I think that "sanewashing" refers specifically to the media (or whoever) taking batshit crazy stuff and then asserting that the crazy person who said the crazy stuff actually said something completely different and sane. The author uses the example of "Defund The Police" which was sanewashed into "Change Police Training To De-Emphasise Use Of Force, And Respond To Certain Categories Of Emergency With Social Work Professionals Rather Than Police". Putin's supporters here continue to sanewash "Ukraine has no right to exist and I will destroy it as an independent nation in order to rebuild the Russian Empire" into "I am concerned about NATO expansion into eastern Europe and ready to negotiate a peace deal that would involve only minor border adjustments".
"here" being the UK, not Unfogged, I should make clear.
AIMHMHB I am sceptical about the Twitter link. The author is not shy of citing studies and figures that back up all the other bits of his argument, but when it comes to "Trump's power depends on Twitter" you suddenly notice an almost complete lack of hyperlinks in the text. It's all just "well, everyone with eyes can tell this is true".
Trump's R approval rating dropped ten points after the coup attempt and has stayed pretty constant ever since. That looks like it was a reaction to the coup attempt. If it was the Twitter ban, wouldn't it have gradually dwindled further and further over subsequent months?
The election fraud stuff turns out to be counter-productive and demotivating for the GOP base. Why vote when the Dems are going to steal it anyway? It's very tightly tied to the Trump cult and I'm relieved it hasn't become more widespread and appears to be dying.
Trump's R approval rating dropped ten points after the coup attempt and has stayed pretty constant ever since. That looks like it was a reaction to the coup attempt. If it was the Twitter ban, wouldn't it have gradually dwindled further and further over subsequent months?
I don't know how you disentangle these. The coup attempt was nearly simultaneous with the Twitter ban.
Why would his popularity have to dwindle further and further, as opposed to taking the hit that it did?
4 is also a big relief to me. It feels like such a lucky break that their attempt to undermine elections hasn't worked spectacularly well.
Why would his popularity have to dwindle further and further, as opposed to taking the hit that it did?
Part of the whole deal with Trump's Twitter usage was that it was a firehose that his fans loved to drink from. If it was a major cause of support, then you'd expect the hose being shut off to lead to at least some supporters drifting away.
Like, we can all agree that some chunk of his voters were/are low-info/low-frequency voters who liked the schtick of it. But w/o Twitter, they'd turn elsewhere for entertainment, and Trump would drop in (relative) importance. Not a catastrophic effect, because nobody else has tried to build an anti-Trump message targeting the same audience, but just the shine wearing off the old toy.
I don't necessarily agree with ajay's strong stance on this, but I certainly see the argument.
If it was a major cause of support, then you'd expect the hose being shut off to lead to at least some supporters drifting away.
Like around 10%?
I think I'd describe it this way: Twitter absolutely was part of his rise, because he was good at it in the way that some celebrities are. But once we got to the point where CNN was showing empty podiums, there was no more that Twitter could do for him.
Furthermore, Twitter is a tiny platform, and the vast majority of his voters never saw his tweets directly. What they saw were them being quoted on Fox and shared on FB, and what's crucial is that that means there was curation happening. 20 tweets a day, but maybe 5 get any traction beyond the app. So him being on (I guess) Truth Social and issuing his weird, semi-official statements that read like tweet threads provides ample material for Fox and FB to propagate.
So him being on (I guess) Truth Social and issuing his weird, semi-official statements that read like tweet threads provides ample material for Fox and FB to propagate.
This just doesn't match my experience as a plebe. I used to hear so much more content from him personally, albeit indirectly. Covfefe? He just filtered into mockery and discussion by others in a way that he doesn't anymore.
You're right that we've argued these same points recently, though. And it's not terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
He used to be President of the United States. It's hardly surprising that his various utterances while in that position were widely circulated. It doesn't seem to me that his reach is really any less: there are the specialized right wing outlets, and there's Hannity.
It's not like DeSantis or Abbott, or their followers, and going to be complaining about stolen elections. In Great Falls, Montana, people in charge of counting votes had to call the sheriff because deniers were harassing them. (The county clerk and recorder race is very close.) There's plenty of this in Arizona.
Sargent made a good point on the hellsite: it serves Republicans to pretend that their electoral problem was Trump, because that can be solved. There's no solution to Dobbs so if that's a problem, well, they're in for a rough ride,
Here's another question: why Twitter specifically? Trump was also banned from Facebook at around the same time. Facebook links produces far, far more web traffic than Twitter links - like ten times more - and Facebook has four times as many US users as Twitter. Also Facebook's US users are older than its Twitter users, more likely to be right-wing, and more likely to use it as their principal source of news. Trump voters don't really use Twitter very much but they definitely use Facebook.
