Trump's one note supporters: We hate liberals

Chew Toy McCoy

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Honestly, is there anything left on that hill they are willing to die on (and some actually will)? I fully believe the RNC will lean heavily on divisiveness and preaching roughly half the country is literally the enemy. I can't put myself in a Republican's shoes, but I can't fathom how almost 4 years of that message culminating in this year's RNC is a good main platform for a party or the country. That message isn't going to end well for anybody.

Personally I mentally separated conservatives and Republicans from Trump supporters a long time ago. I've tried to avoid making "all" statements, but in some antagonizing company it can be really hard to do so. I've also tried to examine how I deliver a statement and if the same type language was aimed at me would it cause me to think or would it cause me to be resentful and insulted. Sometimes I don't care if what I say offends people, but other times if I'm interested in a serious debate I know using certain language or tones isn't going to promote that. In this regard I don't think still remaining Trump supporters are capable of any kind of reflection or examination that gets in the way of liberals are the enemy.
 

lizkat

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Sometimes I don't care if what I say offends people, but other times if I'm interested in a serious debate I know using certain language or tones isn't going to promote that. In this regard I don't think still remaining Trump supporters are capable of any kind of reflection or examination that gets in the way of liberals are the enemy.

I live in a rural area of the western Catskills where Confederate flags still fly off or are painted on some barns, and not only because the owners' ancestors may have hailed from further down along the Appalchian chain. Our county fair's directors have yet to ban the selling of Confederate paraphernalia inside the fairgrounds. I've found that no matter how carefully or casually I express an opinion that it's time to move on from Trump's administration for the benefit of all ordinary Americans, with an example that relates to impact of that administration on our local circumstances, the hard core Trump supporters from 2016 don't want to hear it.

It's not just that they've long since pegged me as liberal, it's that almost any reference to Trump-era policy that sounds like dissent from adulation of Trump himself seems to provoke them into reiteration of some generic soundbite-sized mini-meme that passes for a Republican "talking point" these days.

I regard myself as a forward looking person as far as politics go generally, and get pretty excited about seeing more young people around here becoming activisits. But among older folks, I sure liked the ambience better back when the in-laws some of my kin used to argue conservative politics with me up here. Their points of view were less xenophobic and more focused on practical matters like whether anti-trust policy should start having a look at what was happening in dairy farming even back in the early 80s.

Today some of the remaining farmers, the ones who managed to stave off several waves of bankruptcy or foreclosure, have left such considerations behind in conversations about politics. This seems the case even if they sometimes do push back on Trump's ignorant anti-immigration blatherings... since a number of them do depend on Mexican laborers with strong dairy herd experience. Aside from that they seem too often just uncritical repeaters of the most reductive of the right wing memes of the Trump rally crowd.
 

Chew Toy McCoy

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I live in a rural area of the western Catskills where Confederate flags still fly off or are painted on some barns, and not only because the owners' ancestors may have hailed from further down along the Appalchian chain. Our county fair's directors have yet to ban the selling of Confederate paraphernalia inside the fairgrounds. I've found that no matter how carefully or casually I express an opinion that it's time to move on from Trump's administration for the benefit of all ordinary Americans, with an example that relates to impact of that administration on our local circumstances, the hard core Trump supporters from 2016 don't want to hear it.

It's not just that they've long since pegged me as liberal, it's that almost any reference to Trump-era policy that sounds like dissent from adulation of Trump himself seems to provoke them into reiteration of some generic soundbite-sized mini-meme that passes for a Republican "talking point" these days.

I regard myself as a forward looking person as far as politics go generally, and get pretty excited about seeing more young people around here becoming activisits. But among older folks, I sure liked the ambience better back when the in-laws some of my kin used to argue conservative politics with me up here. Their points of view were less xenophobic and more focused on practical matters like whether anti-trust policy should start having a look at what was happening in dairy farming even back in the early 80s.

Today some of the remaining farmers, the ones who managed to stave off several waves of bankruptcy or foreclosure, have left such considerations behind in conversations about politics. This seems the case even if they sometimes do push back on Trump's ignorant anti-immigration blatherings... since a number of them do depend on Mexican laborers with strong dairy herd experience. Aside from that they seem too often just uncritical repeaters of the most reductive of the right wing memes of the Trump rally crowd.

