Media Attention Will Then Focus On Who His Running Mate Will Be
Remember homophobic maniac Tulsi Gabbard? At one time she took a spin around the national consciousness as the worst Democrap in Congress; then she left Congress and came out as what she always was: a Republican opportunist. She’s been part of the right-wing fringe media world since then, so if you’re a normal person don’t feel badly that you haven’t heard anything from her in a few years. She made the news over the weekend with a set-up question from Jesse Watters asked her if she would be open to being Trump’s running mate. LOL!
This Thursday, she’ll be auditioning by delivering a keynote speech at a Mar-a-Lago fat-cat fundraiser that may presage a long-pursued role in a Trump administration. She would love to be Secretary of State but Trump turned her down for a significant role last time. She’s so fully inserted into MAGA world now (calling Democrats “evil doers” and “dictators” at CPAC a couple of weeks ago), that he’d be likely to give her something if he wins again. But VP? Probably not.
Nor will he be turning the Nikki Haley for that— or any other— role. In fact, Haley just about said aloud, on Meet The Press, what everyone already knew… She’s not even going to vote for him. She's undermining the legitimacy of a new Trump-designed RNC and said she no longer feels bound by a pledge she made to support whichever candidate— Señor Trumpanzee— emerges from the primaries as the Republican candidate. She could well wind up endorsing him but there’s no way she’s going to vote for him. A pro forma endorsement would be part of her 2028 calculus. Will it look better to have stood top against him to primary voters or will it look better to have kowtowed to the MAGA base? (Her last-ditch effort is in Virginia, where she thinks she can win some delegates tomorrow. She’ll probably drop out on Wednesday... although she did win all the delegates up for grabs in the DC primary yesterday-- beating Trump 62.8% to 33.3%.) Meanwhile, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) announced over the weekend that she won't vote for Trump in November.
There are, after all, some Republicans— primary voters no less— who say they can’t vote for Trump. Not many… but enough to swing some key states to Biden if they vote for him or even sit out the election. A team of AP reporters wrote that “According to AP VoteCast surveys of the first three head-to-head Republican contests, 2 in 10 Iowa voters, one-third of New Hampshire voters, and one-quarter of South Carolina voters would be so disappointed by Trump’s renomination that they would refuse to vote for him in the fall... [A]bout 1 in 10 early contest voters who said they supported Trump in the 2020 general election said they wouldn’t be doing so this year.”
In 2020 there were 74,223,975 people who voted for Trump. Are they all traitors? Trump won landslides in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming. Is that 10 states that don’t deserve to be part of the US? Trump, like other charismatic authoritarian characters, managed to stoke and then capitalize on feelings of fear and insecurity among tmany Americans, particularly certain subsets, promising to restore the very order and security he undermined, all the while spreading messages of economic instability, social unrest and threats to national identity. We’ve been looking at the work of psychologist Theodor Adorno on the authoritarian personality for years.
You may recall that Adorno and his colleagues conducted groundbreaking research on the authoritarian personality, identifying traits such as a desire for strong leadership, a tendency to adhere rigidly to conventional norms and a belief in strict social hierarchies. These are the people more inclined to support authoritarian leaders like Trump who promise to maintain control and enforce certain values. Remember, Trump, like authoritarians before him both exacerbated and exploited divisions in society, emphasizing in-group solidarity and demonizing out-groups. This appeals to individuals who derive a sense of identity and belonging from their group affiliations and who may feel threatened by perceived outsiders. So... uneducated and ignorant, yes; rigid, yes; psychologically deformed, yes... but traitors? Not inherently, but a little too open to being led down that path by people like Trump, Bannon, Flynn, Vance.
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