They were all dedicated never-Trumpers who used terms like “racist”, “fascist”, “immoral”, “charlatan”, “fundamentally dishonest”, and “disgusting” in reference to Donald Trump in 2016, and who are now praising him and telling everyone to vote for him again. In addition to the named hypocrites, throw all of Evangelical Christianity in the sack, along with practically every Republican office holder. Digby doesn’t seem to be able to listen to them anymore, and neither can I.
Watching these people on TV making excuses for Trump and preening before his cult followers is more than I can take these days.
They know what they are doing. They are not rubes being brainwashed by Sean Hannity. And they know very well that Democrats are not an existential threat. With the exception of some of the evangelicals who have been lying their entire lives about who they are and what they care about, this is a calculated career decision based on cowardice.
They aren’t rubes, and we certainly can’t make the excuse that they are “economically distressed”. These are craven liars who are in on the grift.
Minneapolis police union selling “Cops for Trump” T-shirts, in wake of uniform ban
You might think that police officers would not embrace someone who has no respect for the rule of law. You might be wrong.
I think the problem was that these sycophants REALLY underestimated just how popular this openly ignorant, bigoted, and casually cruel polyp on the nation’s rectum would be among rank-and-file Republican voters. They expected that they would do the “smart” thing and line up behind a career right-wing politician like Cruz or Bush. Instead, they discovered that after years of subtle pandering to white-supremacy, cut-throat capitalism, jingoism, and Christian fanaticism, those who sincerely believe that crap are going to demand results rather than vague promises. Trump has largely delivered on his promises to the deplorables and the redneck trash love him for it. Now, to stay employed, these lackeys have to start kissing up.
(Hey! Democrats! Are you taking notes? Maybe after decades of teasing us with promises of a left-leaning utopia you ought to actually give us national health care, free college, racial and sexual equality etc. you ACTUALLY FOLLOW THROUGH rather than pat us on the head and tell us that change is slow and incremental. You’d win more elections that way.)
Akira MacKenzie @ 2-
Which just shows how seriously out of touch they are with their own audiences*. At every opportunity, when given the slightest of a chance, the rank and file would gleefully rip the mask off to show what all the elisions, dodges, and mendacities were truly about. A good example of this would be the Dover trial, where the school board just decided they didn’t need to bother with the disguise the Discovery Institute was selling and pretty much admitted what they were doing.
*Or, how seriously they overestimated their ability to control them. Or, how much they deluded themselves into thinking they ever had control.
Reginald Selkirk @1: It’s really not a surprise. Cops tend to overwhelmingly be conservative in many areas and have aggressive views toward minorities, poor people, and basically everyone else the president hates. Many of them openly collude with alt-right hate groups. Having the option to simply use violence against people they don’t like without concern for pesky things like the law is a dream come true for far too many of them.
I am not saying they were all bought by Putin, they were bought by Putin.
The greatest irony is the support and adulation that Trump gets from Focus on the Family, ignoring Trump’s three marriages and two divorces, along with numerous extramarital affairs. But FoF also strongly supported Newt Gingrich despite his four marriages and tree divorces, so there’s no surprise that they adore Trump. What drives them is their belief in “The Word”; and the one word they believe in is “Conservative”. They will support anyone who calls themselves a “Conservative” no matter what they say, do, believe,or enact.
Akira MacKenzie @ 2, Jeremy Shaffer @ 3:
And really, it shouldn’t have surprised them. I’ve been saying since well before Trump was elected that fundamentally the Tea Party was the same thing: the result of over a generation of grifters stirring up the voters by making promises that they never intended to keep (because if they kept them, they wouldn’t have any levers to stir up the voters with anymore), followed by the people who never realized it was a con from the start getting old enough to get into political office themselves and try to actually do the things that were promised. People who didn’t know that there was never an intention on following through, and who ascribe it all to the conspiracy they were told was preventing the ‘good, honest Conservatives’ from actually doing what they pretended they were going to do.
When you raise the next generation on lies and conspiracies to explain why you can’t get rid of the whip you’re using to get them to run, you shouldn’t be surprised when they grow up and show absolutely no understanding of how to use it after they rip it out of your hands.
@1
Um, no. Why would I think that? Very few people look at their own job out of the immediate context. It would be like thinking a restaurateur “embraces” food safety. If they did, we wouldn’t need health inspectors.
The backlash to BLM makes it entirely clear that a large number of affluent Americans consider it the job of police to protect them from the predations of the poor. It is certainly not “justice” or “rule of law” in the abstract. This probably shouldn’t be shocking, since it’s the historical role police have always played, but I have to admit I never imagined people would get in a tizzy over an obviously correct assertion that “blacks live matter.” The counter-assertion is “black lives don’t matter”. After first imagining that people were missing the logic, I now think that is really their point. Detractors of BLM are outraged at the idea that police should ever be impeded in their work by the prospect of killing a black person.
Paul BC: So you’re saying that “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” are both intentional misunderstandings of “Black Lives Matter?” And here I thought it was just glaring ignorance/stupidity on the part of conservatives, but no, you’re right.
No surprises anywhere here and after a few years of Drumpfh, I figured this out:
If I thought 1 + 1 = 3 and somebody corrected me, I would adjust to 1 + 1 = 2. This is because I want to be correct. Drumpfh supporters are gleefully, happily, goonishly, permanently, and incontrovertibly satisfied with 1 + 1 = 3.
They are proud of their ignorance; they no longer have to hide their racism; they are proud of being against ANY type of authority based on facts, e.g. science, professorial knowledge, historical facts, budgets, medicine, etc., ad nauseam.
I no longer get wound up at some Drumpfh supporter’s ignorance–I accept it now. They are simply bad people and are not going to change.
I recommend that others join me. They are simply bad people and will not change.