One thing that blows my mind is when republicans say so many bad things about Trump and then say they "can't" vote for Biden, or I assume any Democrat. So what they are saying is that they will NEVER vote for a Democrat, and if that is the case, then they are basically saying that no matter how bad the Republican candidate is, there is no case they would not vote for them, which is crazy.
That's not exactly what they're saying. People like this could not vote for president at all, vote third party or write somebody in. I mean, Mitt Romney's not voting for Trump, but he's not gonna vote for Biden, either. And look, that's halfway to a vote against Trump, so I'll take it ;)
Boo, hiss, Rick for putting your Libertarian convention post behind the paywall :P I know that's your SOP for weekend posts, but it was a not-at-all pleasant tease to be able to read your whole post and not comment on it. I don't subscribe to anybody. I don't even subscribe to YouTube channels.
If I paid you, I'd have to pay every creator whose content I enjoy and that would leave me nothing to contribute to Biden and the Democrats. Call me a poster boy for the free rider problem.
I still love you, Rick. Very much. But not like a, you know, whore ;)
I just cannot understand it….. Do you think there are death threats to persons or their families? Is that the fear?? We all know that malignant creature is jealous that Putin gets to murder his political enemies. Do you think he has convinced that whole maga cult that they or their families will perish? And yes, for sure Nikki will never get back into his graces. He never forgets the slightest slight. He has mentioned that he will likely eliminate the Supreme Court. They have slighted him in the past. He just wants to use them to gain the power he craves. How can a demented, unhinged, evil senile hate-filled creature who shits in his diapers be elevated to a super power? What is it??? People say he stenches like a porta potty. 🚽 yuk.
I've had the same thought. Many of those who turn around seem to do so kind of out of the blue...and tend to look scared or baffled...or sometimes inordinately enraged. E.g. Lindsey's whole visage seems to have transformed. Both drumpf and Putin have deep roots in organized crime.
For sure there’s a fear of sorts there. I’m not sure that it’s only fear that his so-called base will turn on them. And many say that’s their fear. Maybe, but I still 💭 think it’s a deeper fear than just worry about his base. We all know they can be violent. And tRump can just sic his base unto those he gets mad at. Right??
Thanks for the sub, Joanne. I'd upvote your post but my substack interface is being balky and I can't upvote anyone right now. So many great comments here I'd love to upvote :(
No, Nikki supports Trump willingly. She was never all that anti-Trump, it was just the last remaining lane after the other candidates dropped out. Nikki's a political animal, a creature of pure calculation and she realizes that being in the MAGA fold is the only way to stay relevant.
To answer your larger question, it's because the GOP hasn't had a message that's broadly appealing enough to win national elections since the end of the cold war. The last GOP president to win the popular vote was Dubya the year after he launched two wars with US troops. The GOP stands for tax cuts for the wealthy / deregulation and religious authoritarianism, held together by the nationalist glue of a strong military and dominance overseas. This used to be called Reagan's three-legged stool. But after Dubya humiliated the country with the twin catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan, that glue dissolved. That the neoliberal gospel of the free market sold to the public since Jimmy Carter (Reagan was its main cheerleader but yes, it was bipartisan) led directly to the Great Recession didn't help, either.
So the GOP no longer had a market for its wares. Look, Obama was a historic figure, a great orator and incredibly charismatic, but he was also woefully inexperienced and shouldn't have been so hard to beat. Both McCain and Romney ran hapless campaigns, drafting on the glories of a past no one believed in anymore. But they did it honorably, without race baiting.
Then a diaper wearing, Adderall snorting legend in his own mind with a reality TV show strode in and the rest is history. Rick will tell you that the GOP megadonors initially _despised_ Trump, but Trump had the secret sauce that McCain and Romney lacked -- demagogy. Trump is a virtuoso at otherization, getting people to blame their problems on those below them. It took them a bit to go all in, but once they did, the megadonor class realized they'd get all the tax cuts and deregulation they could ever want while Trump did his professional wrestling act.
And the GOP has now realized they'd be completely lost without Trump, because they can't sell their policies on the merits nationally without him and the MAGA movement he leads. It's why they've become addicted to gerrymandering, voter suppression and a captive SCOTUS.
Scarily, it's a lot more rational than anyone would care to think.
Trump's MAGAloids won't want a neocon Secretary of State. Not that Nikki Haley is fairly described as a "neocon," but they surely think she is. They want an isolationist.
