I don't think the GOP is weaned even a little bit. His most deranged followers are often going to have a blocking position in intra-GOP struggles, even when they don't have an outright majority. People energized by his trashing of norms and guardrails will dominate in a lot of places.
What Twitter lets him do is present his views in very small bites, rather than in long meandering diatribes. Obviously, the combination was powerful for him before, but in this phase shorter but more constant is probably much more effective for him.
tldr: gloom followed by doom.
1.1 is right. I have no idea what Twitter will mean, but the Republican Party has not gotten over Trump at all.
This is super important, but I have no idea at all. My instinct is the more venues he has to express himself uncensored, the more he exposes himself as an addled old fool, but given his ongoing popularity I'm clearly not right about that.
I have no idea what is going to happen, but I wish people would stop positing the idea that revealing something to be stupid or evil will solve the problem. It's pretty clear the correlation is not even positive.
The Republican Party, with or without Trump the person, has been thoroughly Trumpified and is in thrall to its base of fascists and religious fanatics. The world is more pleasant with Trump off Twitter, certainly, but that isn't the line holding anything back.
I think my gut answer this year is "domestic politics are so terrible already that how would you even notice them getting worse?" They are genuinely worse than in 2020.
I wasn't sure if the speculation about Musk backing out of the Twitter deal was still happening, but here is a random tweet from an establishment financial (?) journalist keeping that narrative going. It's a pretty convincing bluff at this point, though.
They are genuinely worse than in 2020.
I have little doubt that a DeSantis or Cotton administration would (will?) be far worse than Trump's.
3: See, I think your first instinct is right. He underperformed other Rs in both '16 and '20. Him being on Twitter obviously did him no good in '18.
The more we've seen from internal R communications post-1/06, the clearer it is that there really was an appetite for impeachment or some other solution. Him being banned from Twitter--the right move on its merits--lowered the temperature on that. It's not the only factor, of course, but all the DC press ever wanted was to pretend that he was a normal president that we all had to respect, and every single tweet proved he wasn't, for all to see with no ability of the press to cover for him.
Electorally, I don't think him returning to Twitter will do one good thing for him or Rs. Will it do ill due to incitement? Maybe, but I don't think his most deranged followers need his tweets--they have Tucker and a thousand state-level goons.
I can probably safely delete my Twitter account at this point without losing anything important. It's frustrating to consider because it has effectively been my news aggregator since Google News became unusable (we also have a couple of direct subscriptions). Is there a better alternative at this point? The idea of the (already bad) information environment getting even worse -- that part is very imaginable and it blows.
7: yeah, for sure, but for me the nightmare scenario is Trump winning in 2024, efficiently destroying the rule of law, as he does, along with what's left of the federal bureaucracy, and then one of those guys taking over after DJT finally has a stroke. Actually there are lots of ways for this to go badly, but Trump was a singularly effective wrecking ball. It's crazy.
Anyway, I'm not saying this to be optimistic as such, but one of the two frontrunners for PA Senate is a Christine O'Donnell-level nutjob who's true believer. As bad as things are, the ones who can't hide the lunacy are the ones who lose close elections. The entire R party is moving so far, so fast into gibbering territory that they really might counterbalance thermostatic voting. All the governors who are already talking about banning IUDs? Not actually good at winning over swing voters. Very good at motivating Ds.
We'll see.
BTW, I should say that, personally, I hate the idea of him back on Twitter utterly. I've never once thought "I wonder what he would tweet about this," and all the political journalists and self-described lefty pundits who have thought and said that should be run out of town on a rail.
Also I agree with 9.2 DeSantis is/seems effective because he's running a state that's been thoroughly R-controlled for 23 years now. DC isn't like that, and it's not certain that DeSantis has the skills to fuck things up the way he'd like. 45 obviously doesn't have the skills either, but he is, as lk said, a very effective wrecking ball.
I would add: I'm not sure any other R would be quite as bad on foreign policy. Whether it was kompromat or not, 45 genuinely strove to align our foreign policy with Putin's goals, and I don't think DeSantis has any particular interest in that. The party is relatively pro-Russia, which is fucked up, but that doesn't mean they're going to expend effort to destroy NATO, especially post-Ukraine when there will be more public support for NATO than for any point since probably 1991.
Other R's will be terrible on foreign policy in the normal way of Republicans, which might be worse. Bush was worse on foreign policy than Trump.
Trump winning in 2020 would mean Ukraine would be fighting a much harder war, maybe having lost already.
8.1 I'd be interested to know (but am apparently not interested enough to search) whether the people he added to the R coalition way overwhelmed the numbers of people who were already in the coalition and didn't vote for him. IMO NeverTrump is a real thing, but only a pretty narrow slice. And an irrelevant slice when you raise all the R boats by a bigger amount.
I was at a forum for our 3 congressional candidates last night. Each would be so much better than Zinke. (Our primary is in June.) The question is whether everyone in our coalition is going to show up. Voting in Montana couldn't be much easier, I don't think. You can get a ballot mailed to you weeks ahead of time, you can get registered on election day if you show up and there's an issue.
