For those who don’t know, the WSJ (a Murdoch paper) opinion section is notoriously conservative, so this is pretty significant.
I would post a link to it directly, but none of the paywall bypass options worked for me, so there wouldn’t be much point.
You don’t really appreciate how stupid Trump voters are. If he’s hanging out with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, they will just start to believe that conspiracy theory.
Trump doesn’t just need the MAGA faithful to win. I have said this so many times on Lemmy that I should find a way to meme it.
Edit: Does this work?
You need to start writing “Trump only needs MAGA paramilitaries to coup again” 50 times on the blackboard.
Votes. Are. Not. How. Trump. Wins.
And you think they’ll be successful when Trump isn’t in charge at the time and held the national guard back? Where would he even gather them? He wouldn’t have permission anywhere inside D.C.
January 6th had the administration in power working with the traitors. He can’t do that this time.
Anyone who would even consider voting for him is REALLY dumb, though. I have no idea what can break through to these people. I really don’t understand them at all
I think he’s shedding voters. I think he’s crossed lines for a lot of people who were on edge to begin with. They probably won’t for Harris, they just won’t vote. I doubt he’s gaining voters.
Don’t bet on that. He may have lost in 2020, but he still had more votes than any prior losing (or winning!) candidate, ever.
Even after all the stuff that happened, the only candidate with more votes than Trump in 2020 was Biden in 2020. There are probably at least 60 million voters who think Trump is their guy.
(Maybe he’s hoping for 69…)
I don’t think you can assume that all of the people who didn’t vote for Biden also wouldn’t vote for Harris.
And I don’t think we can assume that the lower bound to Trump’s support is just the hard-core MAGAts.
There are also the die-hard Republicans who treat their political affiliation like a sports team. They will reflexively vote R no matter what, even if they don’t approve of Trump’s behavior.
Then, paradoxically, there are also the low-information voters who actively avoid politics. In prior years, these tended to lean Democratic, but this year is a bit different. We are finding that many of these people are in much worse shape vs 4 years ago financially, and since they never paid attention to political stuff to begin with all they know is Biden was President for all of that. We know the economy is in decent shape, and we avoided a post-pandemic recession. But the benefits are extremely uneven, and there is a large base of people who are still screwed (and doubly so if they ever want to buy a house).
No, he’s not.
He’s got the pulse of his Republican party and his party demands crazier candidates and more extreme rhetoric.
Donald Trump and Loomer Tunes
Why is the former President hanging with a 9/11 conspiracist?
By The Editorial Board
Sept. 13, 2024
Donald Trump likes to call his political opponents nuts, as in “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” so then why is he hanging with the 9/11 conspiracist Laura Loomer? Is he trying to lose the election?
We can’t believe we have to write this about a presidential candidate, but then Mr. Trump seems to like the company of Ms. Loomer, the 31-year-old online provocateur. She was backstage with the Trump team during this week’s debate with Kamala Harris and was in the spin room with the former President afterward.
She then flew on Mr. Trump’s plane to the anniversary memorials of 9/11 in New York City and the site of the Flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania. Her attendance at these events was especially insulting since Ms. Loomer has claimed that 9/11 was “an inside job.” Does she think Osama bin Laden was a CIA front man?
Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps. On Sunday she posted on X that if Ms. Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry,” a gibe against Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage.
She added that Ms. Harris’s speeches “will be facilitated via a call center.” U.S. companies often farm out their information lines to Indian firms, get it? We wonder if JD Vance’s Indian-American wife thinks that’s funny.
In 2018 Ms. Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters after the platform banned her. She suggested that Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might have lied about having breast cancer: “I’ve never seen the medical records.” This week she smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham after he criticized her association with Mr. Trump.
All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice. People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances. As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis put it on Friday: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”
The press is naturally having fun with all this and asked Mr. Trump about it on Friday. “Laura’s a supporter,” he said. “I have a lot of supporters.” He added that “she’s a strong person; she’s got strong opinions,” and he wondered why people are asking about her.
