He won’t get the nomination, this is a joke campaign.
He won’t win the nomination.
America would never elect someone like Trump.
He’ll have to change, the office of the presidency will change him.
Tonight he became president.
He’s pivoting (at least a dozen times over four years).
He’ll just disappear once he loses.
His supporters are all talk, there won’t be any violence.
And so on.
A lot of people, from the elite-iest of the DC media elite to your neighbor, were constantly and consistently wrong about everything Trump-related. David Brock, former conservative critter and now Democratic strategist, was one of them. Today, he wrote a mea culpa in the New York Times.
“Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.”
To quote John McClain in the movie Die Hard, “Welcome to the party, pal.”
Brock does more than sound an alarm many of us have heard for five years, he offers some potential solutions. These are good action steps, but I wonder how much we will do. There’s a lot of solutions that would fix our current democracy crisis, such as increasing the number of Supreme Court justices and scrapping the filibuster, but those are dismissed as “too radical.” Meanwhile, not doing anything is enabling the radical dismantling of American democracy.
I also worry that not enough people see what is happening. I still hear people wringing their hands about “divisiveness” and I fear that this is something that holds us back from facing certain realities about where conservatives are right now. And while it’s good to see people like Brock aboard with reality and demonstrating a clarity of the current, I worry there are still people who are not, who believe since Trump is no longer president, so there’s no longer any threat. I also am concerned we are going to live up to the old 1/3-1/3-1/3 cliche; one-third of Americans want an end to democracy, one-third are going to fight to save it, and one-third won’t care.
I hope not. There’s a lot of work to do, and whatever you did to fight back against Trump, you need to keep doing it.
The last word goes to a group of guys who want us to wake up.