Good thread.
Yeah, I'm shocked by the Trump era.
NOT SO SHOCKED BY TRUMP HIMSELF - We had a lot of conservatives tell us in 2016 that when Trump said something stupid, he was really playing 4D chess. But after four years of tweeting about "closing the boarders," about Mueller's lack of a "smocking gun," right up until last week's lament that "Votes cannot be cast after the Poles close," we ought to be able to unanimously agree that he's really fucking stupid. But he's always been stupid.
And he's always been a racist.
He's always been a profoundly immoral person - cheating on his wives, cheating in business, bragging to Howard Stern that they couldn't throw him out of the Miss Teen pageant dressing room because he owned it, bragging about serial sexual assault, mocking the disabled, etc.
PRETTY SHOCKED BY THE AMERICANS WHO SUPPORT HIM - I'm looking at you, evangelical Christians. You guys never stopped vigorously and loudly supporting a guy who behaves every single day in a way that is the exact opposite of the way Jesus told you to behave. I'll never understand it, and I'll never forget it.
I suppose the only thing I can conclude is that propaganda works. I mean, it works really well, and there are a lot of people like me who were stupid to think that it couldn't work just as well in a liberal democracy as it does anywhere else in the world. Rush Limbaugh... out there telling conservatives for three decades, "Liberals hate America." "Liberals want to destroy this country." His own rhetoric has been turned up to a boil, and Americans can now live in an entire ecosphere where the "news" tells them (and they confirm to one another) that liberals are evil people who burn down cities, celebrate the death of police officers, and want to murder full-term infants. And that stuff is cemented into their brains as factual, because NO ONE in their world will argue otherwise.
REALLY SHOCKED BY THE ELECTED LEADERS IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY - In 2019, Trump tweeted several times about how four black and brown Congresswomen (all very much Americans, let's point out) should "go back and fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Hours later, he mentioned Ilhan Omar by name at a rally in North Carolina, and he stood and smirked while the all-white crowd chanted "Send her back!"
I have pretty low expectations for the rabid Trumpkins at a rally that looks like a colorized version of 1930's Germany... but what's still unbelievable to me is that every single elected Republican in the national government didn't call a press conference the next day to repudiate and condemn that bullshit. Every single one of them just ran past reporters and hid in their offices for a couple days so they wouldn't have to answer for it. And why? Because they didn't want to lose the privilege and power of their office.
Six months later, those same boot-licking cowards wouldn't even allow Republican-appointed witnesses (Sondland, among others) to speak at an impeachment trial, because they'd rather win their own re-elections than allow the public confirmation that Trump is undeniably a traitor to this country.
It's fucking disgraceful.