The felon frontrunner: How Trump warped our politics

https://www.vox.com/politics/352465/trump-convicted-felon-elections

32 comments

  1. He can’t even stay awake to fight for his own freedom… what makes anyone think he’ll stay awake for yours?

  2. Trump is the inevitable outcome of the conservative backlash to the Warren Court and Nixon. Nixon truly politicized the Supreme Court in reaction to the largest expansion of individual rights granted by SCOTUS which directly lead to the massive conservative legal movement we have today. His impeachment lead to a conservative media machine. Both machines fed by Christian zealots and grievance which just festered and accelerated. He is a symptom not the disease. He is a feature not a bug. All conservative movements of grievance inevitably lead to a charismatic authoritarian figure heads who often turn into dictators.

  3. He didn’t warp our politics. His seething hatred, bigotry, xenophobia, and cruelty was always present in a sizable portion of the electorate. Everything Trump stands for and supports has been cultivated in U.S. Christianity for forty years. He finally gave his folk tacit permission to take off the mask.

    No one was “radicalized” by Trump, they were always capable of terrible things.

  4. Trump was and will forever be:

    First president in 28 years to not serve a second term.

    First president in 45 years not to release any of his tax returns.

    First president in 89 years to lose the presidency, the House and the Senate in a single term.

    First president in 129 years to lose the popular vote twice.

    First president in 152 years to boycott his successors inauguration.

    First president ever to fail to hit a 50% approval rating at any point during their presidency.

    First president ever to accuse his predecessor of not being an American.

    First president ever to be impeached twice.

    First president ever to have a member of their own party vote for conviction in an impeachment trial.

    First president ever to have an arrest warrant issued against him by a foreign nation.

    First president ever to refuse to concede defeat.

    First president ever to fail to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.

    First president ever to actively incite a terrorist attack against his own.

    First President to be convicted of a felony (appeal pending)

  5. Everyone focuses on Trump while ignoring the rightwing voters.

    Trump/maga didn’t just appear out of thin air in 2015, Trump gave his first national political speech in 1987, he was attached to the Reform Party. He/maga have had decades to observe the rightwingers and their leanings/desires.

    All Trump/maga did was pull back the curtain to reveal what the neocons had spent decades trying to keep under thumb. Unfortunately for the neocons that thumb belonged to GHWB and he left no legacy leadership to continue that restraint.

    Even if Trump is removed from the political picture, there is no immediate nor near-future path in taming the rightwing. The neocons don’t have the clout and the rightwing voters are determined to never again be under the yoke of this current political era/system.

  6. Twice impeached shady business man finally brought to justice.

  7. *Team Trump has successfully warped the rules of politics to the point where even a felony conviction may not matter*

    – It’s not Trump, it’s the people who vote for Trump. They want a liar and a cheat and a conman. They want the hatred and the violence. They want the “me first”. In many ways, they always have.

  8. A lot of enablers throughout this journey. Fox News, newsmax, OANN. The rise of podcasts and specifically the right wing social media network. Charlie Kirk, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, the daily wire knuckleheads. And a host of lesser known losers like Benny Johnson, Dean bongino, Tim pool, etc. all backed by right wing dark money billionaires.

  9. It’s all the morons over at r/conservative. They are in the cult and nothing will ever convince them.

  10. Literally couldn’t get a job bagging groceries, odds on favorite to be elected president. What a country

  11. Over on /r/conservative, there are so many saying they are now motivated to donate to Trump’s campaign. Imagine giving your money to a felon who says he’s a billionaire.

  12. Trump isn’t the one that warped our politics. He is the result of decades of conditioning of self-identifying conservatives that they are eternal victims, that everyone is out to get them, and everything is shitty and scary. An entire media ecosystem now exists to keep these people in this bubble at all times. Trump is simply exploiting that for personal gain.

    I don’t think Trump gives two shits about anything he claims to other than himself. He will take any position he thinks will lead him to more money or power.

  13. Republican voters clearly had some pretty bad judgement even before they went mask off fascist, and the lesson to be learned nearly a hundred years ago was already that it could happen anywhere. Trump has some giant issues but the bigger problem is the people that don’t see those problems, they’ll fall for the next budding dictator too and that person will initially seem far more competent and normal than Trump ever did.

  14. Our politics were warped way before Trump entered politics. His presidency and everything going on is actually what the result of decades long warped politics ends up looking like.

  15. Biden should graciously issue an executive order that restores the right to vote for convicted felons so that Trump will be allowed to vote for himself.

    And let the Republicans try to justify why he should or shouldn’t do that.

    And then we do a massive voters registration drive and get every convicted felon to the polls.

  16. Trump is not unique, the creep of accepted corruption and mediocrity has just finally made its way from the corporate world to the White House.

  17. Remember when yelling or riding in a tank with a helmet and looking goofy was enough to cost you the nomination/election.