People who are longtime Haley watchers are not surprised by this in the least. A couple years ago, Charlie Sykes wrote a piece called The Unbearable Lightness of Nikki Haley. We tend to instantly forget that for the first months of the primary, she was a meh candidate, in the back with the other zombie Reaganites Pence and Scott. The focus was on the massively overhyped DeSantis. Then Chris Christie jumped in and started landing some punches on He Who Shall Not Be Named so things began to get interesting for a hot minute right as Tiny D began his agonizingly slow, inevitable self-immolation. Christie's crash through the wall showed a path, but Chris ran out of money and Meatball Ron finally guttered completely out. So there was Nikki, standing open toe-to-toe with HWSNBN.
The was no path to the nomination. But there were 20-30% of Republican primary voters who _did not_ want to see Trump as their nominee. Nikki resumed her career-long pattern of pandering, this time to a group of voters who were far more sincerely anti-Trump than she was. She saw what happened to DeSantis and realized she couldn't run to Trump's right and try to out-MAGA him, so she cosplayed as the archetypal suburban Republican woman who simply found Trump _appalling._
The media _ate this up._ Not just the MSM but sharp analysts who I respect, Sarah Longwell and AB Stoddard, conflated Haley's vesselhood for their anti-Trump dreams with Nikki herself. This was peculiar to me, because Nikki Haley is one of the most carefully scripted politicians I've ever seen. This didn't come from the gut like Chris Christie, or a place of deep moral contemplation like Asa Hutchinson, or a desire to keep her party from being destroyed like Liz Cheney. This was just another group of voters Nikki could shine in front of. And shine she did, to the point of drawing double digits in closed primaries months after she dropped out. Because being anti-Trump _meant something._
Not to Nikki Haley. She kicked those supporters to the curb without a moment's thought.
Because it was best for Nikki. I wish I could feel sorry for Sarah and AB, but I'm incapable of it.
Respect, but I do not watch newsmax and couldn't pick one of their folk out from a police line up. Kind of phatt saying my lived experience is a trope, don't you think. Clearly you spoke to more alum than I. Albeit all I have spoken with (100s) held his remarks in disdain.
Dr. Stephens can believe what he wants. What he can't really do is attempt to speak for black America when he represents a very small cohort of redpilled black conservatives who love themselves some Tucker Carlson and Tim Pool, ROTFL.
I read your piece, Torrance. It was a Newsmax editorial, filled with standard tropes about Biden's "dementia" (a lie), blaming George Floyd's sadistic police murder on the fact that he was a petty criminal and repeating the calumny about Robert Byrd, who tearfully repudiated the Klan decades before his death. Attacking Biden for the '94 crime bill, overwhelmingly supported by black public officials at the time, is pretty rich after what you said about George Floyd.
You want to pretend that it's indecent to talk politics at a commencement address when the truth is, you just don't like _Biden's_ politics. Which is fine; you're entitled. But it begs all sorts of questions about the, uhh, elephant in the room. The standard political trope in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow South was to get poor whites, which the white power structure wanted little to do with, to identify with them by blaming the problems of poor whites on black people. Trump's standard trope is to get black people to identify with him by blaming their problems on recent immigrants. And on phantoms like a "Marxist-Fascist Deep State" run by, you know, well-meaning white liberals. See how that works?
Well no, you're not worth two cups of Starbucks coffee a month if your purpose is to troll us about Biden and brag about being perma-banned from Twitter and YouTube as if you were the second coming of George Orwell. We on Rick's substack not only support Joe Biden but we also despise martyrdom politics. Maybe you deserved it? ;)
FWIW: I have not had cable on my farm since 2002. I rarely watch any television at all. No news, but I do read. As for what I do consume visually: Triggernometry, All-In Podcast, Joe Rogan, The Breakfast Club, Tucker Carlson, Timcast IRL, Come And Talk 2 Me (W Camron & Mase), PBD Podcast & a few other folk. Appreciate your civility, aside your flodging in the form of asserting Black men speaking on Black male realities are merely tropes.
Ummm, did you realize that your Tucker Carlson said in writing to his cohorts at FoX he “despised Trump”, didn’t believe that the election was stolen, thought Trumps “crazy team” was, well, crazy. He felt Trump was not to be believed. All of this was uncovered in the Dominion trial. He, Rupert, and the rest of the gang outright said they lied to their followers because you all were too dumb to factcheck and wanted the lies to continue. How can you believe ANY of those people?
