okay here’s the fish funeral story for everyone who missed it when it blew up six years ago

"Who won the last presidential election?" is not a "gotcha" question.

ARatrupar.bsky.socialOct 6, 2024 2:22pm

STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you say unequivocally that Biden won the 2020 election & Trump lost? MIKE JOHNSON: See, this is the game always played by mainstream media with mainstream Republicans. It's a gotcha game. S: So like Vance, you can't say unequivocally that Biden won the election & Trump lost?

Aaron Rupar (@aaron.rupar) on Threads

STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Trump lost? MIKE JOHNSON: See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with mainstream Republican...

If you have read or shared The Atlantic article on college reading, I beg you to read this piece by a high school teacher interviewed for the piece.

The Atlantic Did Me Dirty

Early this summer I was interviewed by Rose Horowitch, an editor for The Atlantic. She told me that she had heard from a university professor that incoming students were struggling to keep up with the...

Your friend POTUS has a funny name.

I wonder quite a lot what will happen once Trump is no longer at the helm of the party, whether due to a great loss or an eventual death from old age or something else. Will his successors (Vance?) manage to keep racial/cultural resentment dominant? Demographics are against them eventually, I think.

I thought at the time that if Trump lost, the coalition would fragment: nobody would want anything to do with #3, but the others wouldn't be a nationally viable party without them. Complicated! But once Trump won, groups #1 and #2 fully submitted to the reality that without MAGA they have nothing.

A big part of Trump's success came from very clearly not disavowing #3: they finally recognized that they were a plurality of the party and felt empowered to speak up. And the other two groups discovered that they were helpless to exert control once their pet monster decided to run the show.

I remember writing, before the 2016 election, that if the GOP lost I wasn't sure where they'd go next. They'd been a coalition of 1) small-government budget-focused conservatives, 2) religious social conservatives, and 3) publicly disavowed but essential Southern Strategy racially-motivated voters.

There's good thinking in this thread's optimistic "MAGA/GOP last gasp" take on the current moment. I still think the immediate risk is enormous: Trump as President again really could do massive damage and likely undermine future American democracy. But if we avoid/survive that, maybe things look up?