  18. Trump did not warp our politics: WE DID, by allowing him to take up space on the political stage and lending him legitimacy he never deserved. By giving him extensive media coverage every single day of his campaign, (such as George Stephanopoulos interviewing him almost daily in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election on GMA).
    By not effectively and thoroughly challenging his lies and his racism prior to the 2016 election. And not only by not challenging him hard enough throughout his campaign, but also prior to him running for president. His political rants from the 80s onward were tolerated and platformed instead of being ignored. And the public allowed it over and over again, by consuming it by showing interest, and by making him profitable.

  20. Warped our politics and warped our culture…right-of-center folks have moved the overton window rightward and the media has followed right along with it, which has helped normalize extreme views and behavior that 10 years ago was universally panned or Republicans at least pretended to be ashamed of. Women like Chaya Raichik are now mainstream GOP. Mark Robinson. Tulsi Gabbard. Kook after Kook running for Congressional seats. The Weak and Gay chick. Royce White.

    Republicanism in 2024 is now virtually entirely grounded in grievance and hatred. Trump has provided them a fog horn. Republicans are in despair today because Trump represents everything they are and they seek—saying and doing basically whatever they want and to whomever they want and never being held accountable. Accountability threatens them because it means they actually have to consider their actions before engaging and they don’t wanna do that.

    It’s really difficult to reckon with folks who truly do feel righteous in the way Republicans do, in their behavior. It’s almost impossible. They feel righteous. Many called upon by God. How do you combat that? You can’t.

  22. A decent article with a great reflection in the headline, but it ought to give greater import to the fact that Trump’s corruption has already cost him. Since the 2020 election, Trump has had no concrete legitimacy in public life. Even now he just remains the presumptive nominee. Let’s not put the cart before the horse and pretend that the American people in an electoral slate of states will be receptive to it any longer. It’s all hypothetical.

    The headline brings up a great point that we should remember: the mask is off – when presented with evidence and made to consider all arguments without propaganda, a decent focus group of randomly selected citizens screened for bias determined that Trump is guilty in his campaign for his first term in office. Let’s not let blind agendas confuse the fact that common, plain speaking Americans who tell it like it is do not support Trump’s criminality.

  23. There were 17 Republican candidates in the 2016 contest. The media gave all their attention, and thus all of America’s, to one. He would do something Trumpy, and rather than just ignore his antics and focus on the issues, media would run to the other candidates and ask, “what do you have to say about what Trump did?” And Republicans would downplay his antics and boringly try to redirect. The media did this because that’s what sold. That’s what America told them we wanted by watching and buying the shit they were advertising, and the whole time we were watching Trump and his vile family and MAGA take a jackhammer to political discourse and democracy itself. We can blame Trump all we want, but he’s just an expression of the general intellectual laziness and lack of critical thinking that has become the norm in the United States. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

  24. Nah, trump didn’t warp anything, he just took advantage of what was already there and ripped the mask off

  25. The media warped our politics by not calling out his bullshit from day one and giving him a bunch of free air time. Because they wanted the ratings.

  26. No, it’s how the “news” warped our politics and gave birth to this brave new world.

  27. Roger Ailes has entered the chat. He didn’t like journalists reporting on facts/Nixon so created a disinformation network. Now, Americans are being brainwashed by Fox + The Sinclair Broadcast Group, Newsmax, OAN, etc. Even members of congress, including a former POTUS🤦🏻‍♂️Multiple Supreme Court justices have echoed nonsense from these networks. The movement has everyone complaining and arguing over stupid culture wars instead of the lack of quality/affordable education in this country, just how they like it…especially in the red states.

  28. Trump didn’t warp our politics, Republican propaganda warped our politics and it LED to Trump. If it weren’t for the flood of disinformation on AM talk radio, FoxNews/OAN/Newsmax and a slew of internet websites Trump would have been laughed off the stage by Republican voters in 2016. But he was propped up and I can’t help but wonder why. I suspect they just wanted to see if they could. As in, “here’s a completely unqualified moron… is our propaganda network powerful enough to make him the nominee?”

    Unfortunately, the answer was “yes.” And it will continue to be “yes” until they decide he’s harming the party, which I personally believe he is.

  29. I knew we were in very serious trouble when I saw Glenn Beck on Fox scribbling on a chalkboard, spouting a bunch of racist, bad faith, fear mongering propaganda. I was like damn, Houston, we have a problem.

  30. Republicans, not just Trump. He took advantage of the environment the GOP created. He wasn’t supposed to be President; he gutted their plans and made all the shit going on secretly, visible

  31. How our media warped our politics by relentlessly propping up this bag of shit.

  32. The entire GOP supports a criminal anti democratic candidate… Shouldn’t this Bar him from running for office? A criminal

Leave a Reply