One of the reasons that the Democrats have failed to smother the threat of Trump seems rather more obvious to me than to them.
They relentlessly take the Donald at face value. In doing so they place him in the same bucket as maybe half of his supporters — so when the Democrats call him a dictator, these folk say "hell, yeah!"
Meanwhile, the remainder of his supporters more or less hold onto the idea that what he says on campaign is just the idiot fodder necessary to carry the swing states and that, once elected, he will do what the big business, libertarian elites want him to do and not the MAGA-hat morons.
Some of this lot are (rightly) scared that perhaps, after all, it's not so straightforward to read Trump this way. But the Democrats are doing nothing to address this potentially mythical "just pretending' version of Trump. Instead they relentlessly mock and/or fear-monger in response to the flow of the "just what it says on the tin" rhetoric, which somehow provokes them into this permanent pattern.
Essentially this means that their riposte to all the scary nonsense is only of interest to his base and they take it as reinforcement, the part of scary that's a thrill ride.
It really doesn't matter that Trump should be taken at face value if enough highly educated, successful individuals think he shouldn't be. They vote, they influence, and their position needs a counter-position.
Harris’s strategy of calling Trump a fascist is precisely calibrated not to win over moderate Republicans, however counter-intuitive that might seem.
1 comment:
I've known him to be a four flusher fascist from the time he first came into the political realm. The problem has always been that my fellow democrats were afraid to call a spade a spade-I never understood that reluctance . You're right, it is very late in the game to bring up his fascist thinking, especially by his political opponents but I for one, think it prudent, should he win a second term. He has been called out by people who have more political clout than myself. The idea that, 'they' can't say we did not warn them holds some comfort.
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