They’re asking because they know Mr. Trump’s association with Ms. Loomer feeds the concern among voters that Mr. Trump listens to crazy courtiers who flatter him and play to his vanity. Is this who the next four years are going to feature?
The problem here is deeper than Mr. Trump’s electoral prospects. A growing segment of the American right is populated by, and susceptible to, cranks and conspiracists. A movement that used to admire William F. Buckley Jr. and Thomas Sowell now elevates a pseudo-historian who blames Winston Churchill for World War II and media personalities who sell falsehoods as a triumph for free speech.
This isn’t an intellectual or political movement that is going to win converts, nor will it deserve them.
Reading this, you would think that the WSJ editorial board was against racism.
Yet, I think they did help create/inspire the monster that MAGA is today.
I think this opinion piece is too little, too late.
Yeah, it was in response to them publishing an election article covering looney as part of trumps entourage and WSJ apparently thinking its just ridiculous. But there’s so much ridiculous with trump it kind of funny this is where they draw the line.
Folks in power are finding out the hard way that Donald can’t be everyone’s useful idiot at once.
No, he’s not trying to lose.
Trump’s path to “victory” lies in inciting his most rabid brownshirts to coup for him (again), not expanding his appeal to actually win more EC votes than Harris.
How would he pull this off though with Biden as president? They didn’t even make it with all their efforts when the white house was on their side, but now it’s not. I believe he would if he could, but I don’t think it’s a viable option this time around.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-election-boards-swing-states
TL;DR: because this time they have state election officials on their side.
They will create enough FUD about the results to either get Trump EC votes he didn’t legitimately win, or to throw out enough EC votes entirely that neither candidate gets to 270 and the election is decided by a “one state, one vote” poll in the House.
Last time, the 50+ lawsuits trying to throw out election results failed because there was no fraud to be found. This time, they will succeed because disposable MAGA followers will have manufactured it themselves. As we’ve seen with those previous lawsuits as well as Trump v United States, the MAGA SCOTUS won’t go so far as to blatantly ignore 100% of reality to rule in favor of Trump, but will seize upon any flimsy excuse they can find to spin their decisions in his favor. Any real election fraud – even if we all know it’s done on Trump’s behalf – will be the fig leaf that covers SCOTUS as it falls over itself to coronate him.
Man I really can’t shake the thought that’s shes something not human wearing a skin suit.
Which bothers me mostly because that constantly reminds me of the aliens from They Live that occupy my nightmares with the Time Eaters from Legion.
My nightmares are scary
Shut up and let him lose already.
But Murdoch and the neo cons went this dumbass to win.
I’m all for him to surround himself with bigger loonies focusing the weirdo vibe and alienating more people from the Republican vote.
May hisi defeat be crushing and a permanent end to his “political” career. Some prison would top it all off beautifuly.
We should invest more and expand PBS.
There’s a reason Republicans hate it
This is the final push. If he loses it’s over no matter what. He’s not going to run again at 82 if he even lives that long.
“All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice,” the editors wrote. “People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances.”
Keep it up! Let her feed his ego and make him over-confident and spewing insanity that regular people can’t understand because they aren’t terminally-online.
She’s boning him, or wants to be.
Swamp creature vibes.
Very significant. Their coalition is no different from ours, formed of many different factions that don’t agree on a whole lot. They’re just better at taking marching orders and falling in line behind their candidate.
We do have an opportunity to peel away people that aren’t so fond of overt fascism and add to our election tally though, so, I’m not complaining. Even when its a neocon defecting.
In addition to peeling off people that aren’t so eager for dictatorship, we also have an opportunity to peel off genuinely religious people, who actually try to follow Jesus’ message. While most religious people do it more as a club membership, the genuinely devout can be reminded what their lord and savior actually instructed them to do.