Why aren't we worrying about what happens in January, when his Facebook ban ends? Is it just that NYT writers use Twitter obsessively, but think Facebook is uncool parent stuff? Is it just that outsiders can't see what's happening on Facebook in the way they can on Twitter?
Here's another question: why Twitter specifically? Trump was also banned from Facebook at around the same time. Facebook links produces far, far more web traffic than Twitter links - like ten times more - and Facebook has four times as many US users as Twitter. Also Facebook's US users are older than its Twitter users, more likely to be right-wing, and more likely to use it as their principal source of news. Trump voters don't really use Twitter very much but they definitely use Facebook.
Why aren't we worrying about what happens in January, when his Facebook ban ends? Is it just that NYT writers use Twitter obsessively, but think Facebook is uncool parent stuff? Is it just that outsiders can't see what's happening on Facebook in the way they can on Twitter?
Trump himself never used FB that much, for whatever reason.
Assembling a coup attempt, being kicked off Twitter, and stepping down as President within the span of two weeks is what social scientists call "hella overdetermination."
Trump himself never used FB that much, for whatever reason.
When he had the choice of platforms, maybe he preferred Twitter - though he also used Facebook a lot, and liked it. By autumn 2020 he had 29 million Facebook followers.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/13/13619148/trump-facebook-twitter-helped-win
https://theconversation.com/trump-v-biden-who-is-engaging-the-most-followers-on-facebook-146520
So if it's not Twitter, what is a plausible reason the loser-deniers* are not denying their losses? There's no high council that decides these things - is Tucker Carlson counseling against it in the slow bits?
The Trump endorsed candidate (I think, but awful nevertheless) candidate in WA-03 spent a lot of time tweeting about how every vote needs to be counted, urging supporters to do things like curing (fixing signature issues) their ballots. I thought it was kind of wonderful to see him endorse the election process while losing in an upset. Low bar, I know.
18: Here's a thought: in 2020, non-Trump Rs actually did pretty well, which meant two things. 1. Nobody but Trump had reason to claim fraud, and 2. There was a logical case that Trump was somehow robbed, since he ran behind the party (and Rs take it on faith that he's the big man who can't lose).
2022 is a really different story, with a lot of high profile, large margin losses (eg PA) alongside high profile, large margin wins (eg FL). So there's no coherent narrative about theft, bc Dems clearly didn't subvert all the elections, and bc a lot of races weren't super-close but went the Dems' way. Or rather, that was the case on Election Night. Now it's turned out that Dems did run the board on the close Senate races that took days to resolve, but it's too late for that too cement a national narrative about theft, plus Rs out west have made some late comebacks in House races.
There are other factors as well, of course, but it's just not an environment that lends itself to everybody crying foul. And obviously the party elites don't actually want the central R message to be "Dems will steal every election from us", so there's no central incentive to push that story.
Finally, there's this: Trump isn't the dog catcher for Waukesha Wisconsin. He can blather about stolen elections, but his people will still pursue legal (as well as pointless) channels towards victory, and his supporters will still love him. But if some schmoe says he was robbed, that doesn't motivate anyone to come cure their ballots, and it doesn't get deferential coverage from local press. He doesn't sound exactly like a sore loser (bc so many Rs are open to the message), but it doesn't turn him into an R hero.
This just doesn't match my experience as a plebe. I used to hear so much more content from him personally, albeit indirectly. Covfefe? He just filtered into mockery and discussion by others in a way that he doesn't anymore.
The question is about his supporters, not how he looms in popular culture. I agree that his tweets would get more attention if they still existed than his "truths" or whatever. But I don't think his fans are exposed to him any less--and in fact, they're probably experiencing a better balance of his utterances, since popular mockery is basically gone. I assume there's some chunk of true believer Rs who were thrilled when he'd do a racism on Twitter but were nonetheless a little embarrassed by covfefe. Now they only get the good stuff, bc Fox doesn't do segments on whatever dumb mistakes he makes, and nobody else is looking.
Election denial, for a candidate, depends on a level of shamelessness that is very difficult to replicate. Shamelessness is Trump's superpower. He tries to teach his disciples, but even a pig like Sean Spicer was embarrassed to be showing the media photos of the Obama and Trump inaugurations.
Meaningful election denial also requires a cult of personality that most of these lesser candidates lack.
Even so, by the standards of a decade ago, there was a huge amount of election denial. In these latter days, we are grateful that there hasn't been significant violence, but that's not the same thing as "no election denial."
