"Basket of deplorables" 2024 version: fearful, credulous, vicious, cheap, thoughtless and destructive

Remember in 2016, when Hillary said some Trump supporters were "a basket of deplorables" and the US media clutched their pearls and fainted all over their couches and gasped how unseemly for a Democrat to be so mean to Republicans.

Well, like with everything else, Hillary was right. 

Now other commentators are trying to describe exactly what is deplorable about Republicans who support Trump in 2024. It isn't a pretty picture.

Defector's David Roth What A Lie Is For:

...Donald Trump is one of the most thoroughly known quantities in American life; the country has been stuck in here with him for nearly a decade now. Everyone knows that there is nothing he would not say, simply because he believes that he can say whatever he wants; everyone knows that once he starts saying something, he will never stop saying it, and will in fact say it louder and make it bigger, because to do anything else would be not merely admitting error but, given how over-leveraged his whole being is on the issue of his own invincibility, something like death. Seeding the belief that undocumented immigrants will vote against him in the coming presidential election is very much something Trump would say, whether as an early excuse for losing, or as a sop to various longstanding reactionary fantasies, or as advance justification for some subsequent attempts to bring those fantasies to life. But also like most things he says, it is a sound he makes because he noticed that people responded to it. He is a boring, stupid man, a bigot and a liar, and so will only ever do the boring, stupid things he does for the most boring, stupid reasons.

Which leaves us with this: One of the two biggest political parties in the country, the one that controls the highest courts, has as a decent-sized and growing segment of its base people who like to make bomb threats. The party as a whole lives within a prolonged and deranging fantasy of political violence, and offers its base nothing but the license to further lavish over those fantasies, as well as the teasing possibility that they will someday be permitted to make them real. Last Friday, at a rally, Trump said that he would deport Springfield's Haitian community, which is living and working in this country legally, en masse, to Venezuela. All of these people are unserious and behave unseriously, but it would be foolish to assume they don't mean it.

That is it. The tide rushes out on everything else, every other idea that the conservative movement (never very convincingly) pretended to have, and leaves this behind. The actual beliefs are self-evident: that the suffering of others is a tool, or a toy; that everyone else in the world is a threat or an obstacle or something to wad up and throw away; that even the most abstracted inconveniencing of their own sainted comfort is tantamount to the end of the world. A cohort of the most fearful and most credulous and most idly vicious people this country has ever produced, who have lately awakened to some strange and terrible appetites and whose only real faith is in their own unshameable blamelessness, watches to see what will happen next. This is what the lie is for—to freeze this uneasy moment in place and hold it there forever, a threat unspooling endlessly over the horizon, not so much into the future as instead of it.

No More Mister Nice Blog's Steve M writes Every True Republican Could Shoot Somebody on Fifth Avenue and Not Lose Any Republican Voters:

A couple of weeks before the 2016 Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump made a memorable boast:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible." 

Eight years later, he's in his third consecutive close presidential race, and he might win for the second time. He's trailing in the polls and seems likely to lose, but one thing is clear: no matter what he's said or done, he's lost only a handful of Republican voters. Many people believe Trump has a unique appeal to the GOP base. He doesn't. The case of Mark Robinson proves that every Republican in good standing could shoot somebody and not lose party voters.

...when [Robinson] won the Republican gubernatorial primary with 65% of the vote, it was widely known that he had a long history of posting conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, anti-Black, and anti-LGBTQ remarks on social media.

It didn't matter. He hated the people Republican voters hate, so nothing he'd ever said or done could be a dealbreaker for the base.

...There's only one way Republicans can lose the support of the party's voter base: by consorting with the enemy. If you're Liz Cheney, you're a pariah in the party. But Robinson is fine.

...I could have written this post about other Republicans -- Matt Gaetz, for instance. (He won his last election 68%-32%.) Just remember the principle: any Republican who clearly despises the people Republican base voters despise will retain their support under any circumstances.

And Steve also writes The Voters Who Are Keeping Trump In The Race Think He's an Idiot

...Trump's support hasn't collapsed. Why is that?

The easy answer is that Trump's superfans will never abandon him. That's true, but he hasn't remained competitive in this election just because of the superfans. There aren't enough of them. He's remained competitive because people who don't worship the ground he walks on continue to support him. Paradoxically, they're as unlikely to reject him after that debate as the MAGA loyalists.

Here's the problem: Trump supporters who aren't superfans already seem to recognize that he's an obnoxious, angry blowhard. They've priced that in to their decision this year. Their view is that if he's elected president, he'll say a lot of awful things, and he'll post terrible things on social media, but he'll also make inflation go away magically. So it doesn't matter to them that he looked like an idiot on Tuesday night. They already thought he was an idiot -- but they think he's an idiot who can make prices lower using that business magic they saw him display on The Apprentice.

...I'm not pointing this out because I'm feeling the gloom and doom I was feeling when Joe Biden was still in the race. I think Harris is in pretty good shape, and is a slight favorite to win. I'm just trying to understand why the race is still close.

Maybe Trump will double down on rage, resentment, and Laura Loomer-style conspiratorialism, and his numbers will continue to erode. Or it might be that Harris has to challenge him more forcefully on the economy, because the gettable voters she needs are willing to vote for a guy who says immigrants eat pets if they think he can lower the price of eggs.

The Garden of Forking Paths Brian Klaas writes The "Need for Chaos" Voter:

....These people, according to the new research, share a desire to “unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.” This trait now has a name — and an established psychological profile.

It’s called the “Need for Chaos.” Understanding it provides an important insight into the destructive world of modern politics, in which the trolls have taken over, and politicians are no longer problem solvers, but are rather political influencers. It’s not about making the world better. It’s about burning down the world of people they hate.

...The Need for Chaos trait is particularly damaging for individuals who also feel that they’ve been failed by society, manifesting in their loneliness. For them, sowing chaos is a way to lash out against the system while asserting their power and trying to establish some form of social status.

...The challenge for modern politics, then, lies with figuring out a way to deal with the inevitable perceived loss of social status that accompanies a society that’s becoming more equal, while mitigating the damage that these aggrieved chaos agents can inflict on everyone else.

Next time you’re on social media and you try to engage with a vicious troll, keep in mind that you’re likely not dealing with someone who cares about truth, or social progress, or justice. Instead, odds are that you’ve just encountered someone who wants to watch the world burn, because they’ve got a destructive trait: the Need for Chaos.

So there we have it: this election, Trump's "deplorables" are fearful, credulous, idly vicious, cheap, thoughtless and destructive. And they hate the same people Trump hates. Its not an attractive picture, is it.

I’m going to need a massive chart that explains which Republicans are self-identified Nazis, which Republicans are simply parroting Nazis, which Republicans are defending slavery, which Republicans are dealing with sex scandals, and which Republicans are juggling combinations of the above.

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) September 20, 2024 at 1:12 PM