Look at the other side of the coin – folks who continue to favor Trump are prone to say things like, “Never say a bad thing about my President.” To me Trump represents a perfect storm of aggrievedness fueling utter self-confidence, non-stop creative fiction, gutter combativeness, and never confessing to any negative at all. He winds up being the epitome of Lincoln’s “You can feel some of the people all of the time.”
What gave him a leg up was the internet’s powerful effect on noise, as in “He who shouts loudest gets heard mostest.” The result is that fringe views flourish. Moderate views just don’t move people to shout. The internet facilitates building ideological camps at the poles not the center.
Where do we see that? Congressmen and Senators used to socialize across party lines. Not just socialize, but form deep friendships. The last time we saw that was when Ruth Bader Ginsburg mourned the loss of her dear friend Antonin Scalia.
The press loves the left more than the right. Too complicated to explain why, it just happened. Example: the New York Times sends out selected news items to just about every newspaper in America, and items it considers “news” wind up on countless front pages. But articles which it values have a strong tendency to praise and explain ideas popular on the left. Right-wing ideas get a lot less exposure, unless it’s negative. Over the span of the last 70 years, come election time the Times has endorsed candidates and platform planks from the left almost exclusively.
The folks on the right began to believe that the left wouldn’t know the truth if they happened to sit down on it. So today, Trump’s guilt is manifest and disgusting, but his soldiers in the House and Senate do a spin dance and declare it a non-issue. And the bit about not knowing the truth if they were sitting on it? In this case the Republicans deny that the Democrats are parading around the public square astride a great white horse of truth .
What’s more, the only trial Tump deems fair is one where the fix is in and his soldiers are running the courtroom. And yes, that hardcore base of permanently pissed-off Republicans delight in looking forward to sticking it to those ugly enemies across the aisle.
Politics ain’t beanbag. True enough. But we’re about to wish it were.
Oh, and Another Thing 