It is actually all but unprecedented…until now.
Completely agree it is one way… and unprecedented.
Just wondering where it all leads?
The amount that red/blue states put into the pot, and take out from the pot, is a point well made too.
FWIW, Ezra Klein of the NYT has done some exceptional work exploring the increased ideological divisions within MAGA this cycle. I think his best one was his autumn interview with Vivek, who was giving his description of the goals and priorities of the movement. time after time Ezra challenged him on the reality that these things were opposed by trump in his first term, have not been coherently backed by trump this cycle, are the opposite of what Vance says MAGA believes on the issue, and are often more inline with what Biden had actually done. Yet he is often uncritically presented as a voice of MAGA.
Just wondering out loud… but to what extent does it matter? I’m talking about what MAGA is and isn’t, and how it is portrayed and who has the main say so. Is it the likes of Steve Bannon? Or the likes of Musk and Vivek?
The reason for my question, what does it matter, is that we are in a post-truth era. I don’t see it making too much difference even if there are diametrically opposed positions within MAGA, as from the very top down, they just say what they like in the particular moment.
Hence Trump can be elected saying stuff like I will make sure prices go down for hard working Americans, and before he even gets into the Oval Office he is back-pedaling and saying once prices go up it’s hard for them to come down.
I guess what I’m saying is the leader of the movement is Trump, and he has a long record of talking crap, out of both sides of his mouth, without any consequence whatsoever.
If serious journalists like Klein are doing good work to demonstrate that senior MAGA people like Vivek are out of step with Trump when they give their opinions, in a normal world it would be a big deal, but I suspect we are in an era of anything goes, and the actual words that any of them say in the MAGA sphere, and the positions they espouse, are just not reliable, and will change to suit.
Trump has my head spinning, on the news here in Oz in the last few days we have seen Trump blaming Newsome>clearly political.of course and last night telling the fire fighters “Can’t you put the fire out, surely that isn’t that hard”
FFS,what kind of lunatic have the American people elected.This the same guy who wondered about nuking hurricanes a few years back, next he’ll be wanting to nuke the fires.
That would work really well.
is that legit? is there footage or a link or something?
surely not even the Don would use those words?
I think it matters in terms of tactics for Dems. If one side has no anchor then there is no line of argument you can make against them that they cannot just pivot away from.
Bit for the average news consumer it doesn’t matter that much other than to understand what is happening when episodes of infighting of people supposedly on the same team become public
Quoted ABC News last night.
Puerto Ricans can then tell MAGAs to fuck off and get them to re-write its European colonial history on the discovery of USA by Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513.
Tbh, I’ve never understood the obsession with Columbus in the US school system, particularly for such an insular country. It would be like Australia focussing its teaching of European colonisation history around the discovery of Christmas Island in 1643.
“The fires are still raging in LA. The incompetent pols [politicians] have no idea how to put them out,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. “This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?” he wrote.
This is where Scotty Morrisons “I don’t hold a hose, mate” line may actually be an appropriate response:
direct attack on politicians, that’s different than;
on the news here in Oz in the last few days we have seen Trump blaming Newsome>clearly political.of course and last night telling the fire fighters “Can’t you put the fire out, surely that isn’t that hard”
or am i misunderstanding something?
From the WaPo…
This is obviously just one outrage amongst hundreds.
Serious question…can the US political system ever recover from Trump? He’ll be dead soon-ish, hopefully 2mins after a Democratic president is inaugurated in 2029.
But once he is gone, will such brazen corruption ever be weeded out? I just cannot imagine a scenario where the Goobers will ever want to go back to having the guardrails in place (fully acknowledging that said guardrails have perhaps not been as robust as they needed to be for some time now…)
Nothing matters anyway. We’ll all die and the sun will consume the earth.
Theres a John Wayne film he might reference for that
It wasn’t always the case. It didn’t really become that way until the beginning of the 20th century. That coincided with a large influx of Italian immigrants who became the new focus of the country’s anti immigrant sentiment. They presented Columbus as one of them as an example of what Italians can bring and then it just escalated from there.
I did Grade 3 in an American school. I remember vividly the look I got from my American teacher when I offered up Leif Eriksson as the discoverer of the Americas, including the observation that it was weird to say he discovered anything if there were already people there.
Very weirdly, lots of Americans apparently believe Columbus proved the world was round
I wonder if they even know where he landed in each of his voyages, or that he made multiple voyages.