I think it's just as simple as that they're Trump lackeys so they do what he asks, but since Trump doesn't actually care about whether other Republicans get elected or not, he's not going to bother denying elections without him on that ballot. I was worried that more people out there genuinely wanted to set up an autocratic state, but it turns out that they're just Trump lackeys who are vaguely in favor of democracy but not so in favor of it that they wouldn't do a coup if Trump asked.
Furthermore, Twitter is a tiny platform, and the vast majority of his voters never saw his tweets directly. What they saw were them being quoted on Fox and shared on FB, and what's crucial is that that means there was curation happening. 20 tweets a day, but maybe 5 get any traction beyond the app. So him being on (I guess) Truth Social and issuing his weird, semi-official statements that read like tweet threads provides ample material for Fox and FB to propagate.
Are they doing this, though? Anecdotally, the original essayist thought not. I could think of two reasons:
1. The people best suited to curation are the freaks on Twitter all the time; the rest are just poorly paid Daily Caller staffers and so forth
2. Facebook, Truth Social, etc. let you run on for many paragraphs, so Trump just keeps on dictating until he's unspooled all his current thoughts and the material is much less punchy. On his current feed, the top post is tweet-length at 52 characters, but then you have 499 characters, 447 characters, a bunch of links and manual RTs, 312 characters...
he's not going to bother denying elections without him on that ballot
His third-to-last Truth Social post is specifically saying the election was stolen from Kari Lake. (The two more recent are about fraud more generally.)
From Reddit:
Does he still have 80% favourability among them? Yes. That's down from 90.
Or, as NPR's Mara Liasson put it: He's no longer an 800-pound gorilla. He's a 700-pound gorilla.
No Republican politician outside of a blue state is willing to take him on directly unless they are prepared to end their political career.
The "favourability" in the quote here is a big tipoff. This is no doubt some UK person who thinks they understand Americans. It's a common problem.
"No Republican politician outside of a blue state is willing to take him on directly unless they are prepared to end their political career."
So you don't expect DeSantis to run?
I think DeSantis is hoping age or criminal process will take care of Trump. If not, I don't think he'll run.
Trump would absolutely squash DeSantis like a bug in a head-to-head primary, and I have no doubt DeSantis knows this.
Co-signing 28 and 29. DeSantis has enough animal cunning to know that a direction confrontation with Trump ends very badly for him.
I assumed 29 was the case, and that DeSantis is trying to set himself up as the clearest option if Trump drops dead or has major health problems, but there are three primary polls listed on 538 since the election, and DeSantis is respectively -16, +7, and +11. (The last is Texas only.) I'll be interested to see if that continues.
DeSantis will not run against Trump. There's a lot that can happen between now and 2024, but if conditions are the same as now, DeSantis won't run.
DeSantis is putting himself in a position to succeed Trump once Trump is gone.
The Reddit post fails to acknowledge that Trump has always faced powerful adversaries -- Fox News and the Republican Establishment most obviously. But they have fallen into line before.
The author's effort to understand conservatives as the conservatives understand themselves is admirable, but it goes nowhere. Conservatives think the midterms made Trump a loser in the eyes of his people? Did conservatives think his defeat in 2020 made him a loser?
Trump can lose and lose and lose and still be a winner to his fans. And he can win and win and still be downtrodden and oppressed -- a victim of Democrat bullies. Our Reddit author says this:
The conclusions may be irrational, but they are still systematic and predictable. They still follow internal logic and internal rationality.
This is true! But the author utterly fails to grasp that logic. DeSantis, I bet, gets it.
Do you guys watch Jordan Klepper's Fingers the Pulse segments from the Daily Show? I have no problem believing that there is a cohort of 'Trump or no one' and I am so delighted with the Republican dilemma.
@29 I don't think that is correct. The trumpists are entertaining, which is why they get so much media play. Trump is a WWE-style heel. But he only won the 2016 primary because the "serious" candidates refused to unite against him.
Trump got @29 I don't think that is correct. The trumpists are entertaining, which is why they get so much media play. Trump is a WWE-style heel. But he only won the 2016 primary because the "serious" candidates refused to unite against him.
Trump got less than 50% of the vote through the New York primary. If the Republican establishment had united behind an establishment candidate (ya know, the way the Democrats did in 2020), then Trump would have been crushed in the primary. Instead, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich split the dear-god-no vote, and the rest is history.
I wish more reporters would note how weird it is that: Many of his supporters still claim that he won two years out after losing. He's a candidate for president two years out giving rallies, not only talking to donors or some such. His rallies for years have had no connection to campaigning for specific issues or candidates. He is just drumming up hatred.
Every story about him should note that this has never happened in the lifetime of anybody now alive.