You may have noticed, Torrance, that Joe Biden is in the midst of a presidential campaign and to expect he'd give a commencement at Morehouse and not campaign is neither realistic nor fair minded. I'm not trying to reduce your lived experience to tropes but you are articulating a narrative that's been around since the late 60s (the so-called Democrat plantation) and well before that with the great debate between Booker T. Washington and WE Dubois. I'm with WE Dubois.
Donald Trump isn't your friend, Torrance. Joe Biden is at least trying. And he's not aiming his appeal at black cultural conservatives like you and your Morehouse cohort because they're, you know, cultural conservatives. Biden opposes cultural conservatism and IMHO for good reason.
Which doesn't mean you have to agree, just sayin'.
There a chance of it to be sure and he deffo won't endorse Biden. But I'm much less confident that he will than I was dead certain Haley would. Chris Christie is a gut politician; he takes great pride in not pandering. Haley is all about calculated appeals and only went at Trump when Christie dropped out and it was the last lane left open.
That's a good question. I don't think he'll endorse Trump although it's not likely he'll endorse Biden. He has less to prove to himself than Nikki Haley.
What made Tim Miller howl the most was her boilerplate about wanting a strong foreign policy, knowing full well that Trump would give away the store to Putin and Xi. She can only attempt to rationalize that by trying to claim that Biden would be "worse," which nobody in the cabinet she served with believes for a femtosecond. It's pathetic and false on its face and she knows it.
It was to remain viable in the Trumpified Republican Party. Nikki has always done what's best for Nikki; she thought trashing Trump at the end of the primary would open up a lane for her. When the lane closed, that was it for that and no further thoughts about doing the Liz Cheney principled thing. Nikki's never done anything for high principle, including taking down the Confederate flag, which her big donors wanted to attract business into South Carolina.
Nikki Haley hoped for the same thing as Melania: that Trump would die in the near future. Nikki would become President if Trump was elected.
One thing that blows my mind is when republicans say so many bad things about Trump and then say they "can't" vote for Biden, or I assume any Democrat. So what they are saying is that they will NEVER vote for a Democrat, and if that is the case, then they are basically saying that no matter how bad the Republican candidate is, there is no case they would not vote for them, which is crazy.
That's not exactly what they're saying. People like this could not vote for president at all, vote third party or write somebody in. I mean, Mitt Romney's not voting for Trump, but he's not gonna vote for Biden, either. And look, that's halfway to a vote against Trump, so I'll take it ;)
Boo, hiss, Rick for putting your Libertarian convention post behind the paywall :P I know that's your SOP for weekend posts, but it was a not-at-all pleasant tease to be able to read your whole post and not comment on it. I don't subscribe to anybody. I don't even subscribe to YouTube channels.
If I paid you, I'd have to pay every creator whose content I enjoy and that would leave me nothing to contribute to Biden and the Democrats. Call me a poster boy for the free rider problem.
I still love you, Rick. Very much. But not like a, you know, whore ;)
I just cannot understand it….. Do you think there are death threats to persons or their families? Is that the fear?? We all know that malignant creature is jealous that Putin gets to murder his political enemies. Do you think he has convinced that whole maga cult that they or their families will perish? And yes, for sure Nikki will never get back into his graces. He never forgets the slightest slight. He has mentioned that he will likely eliminate the Supreme Court. They have slighted him in the past. He just wants to use them to gain the power he craves. How can a demented, unhinged, evil senile hate-filled creature who shits in his diapers be elevated to a super power? What is it??? People say he stenches like a porta potty. 🚽 yuk.
I've had the same thought. Many of those who turn around seem to do so kind of out of the blue...and tend to look scared or baffled...or sometimes inordinately enraged. E.g. Lindsey's whole visage seems to have transformed. Both drumpf and Putin have deep roots in organized crime.
For sure there’s a fear of sorts there. I’m not sure that it’s only fear that his so-called base will turn on them. And many say that’s their fear. Maybe, but I still 💭 think it’s a deeper fear than just worry about his base. We all know they can be violent. And tRump can just sic his base unto those he gets mad at. Right??
No, they're not doing it under duress. For people like Lindsey and Nikki, it's pure FOMO.
Thanks for the sub, Joanne. I'd upvote your post but my substack interface is being balky and I can't upvote anyone right now. So many great comments here I'd love to upvote :(
No, Nikki supports Trump willingly. She was never all that anti-Trump, it was just the last remaining lane after the other candidates dropped out. Nikki's a political animal, a creature of pure calculation and she realizes that being in the MAGA fold is the only way to stay relevant.
