a strongman, their guy now and forever. I'm hoping the GOP is setting up to disappoint them in 2024, but past that I'm hoping they also don't want to continue touting the strongman model for an American prez.
I should think the Republican establishment would have been as alarmed as the rest of us by some of Trump's ad hoc capers while he was pressing all the levers of power he could reach while he was in office. Time to wrest back a little more congressional power to restore balance.
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