You're assuming that everyone who voted for someone other than Trump would have preferred any non- Trump to Trump.
@36 I think that is a fairly justifiable assumption. Compare the results for the February Rep. primaries with the results for the March 5 Rep. primaries. Trump is stuck at around 30 - 40%, while the not-trumps consolidate to 60-70%.
Would DeSantis accept a VP slot on a Trump ticket? Risk/reward ratio is complicated there.
My Let's Go Brandon student got a bunch of students to show up and help him on a big fundraiser because his nephew has cancer.
Obviously that's far too awful for ordinary schadenfreude, and my heart goes out to the family. But it's okay to hope that some of the family members question their devotion to the party that maintains the for-profit health care system. (And who knows, maybe his family is not all Brandon'd out.)
(Yeah, yeah, the Democrats also maintain the system. But not in the same way.)
34, 38: In December 2015, Nate Cohn worked very hard to convince himself of this theory, and he couldn't do it without resorting to gibberish.
Once the field was winnowed, Silver said, Trump was unlikely to be able to go toe-to-toe with the survivor. Why? Because Trump trailed one of those 16 candidates (Ted Cruz) by two percent in a head-to-head poll.
As for the Establishment not supporting a candidate in 2016, nobody seems to remember Jeb Bush.
But OK - let's postulate that 2016 provides strong evidence that a united Republican Establishment wants to beat Trump and has the ability to do so. Has the year 2020 gone down the memory hole?
I'm still waiting for Coco Chow's husband to come out against Trump.
Knowing only what I knew in 2016, I wouldn't have voted for Ted Cruz over Trump.
You're assuming that everyone who voted for someone other than Trump would have preferred any non- Trump to Trump.
Also a huge reason they were voting against Trump is that everyone thought he would lose in the general election. They were almost all ready and willing to set aside their reservations after he won.
DeSantis will not run against Trump. There's a lot that can happen between now and 2024, but if conditions are the same as now, DeSantis won't run.
Well, Trump is presumed to be announcing today...
Update to 31: the lead did not, in fact, persist.
I'm going to assume this thread is adequate for discussing Trump's Announcement today, and that I can post about something else for contrast.
I think criticism of the NYT's Cletus safaris is somewhat overdone. This one is an example of how these stories can be useful.
The lede amuses me because it's so true in a way that polls can capture, but that the elite consensus -- including people like Silver and Cohn, who should know better -- are often going to miss.
Trump rallies aren't where you expect to hear hard-nosed analysis of Donald J. Trump's chances of winning back the White House. But Chuck Smith, an ardent supporter who recently drove two hours to stand under the scorching Arizona sun to cheer Mr. Trump, was blunt.
"I don't think Trump is a viable person for re-election," he said. "I just don't think it's a wise decision, especially with the way he was attacked -- and the way he's still attacked -- it would be a major risk to the Republican Party."
But in the next breath, Mr. Smith followed up with a caveat that could define the Republican Party for months to come.
"Don't get me wrong," he added. "I would definitely support him if he ran."
DeSantis's main appeal to Trump skeptics is that he's the only major figure in the Republican Party that Trump hasn't publicly humiliated ... yet. But he has begun to attract Trump's attention.
I gotta say, I'm starting to think the NYT might have learned something. Here is the current top-of-the-page headline:
Trump Announces 2024 Run, Repeating Lies and Exaggerating Record
Florida + Ohio assessment of politically differentiated death rates from covid. Not enough to swing the NV senate race (roughly 400 person election differential in NV, crude rate 379/100k) sharpest in deep red localities.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30512/w30512.pdf
The most recent NH Legislature race to be counted ended in a tie, with each candidate getting 970 votes. If the tie holds, it will be broken by vote of the legislature. With this seat outstanding, the balance in the legislature is currently at 200 R - 199 D.
I have found the media coverage of Trump's announcement gratifying. I had thought Trump coverage was going to continue to be focused on the celebrity spectacle, but I'm actually seeing a significant amount of legit journalism being conducted. If it continues, DeSantis really could be a threat because I could see him inheriting Trump's immunity.
The folks in the shuttle to work loved "Florida Man Makes Announcement."
Minivet beat me to it but that's one of the most hilarious things I've seen in a bit (bit=like 15 minutes because I've been following the Musk Twitter meltdown like a loon)
13: he also hired a whole, expensive specialist team to design Facebook campaigns and exploit Facebook's features, and spent an absolute ton of money specifically buying Facebook ads, so much money that Facebook assigned a team of ad salesmen, data scientists, and engineers to work from the Trump HQ. People made documentaries!
It really wasn't that long ago that received wisdom said that Facebook was history's greatest monster. Now completely erased and forgotten. Sad!