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.
...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.