In 2018, I was working at a precinct within CSKT, and a group of activists kept popping in to ask what turnout was, and whether particular individuals had voted yet. If not, they went to those people's houses and told them to come vote. That sort of intensive effort got Tester re-elected, and maybe we'll be able to mobilize like this in the fall.
Bush was worse on foreign policy than Trump.
Apples and oranges. Faced with the same challenges, I think Trump would definitely have been worse. It's cold comfort indeed that Trump didn't have a 9/11 scale external attack.
I keep thinking that the "Trump destroys everything he touches" law has to kick in. I mean, how much would I love to watch an intra-party Trump-DeSantis war? I would love that a lot. Trump controls an awful lot of Republicans and he would completely turn them against Republicans out of spite. I mean, he was doing stupid shit like telling his voters not to vote by mail-in until someone got to him and changed his message.
It's cold comfort indeed that Trump didn't have a 9/11 scale external attack.
Yeah, all he had was a pandemic to mismanage.
It bugs me that taking away Twitter was the only punishment that society was able to place on Trump after January 6, and apparently that won't stick because rich guys gonna rich guy.
I certainly feel the mental positives of Trump being off Twitter, it was like his thoughts being beamed into my brain a few times a week, and of course he deserved it, but did it objectively improve the state of our politics?
I think the main positive was all the money burned failing to build an alternative to Twitter.
Trump back on Twitter would be bad. He's good at using it to get attention and attention is power these days.
I'm willing to be convinced otherwise but it doesn't seem like he's lost much of his power, other than losing the presidency which he had already done.
I mean... the possibility of Trump returning to today's Musk-dominated Twitter, and the resulting Trump-Musk synergy (with others arbitrarily drawn into the orbit), will be its own fresh hellscape. That's a minor issue, though. I'm not sure I can think of any individual person whose life would be made worse by spending less time on Twitter, so there's at least a possibility that a massive user pullback would have some net positive effect.
However, I really do struggle to imagine a future where the internet generally gets better. Can any of you imagine one?
I have reached the age at which the idiom of Twitter inspires barbaric anger: words popular with Twitter personae, like "cope," "priors" "data," "framing," etc., earn a hurled skull-splitting axe.
I am not a crackpot.
Right. That's what we always say when you're not here.
Miss me with your skull-splitting axe discourse Do you have any news-getting recommendations, Flip? I would truly love to kick social media to the curb. Truly.
the main positive was all the money burned failing to build an alternative to Twitter
Hey now. Also Devin Nunes leaving his House seat to run Truth Social.
I find the old, boring newspapers not satisfying, but adequate, but I wouldn't refine that into an opinion, much less a position to be propounded. Or, Christ have mercy, a "take."
It will be more terrible again for visible minorities, especially immigrants.
Regarding legacy media, I saw that there was a long piece in Vanity Fair about how Peter Thiel and Mencius Moldbug (?) are bankrolling a right-wing political vanguard, and I just couldn't fucking read it. I tried, and my eyeballs fell right out of their sockets and crawled off into books of peaceful foreign language study. Sadly, even the internet of today is seriously helpful for language learning.
this is either a derail (too soon? can't remember the number of comments that signals open season, if i ever knew, which seems unlikely) or on point if topic is our shitty world & the role of shitty people in it - just want to express how i dearly hope that the young man in my medium-extended family who toils in the crypto field is getting his ass truly & definitively handed to him on a plate. really hoping he is getting wiped out beyond wiped out.
However, I really do struggle to imagine a future where the internet generally gets better. Can any of you imagine one?
I have three active blogs, but I suppose I could start a fourth.
The rule was 40 but looks like it's down 20%.
Stablecoins are super cheap right now. I'm thinking of buying them for pennies and waiting for them to go back up to a dollar. What could go wrong?
36: How can they go down so low? They are called stablecoins!
It's because there's a pony in there somewhere
38: The pony that does the limbo? That would explain it.
34: yes, the broader economic, social, political conditions that mean there are a lot of marks available for crypto swindles are alarming & need urgently to be addressed.
this young man has been raking in fiat buckaroos for diligently sheepdogging in marks, unless he's completely high on his own supply he should have $$$ socked away. i wouldn't mind if he has lost tons or all of his money, mind. he's clearly somewhere along a scale from smart super greedy & irredeemably lacking in ethics and any feeling for fellow humans to super greedy & a hell of a lot less bright than he believes himself to be. last time i saw him he somewhat dispiritedly trotted out "web3" canned bs, probably lacking in gusto bc could tell his audience (me & franz josef) were not buying it. young man has family resources to fall back on if he's wiped out completely.
most interesting has been to watch his parents both stick *rigorously* to studied ignorance of what he's been up to. just absolute discipline to remain utterly in the dark.
The world is failing. The parents might be glad he isn't looking for work as a paid agent attempting to end democracy in America directly.
Anyway, a guy I buy lunch from a bunch was telling me how he was going to get into crypto or buy a rental property in my neighborhood. I tried to get him to do the latter even though rental housing in my neighborhood often goes to graduate students.
And Musk is putting the deal "on hold".
Ooooo, maybe I can start Tweeting again.
Some analysis of his "substance", h/t snarkout.
Future lawyers get to argue over whether Musk replying to the Twitter CEO discussing the challenges of combating bots with a poop emoji (and nothing else) violates his nondisparagement clause!