I have a good conservative friend, in CA no less!, and is/was a Trump supporter. I’m really not sure at this point because Covid-19 really sobered a lot of us up and we haven’t really touched the topic of partisan debating since. It’s kind of don’t ask/don’t tell at this point. I know he does take the virus seriously at least to the level of being concerned about his elderly parents.

Despite him and I being the same age he mostly just sees the internet as a YouTube viewer and still has a feature phone, refuses to get a smartphone. He doesn’t do any social media. He gets all his news from Fox on TV. He tends to be more overbearing in our political discussions and echoes a lot of Fox talking points. His biggest gripes are people on welfare and illegals. To his credit when I offer opposing information and data he is usually open to it, but I’m really quite shocked sometimes at some of the opposing information he is completely unaware of that is the direct result of consuming nothing but Fox News on political issues.
 

DT

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In this regard I don't think still remaining Trump supporters are capable of any kind of reflection or examination that gets in the way of liberals are the enemy.

We've been watching as trump supporters have backed away, particularly over the last 12-18 months. We've been saying there's some point where it's hard to understand who's left - I mean, in 2016 I sort of "got it", in 2017, OK, well, some of the original supporting ideas are still in play, but then as we moved through 2018 till now, it's just become an angry cesspool, the dialog from the WH is just raging anti-anything-liberal, it's not even consistent or logically sound (in the context of more traditional republican values). And the remaining mouth-breathers just get off on the anti-Liberal thing too, look at a couple of the usual suspects on MR, it's just hateful vitriol about wanting to see people cry, or about "the feels" (the funny thing, the people who say those things, in my experience, are the first people to shit their pants in any situation).
 

Renzatic

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lizkat

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the dialog from the WH is just raging anti-anything-liberal, it's not even consistent or logically sound (in the context of more traditional republican values)

This is what gets me. And there's no bully pulpit like that of the White House, so it at least seems to have overwhelmed expression or reiteration of those more traditional values. For that though I blame not only partisan media outlets like Fox, but also the center and left-leaning media who may have come down too much along lines of "but we have to cover this stuff."

Yeah of course they must cover the circus. We do need to be jolted out of our own busy schedules and priorities now and then by a glance at a gone-viral clip of exactly how nuts (or corrupt, or ignorant, or abusive) Trump and his crew are. This is a dangerously impulsive and malleable executive we have now in the Oval Office. He and his inner circle have merited a 24/7 watching effort.

But maybe the mainstream journos' editors could afford to leave far more of the "Trump Show" space for some remaining sane voices to the right of center.

In the end, no matter the ringmaster's attributes, the country's fate rests in execution of policy. Surely the press knows this.

We have all needed more summary-view but clear explication du texte of the down-road impact of Trump's EOs at papers of record like WaPo and the NYT all this time. We could have used presentations given at least as much weight as three minutes analyzing Trump's latest rage-tweet? Not just 15 seconds of pro forma "If pursued, the ideas in this tweet could affect Main Street banking practices and maybe hurt consumers." Something like that goes in one ear and out the other. The focus remains on "HE said THAT to a CEO? WOW!"

With a little more attention to sane conservative views in this era, then it might not now be just people tuning into the Dems' convention who have been reminded of the thinking offered up by the likes of Sally Yates, John Kasich or Christine Whitman. Seems to me the media are not exactly phoning it in, but they may have been resorting to a half-assed formula of "oh Trump is so off the wall on this thing, must be time for another op-ed from a sane Republican, anybody get anything in over the transom lately? Get me somebody who was over at State from the Bush '41 era..."

I'm not a subscriber to some automatic algorithm of "fair and balanced" ... that was always nonsense even if it may have had some merit back in campaign seasons when most pols in both major parties who made it onto the little screen in our living rooms were sane and articulate. But if the press today have meant to cover Trump as a real president (v the reality show guy) then the media outlets of record in the USA need more consistently to have presented regular Republican views opposite some of his crews' outlandish assertions (not to mention their inconsistencies).

There's such a thing as letting a circus get out of hand. The consumer may always be right (although in fact that's not even the case) but that should not translate to responsible purveyors of news that it's okay to hand out only candy. We get hooked on it. We are hooked on it. What the hell are the media going to do when we get a president whose public pronouncements are about policy? It was and definitely now seems decades ago that presidents made sober if perhaps boring announcements on policy, and that media made careful if boring transcriptions of such news. Here Nixon, back in the day.,

"The legislation I have signed today extends and amends the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970 under which both the first and second phases of our anti-inflation program were launched. It provides authority for continuing these efforts through April 30, 1973. I hope and expect, however, that before that date we will see the end of the inflationary psychology that developed in the 1960's, achieve lasting price stability, end controls, and return to reliance on free market forces."​
Great. We go back to seeing that on page one of the paper and media segment bankruptcies will ensue in months, eh? Our eyes glaze over much more easily now after four years of Trump's tweeted policy shift nutshells, never mind official signing statements.

