Tuesday, June 04, 2024

The Normie Take

If you don't own a red MAGA baseball cap or a "Let's Go Brandon" bumper sticker, but also aren't some raving Bernie Sanders voter who brings your tofu sandwich lunch to work in an NPR tote bag, Ben Dreyfuss's take here is pretty much how things look:
I live in a small town. I drive by the same five police cars every day. If I constantly played “Fuck The Police” as loud as possible and flipped them off as I drove by, if I were ever pulled over for speeding, I would not expect them to let me off with a warning.

Trump, more than any politician in my lifetime, chose a political strategy that involved him antagonizing half this country. From day one, he “owned the libs.” He made himself the main character in our culture. And he won a personality cult on the right that loves him. But, he earned the intense disdain of the other half of the country.

There are lots of reasons why I think that was bad for this country and the world, but one reason you shouldn’t do it out of self-interest is that a lot of people are going to be rooting for your downfall. And they are going to go over everything with a fine-tooth comb. And if you are a criminal who has broken/does break the law, your chances of getting away with it are going to drop precipitously.

If you have a person bound and gagged in your trunk, you probably shouldn’t speed.

So many people in Trump’s orbit were convicted of various low-rent crimes over the last decade, and none of that would have happened if Trump hadn’t won in 2016. They would have gotten away with all of their fraud and bribery schemes. They had gotten away with them. Then they decided to loudly associate themselves with a hugely divisive person who antagonized so many people that the world gave them a closer look.

That’s what happens in life! It’s just a fact of human nature. It’s how attention works. Of course, that now applies to Trump. And it applies to his enemies, too.


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