Friday, October 09, 2020

YOU KNOW WHO LIVES IN A BUBBLE? THE PRESIDENT. ALSO RIGHT-WINGERS WHO WANT TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT.

I'm frequently told that I live in a liberal bubble, but here are the main items on the schedule of Donald Trump today:
The president, still recovering from COVID-19, is on a media blitz on Friday, appearing on [Rush] Limbaugh's show with scheduled appearances on Mark Levin's radio show and Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News.
And tomorrow?
President Trump is planning to host up to 2,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House on Saturday for his first in-person event since he announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus....

The president was expected to make remarks from one of the balconies at the White House to the crowd, which was expected to include people attending an event elsewhere in Washington staged by a Trump supporter, Candace Owens....
This is how he campaigns -- by appealing to his base over and over and over again. Donald, you have those voters. You need other voters. But he doesn't believe that. His need to be around people who worship him has merged with his delusional belief that there are enough of those people to reelect him.

Jonathan Allen of NBC News writes:
Less than a month out from Election Day, President Donald Trump is dealing with a hostage crisis of sorts — he is both the captor and the captive of a badly tarnished political brand.

The more it fades, the more he tends to it. The more he tends to it, the more it fades....

For nearly four years, Trump has rejected every opportunity to dilute his brand, even a little bit, to widen his coalition. The latest, and perhaps last, chance came when he decided to amplify his message on the coronavirus after being hospitalized with the disease. His insistence that it mostly just takes resolve to defeat the virus is a large part of why, more than seven months into a national crisis that has killed 210,000 Americans and left millions without work, most voters say he has mishandled the federal response.
But he won't stop because he still believes it's working. He believes it's working because he watches hours of Fox News a day, and Fox tells him that all real Americans are right-wingers.

But you know who really lives in a bubble? The folks who plotted to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, in the belief that spiriting her out of state, putting her on some sort of trial for treason, and (presumably) executing her would inspire a widespread anti-government uprising rather than appalling the vast majority of Americans the way 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing did. What gets into revolutionaries' heads? I've been asking that since I was a teenager, in the days of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Violent American radicals always seem to believe far more people are ready to rise up than actually are.

Trump's bubble thinking isn't quite as delusional, but it's a difference of degree. Like the would-be kidnappers, he believes that if he does one more rally, or does one more video ad posing on one more balcony, the people will rise up. I know he's trying to steal the election, but he really believes he's trying to win it. He believes he can. And he's just as out of touch as those boogaloo bois.

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