The world of Trump has been far more exciting in the world of media coverage: a gusher of attempts to burn down a lotta barns, not only those of "the establishment" but the ways in which media even cover government and the ways in which Trump has been trying to discredit that coverage. Media have been hard pressed to cover all that and still leave time to reflect on what their own mission is. I grant any of them that. It's really hard to figure out what's worth covering and what is the potential cost to us of skipping some of it.

Still: some of us who are lefties were shocked to remember "oh yeah, she used to make some good points" on hearing someone like Whitman last night, and that doesn't really speak well for the press' grasp of their own options in a time of an increasingly autocratic government. Trump's guys have been gutting rules at the EPA and DOI since Day One in 2017. It shouldn't have taken a Democratic national convention nearly four years later to remind even those viewers, never mind the whole country, that there were once Republicans who were supporters of environmental conservation and protection.
 

Huntn

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I live in a rural area of the western Catskills where Confederate flags still fly off or are painted on some barns, and not only because the owners' ancestors may have hailed from further down along the Appalchian chain. Our county fair's directors have yet to ban the selling of Confederate paraphernalia inside the fairgrounds. I've found that no matter how carefully or casually I express an opinion that it's time to move on from Trump's administration for the benefit of all ordinary Americans, with an example that relates to impact of that administration on our local circumstances, the hard core Trump supporters from 2016 don't want to hear it.

It's not just that they've long since pegged me as liberal, it's that almost any reference to Trump-era policy that sounds like dissent from adulation of Trump himself seems to provoke them into reiteration of some generic soundbite-sized mini-meme that passes for a Republican "talking point" these days.

I regard myself as a forward looking person as far as politics go generally, and get pretty excited about seeing more young people around here becoming activisits. But among older folks, I sure liked the ambience better back when the in-laws some of my kin used to argue conservative politics with me up here. Their points of view were less xenophobic and more focused on practical matters like whether anti-trust policy should start having a look at what was happening in dairy farming even back in the early 80s.

Today some of the remaining farmers, the ones who managed to stave off several waves of bankruptcy or foreclosure, have left such considerations behind in conversations about politics. This seems the case even if they sometimes do push back on Trump's ignorant anti-immigration blatherings... since a number of them do depend on Mexican laborers with strong dairy herd experience. Aside from that they seem too often just uncritical repeaters of the most reductive of the right wing memes of the Trump rally crowd.
It could be the perfect example of people, farmers in this case who think they are voting with their wallets, to find out they have been pick pocketed, by someone I don’t regard as any kind of a genius, but he has figured out how manipulate certain groups of people, who I will refrain from speculating about the suckers’ motivations.
 

Thomas Veil

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It’s so jarring to see your neighbor a few doors down, who’s always been on friendly terms with you and is actually a nice guy, put up a Trump flag. That is what I was confronted with as I drove to work this morning.

He’s not stupid either, despite the flag. But the flag does sort of say, “I’m with stupid.”

I just hope if Biden wins he doesn’t keep it up out of spite. 🙄
 

ouimetnick

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It’s so jarring to see your neighbor a few doors down, who’s always been on friendly terms with you and is actually a nice guy, put up a Trump flag. That is what I was confronted with as I drove to work this morning.

He’s not stupid either, despite the flag. But the flag does sort of say, “I’m with stupid.”

I just hope if Biden wins he doesn’t keep it up out of spite. 🙄

Eh, if he does, it will be like the confederate flags. A flag that sore losers keep holding on to.
 

lizkat

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As one comedian put it, confederate romanticizers love losing so much that they reenact the civil war they lost.

Ya gotta wonder. There have been some re-enactments in a township near here and calls for it to become an annual event. I really loathe them. It just encourages those who fly the confederate flag off barns and tractors in the area to keep on doing that in between reliving battles that took place in the area more than a hundred fifty years ago. They put a lot of effort into it all too. You'd think if we put that much effort into attracting more jobs to the county, we could finally leave the civil war to the history books and take regular ol' American vacations in the summer instead, maybe go visit Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon.
 
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