To answer your larger question, it's because the GOP hasn't had a message that's broadly appealing enough to win national elections since the end of the cold war. The last GOP president to win the popular vote was Dubya the year after he launched two wars with US troops. The GOP stands for tax cuts for the wealthy / deregulation and religious authoritarianism, held together by the nationalist glue of a strong military and dominance overseas. This used to be called Reagan's three-legged stool. But after Dubya humiliated the country with the twin catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan, that glue dissolved. That the neoliberal gospel of the free market sold to the public since Jimmy Carter (Reagan was its main cheerleader but yes, it was bipartisan) led directly to the Great Recession didn't help, either.
So the GOP no longer had a market for its wares. Look, Obama was a historic figure, a great orator and incredibly charismatic, but he was also woefully inexperienced and shouldn't have been so hard to beat. Both McCain and Romney ran hapless campaigns, drafting on the glories of a past no one believed in anymore. But they did it honorably, without race baiting.
Then a diaper wearing, Adderall snorting legend in his own mind with a reality TV show strode in and the rest is history. Rick will tell you that the GOP megadonors initially _despised_ Trump, but Trump had the secret sauce that McCain and Romney lacked -- demagogy. Trump is a virtuoso at otherization, getting people to blame their problems on those below them. It took them a bit to go all in, but once they did, the megadonor class realized they'd get all the tax cuts and deregulation they could ever want while Trump did his professional wrestling act.
And the GOP has now realized they'd be completely lost without Trump, because they can't sell their policies on the merits nationally without him and the MAGA movement he leads. It's why they've become addicted to gerrymandering, voter suppression and a captive SCOTUS.
Scarily, it's a lot more rational than anyone would care to think.
Wow……. Thank you. Right they can’t win on their own merit. But they can by massive, clever cheating like hell!! Unbelievable. !!!
Zakley.
Nikki the Nazi apologist. Is that going to be her legacy?
Totally!
Perhaps he dangled Sec State in front of her and she jumped?
Trump's MAGAloids won't want a neocon Secretary of State. Not that Nikki Haley is fairly described as a "neocon," but they surely think she is. They want an isolationist.
People who are longtime Haley watchers are not surprised by this in the least. A couple years ago, Charlie Sykes wrote a piece called The Unbearable Lightness of Nikki Haley. We tend to instantly forget that for the first months of the primary, she was a meh candidate, in the back with the other zombie Reaganites Pence and Scott. The focus was on the massively overhyped DeSantis. Then Chris Christie jumped in and started landing some punches on He Who Shall Not Be Named so things began to get interesting for a hot minute right as Tiny D began his agonizingly slow, inevitable self-immolation. Christie's crash through the wall showed a path, but Chris ran out of money and Meatball Ron finally guttered completely out. So there was Nikki, standing open toe-to-toe with HWSNBN.
The was no path to the nomination. But there were 20-30% of Republican primary voters who _did not_ want to see Trump as their nominee. Nikki resumed her career-long pattern of pandering, this time to a group of voters who were far more sincerely anti-Trump than she was. She saw what happened to DeSantis and realized she couldn't run to Trump's right and try to out-MAGA him, so she cosplayed as the archetypal suburban Republican woman who simply found Trump _appalling._
The media _ate this up._ Not just the MSM but sharp analysts who I respect, Sarah Longwell and AB Stoddard, conflated Haley's vesselhood for their anti-Trump dreams with Nikki herself. This was peculiar to me, because Nikki Haley is one of the most carefully scripted politicians I've ever seen. This didn't come from the gut like Chris Christie, or a place of deep moral contemplation like Asa Hutchinson, or a desire to keep her party from being destroyed like Liz Cheney. This was just another group of voters Nikki could shine in front of. And shine she did, to the point of drawing double digits in closed primaries months after she dropped out. Because being anti-Trump _meant something._
Not to Nikki Haley. She kicked those supporters to the curb without a moment's thought.
Because it was best for Nikki. I wish I could feel sorry for Sarah and AB, but I'm incapable of it.
They should have known.
Respect, but I do not watch newsmax and couldn't pick one of their folk out from a police line up. Kind of phatt saying my lived experience is a trope, don't you think. Clearly you spoke to more alum than I. Albeit all I have spoken with (100s) held his remarks in disdain.
"Newsmax editorial" was a metaphor. By your own admission, your media diet is right wing.
I looked at that media diet and just shook my head. Please branch out, Dr Stephens.
Dr. Stephens can believe what he wants. What he can't really do is attempt to speak for black America when he represents a very small cohort of redpilled black conservatives who love themselves some Tucker Carlson and Tim Pool, ROTFL.
