The ex-president is ranting and raving on social media, making wild claims and vowing revenge—and yet, too often, he’s treated as a conventional candidate.
Donald Trump is poised to win the Republican nomination. If the polls are right, though they often aren’t, he’ll handily win Iowa and New Hampshire, at which point there will likely be very little chance of any non-Trump candidate slowing him down (not that they put up much of a fight to begin with). He’s also racking up endorsements, with prominent Republicans, including representatives Tom Emmer and Steve Scalise and Senator Tom Cotton, throwing him their support this week. And if you believe the polls pitting Trump against Joe Biden—I, for one, am skeptical—then the quadruply indicted former president is positioned to return to the White House.
Around this time last year, I argued that someone who tried to overturn the 2020 election shouldn’t be covered like a “normal” 2024 candidate, and yet, even four criminal indictments later, it feels like he is being treated that way. Whereas Trump enjoyed $ 2 billion worth of free media to dominate the news cycle during his 2016 run, these days he rarely sits down with mainstream outlets and opens himself up to scrutiny. His autocratic plans and extremist rants, while garnering some headlines, seem to quickly be forgotten amid the latest polls. Given that Trump and his allies have already told us that he plans to target the news media, whether “criminally or civilly,” it’s worth pausing and considering whether we’re adequately covering his unhinged behavior.
Paywall blocked me out. My response to the synopsis though:
This is a fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t thing. Militaristic thinkers, because they only care about winning, are often very good at maneuvering their opposition into untenable positions, catch-22s. They’re rationally inescapable, that’s the whole point, so it’s best to fall back onto your feelings, as much as I hate to say it. To paraphrase popular youtuber Ryan McBeth, don’t give your enemies problems, because problems have solutions. Give them dilemmas. That’s what they’re doing to us. When you find yourself in one, just acknowledge pain is your future, and pick something.
I’ve also slowly begun to suspect that there’s Russian intelligence penetration into our broader media ecosystem. I cannot otherwise explain the prevalence of Russian war propaganda coming from western outlets, and how certain American churches seem to be drifting closer and closer to Eastern Orthodoxy.
Let’s just keep our eye on the ball here. We’re trying to prevent the full might of the US military from falling into fascist hands unchecked by any Mike Pence type figures. It’s gonna get really ugly, but we can still win this with political activism and words. We need to remember our ground game. Nobody fully trusts these glowy screens we’re looking at, so its talking to your friends, knocking on doors, getting people registered, volunteering to drive voters to the polls, etc.
We win this one face-to-face, with the good ole fashioned democratic party ground n pound. It’s our greatest strength anyway. Find a couple people somewhere, and talk to them, preferably nicely. Don’t try to make them angry, try to get through to them.
If they’re religious, you can try to gently remind them of Jesus’ teachings, and how he said to pray for your enemies, to forgive others, to be kind and charitable, how the meek, not the strong shall inherit the Earth, how it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, how he whipped the Pharisees for using the temple to make money, how he sacrificed himself and not someone else to save our souls, how he asked us to follow him.
There’s so much more too. The height of irony in this day and age is how our greatest ally is actually probably the Jesus Christ of the scriptures. Sometimes you just have to meet people where they’re at. Frankly though, if you support people like Ghandi and MLK Jr, nothing Jesus says should be too strange to you. Maybe the praying stuff, he was pretty big on prayer. Philosophically he was just ahead of his time though, and honestly fits fine into the modern world as a broader philosophical alternative to materialism. He shouldn’t be blamed for what people did in his name after he died though, and his direct words are probably the only possible thing that could get through to certain sorts.
If we can remind evangelicals what it means to be a good person instead of a frightened person, though, we’ll sweep this election in a landslide. If by any chance you were raised in the church, there’s a very good use for those skills still. I know they’re still in there, even if it upsets us a little bit because of the shitty actions of various churches in the intervening 2000 years. Jesus didn’t do those things though, he just told people to play nice in a lot of different ways.