The Vessel

Reuben Rodriquez, the pseudonym for a Florida Democrat political observer, has some astute observations on Donald Trump.  I've been reading Reuben on Twitter since 2020 and find he has remained true to his political beliefs, while avoiding the stampede to insanity of mainline Democrats.

Trump exists as a flawed, powerful & impotent, VESSEL for a cornucopia of grievance. He is a revolt against a global economy, cloying feminism & a subconscious revolt against the victory of post-material liberalism. That he can not even comprehend this ADDs to the appeal.

Say it weekly: Trump being fully unable to articulate his value prop allows HUGE swaths of the pop to project on him their *own* amorphous grievances Grievances they can’t even say aloud. Trump is an inadvertent masterpiece of channeling desperate groups & desires.

I don't think this completely captures Trump or his appeal but does account for a certain amount of it.

His observations were prompted by tweets from Matt Stoller (a leftist and no relation to THC), including this scathing and accurate assessment.

There's this belief that JD Vance was 'radicalized' by something, as if it's weird to lose faith in institutional leaders, academics and journalists who are clearly inept and totally full of shit all the time.

Andrew Sullivan, who will not be voting for Trump, provides another perspective on the man and his political resurrection, while pondering the collapse of the liberal establishment.

What makes this narrative feel like something deeper than a mere looming electoral college landslide is that, simultaneously, the entire liberal establishment seems to be imploding. The Democrats’ Biden formula — impose radical social, economic, and cultural change by fronting it with a moderate, easy-to-bully old man — has unraveled as obviously as Biden’s health. One reason is that the president is simply incapable of catching the attention of the country — except in universal cringe — and has singularly failed to construct a compelling narrative of his own.

Another is the incoherence of the Resistance. If you want to protest potential abuse of the justice system by a future president Trump, don’t bring an obviously flimsy, political case in New York City that merely helped Trump sweep back to dominance in the GOP. If you want a saner GOP, don’t demonize every other possibility, from DeSantis to Vance. If you emphasize the danger of political violence, don’t turn a blind eye as BLM burns America’s cities to the ground, or ignore Antifa. If you want to accuse Fox News of propaganda, don’t push out equal and opposite propaganda on toxic MSNBC. If you think democracy dies in darkness, why try to get Trump legally excluded from some state ballots, and prevent any real primary among Democrats?

More saliently, if one of your main lines of attack on Trump is his mendacity, it was probably not a great idea to tell the entire country that Biden was, in Joe Scarborough’s words, “far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been — intellectually, analytically…”

The lies the Democrats have been telling us these past few years are legion: inflation won’t happen/is temporary/is good for you; the Southern border is secure; “equity” is “fairness”; biological sex is a “spectrum”; Ukraine is about to win the war; Russia’s economy can be sanctioned to death; political violence is entirely on the far right; children can meaningfully consent to sex changes; the only thing holding black Americans back is white bigotry; the mainstream media is fair; and women have penises. Yes, Trump is a shameless liar. But the left’s propaganda has muddied the waters. When NBC’s higher-ups took Morning Joe off the air this week, it was a real moment. Even the muckety-mucks couldn’t take the lucrative propaganda anymore.

I will never vote for Trump — because he is so psychologically disturbed and so contemptuous of the rule of law that he remains a danger to us and the world. But I can see the logic of Trumpism. Those who feel left behind — culturally, economically — need at least one party to represent them and their values. As Biden has proven, protectionism is not all bad, especially when related to supply chains and national security. Mass immigration is out of control, and only one party gets it. Support for those who have lost the most from globalization seems to me a defensible conservative position, after migrant winners like me have had such a good run of it. And the madness of the neocon war machine demands a president able to spurn it.

Neither Rodriguez or Sullivan focus on the authoritarian turn of the Democrats, for whom a danger to democracy is anyone who does not vote for Democrats and, as a party, are doing all they can to ensure that the opposition never attains power again.  The radical social, economic, and cultural change referenced by Sullivan can only occur if accompanied by the repression needed to impose and maintain that change.

As for THC, he remains committed to leaving the presidential line on the ballot blank in 2024.