What about Biden? This says a lot about Biden. tinyurl.com/3d4ea6mp Hope he never comes back to my school.
I read your piece, Torrance. It was a Newsmax editorial, filled with standard tropes about Biden's "dementia" (a lie), blaming George Floyd's sadistic police murder on the fact that he was a petty criminal and repeating the calumny about Robert Byrd, who tearfully repudiated the Klan decades before his death. Attacking Biden for the '94 crime bill, overwhelmingly supported by black public officials at the time, is pretty rich after what you said about George Floyd.
You want to pretend that it's indecent to talk politics at a commencement address when the truth is, you just don't like _Biden's_ politics. Which is fine; you're entitled. But it begs all sorts of questions about the, uhh, elephant in the room. The standard political trope in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow South was to get poor whites, which the white power structure wanted little to do with, to identify with them by blaming the problems of poor whites on black people. Trump's standard trope is to get black people to identify with him by blaming their problems on recent immigrants. And on phantoms like a "Marxist-Fascist Deep State" run by, you know, well-meaning white liberals. See how that works?
Well no, you're not worth two cups of Starbucks coffee a month if your purpose is to troll us about Biden and brag about being perma-banned from Twitter and YouTube as if you were the second coming of George Orwell. We on Rick's substack not only support Joe Biden but we also despise martyrdom politics. Maybe you deserved it? ;)
FWIW: I have not had cable on my farm since 2002. I rarely watch any television at all. No news, but I do read. As for what I do consume visually: Triggernometry, All-In Podcast, Joe Rogan, The Breakfast Club, Tucker Carlson, Timcast IRL, Come And Talk 2 Me (W Camron & Mase), PBD Podcast & a few other folk. Appreciate your civility, aside your flodging in the form of asserting Black men speaking on Black male realities are merely tropes.
Ummm, did you realize that your Tucker Carlson said in writing to his cohorts at FoX he “despised Trump”, didn’t believe that the election was stolen, thought Trumps “crazy team” was, well, crazy. He felt Trump was not to be believed. All of this was uncovered in the Dominion trial. He, Rupert, and the rest of the gang outright said they lied to their followers because you all were too dumb to factcheck and wanted the lies to continue. How can you believe ANY of those people?
You may have noticed, Torrance, that Joe Biden is in the midst of a presidential campaign and to expect he'd give a commencement at Morehouse and not campaign is neither realistic nor fair minded. I'm not trying to reduce your lived experience to tropes but you are articulating a narrative that's been around since the late 60s (the so-called Democrat plantation) and well before that with the great debate between Booker T. Washington and WE Dubois. I'm with WE Dubois.
Donald Trump isn't your friend, Torrance. Joe Biden is at least trying. And he's not aiming his appeal at black cultural conservatives like you and your Morehouse cohort because they're, you know, cultural conservatives. Biden opposes cultural conservatism and IMHO for good reason.
Which doesn't mean you have to agree, just sayin'.
What about Christie?
Anyone who follows Christie closely knows that at bottom he’s a shameless opportunist. Dollars to donuts he endorses Trump prior to the election.
There a chance of it to be sure and he deffo won't endorse Biden. But I'm much less confident that he will than I was dead certain Haley would. Chris Christie is a gut politician; he takes great pride in not pandering. Haley is all about calculated appeals and only went at Trump when Christie dropped out and it was the last lane left open.
That's a good question. I don't think he'll endorse Trump although it's not likely he'll endorse Biden. He has less to prove to himself than Nikki Haley.
Are there any Republican politicians who have NOT sucked up to Trump?
Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Geoff Duncan.
I’ll add Mitt Romney to that list.
What made Tim Miller howl the most was her boilerplate about wanting a strong foreign policy, knowing full well that Trump would give away the store to Putin and Xi. She can only attempt to rationalize that by trying to claim that Biden would be "worse," which nobody in the cabinet she served with believes for a femtosecond. It's pathetic and false on its face and she knows it.
Q: What can you sell but never buy back? A: Your integrity.
How do we know it was for ‘nothing’?
It was to remain viable in the Trumpified Republican Party. Nikki has always done what's best for Nikki; she thought trashing Trump at the end of the primary would open up a lane for her. When the lane closed, that was it for that and no further thoughts about doing the Liz Cheney principled thing. Nikki's never done anything for high principle, including taking down the Confederate flag, which her big donors wanted to attract business into South Carolina.
Nobody with a single functioning brain cell was shocked or surprised.
Welcome to 1937.