I wonder if there are living people who don't interpret it as a sign of something __REALLY__ weird going on here.
I view Trump as a clinical case of narcissism, bad upbringing, screwed-up mentors, but too late for treatment anyways.
But man, the crowd that lick his boots in public for a position or some coins... They should be shunned for life. This level of sycophancy would destroy one's reputation for ever in my culture and I just don't want to believe it wouldn't in American culture. But even the official government channels have been turned into fan pages run by six year olds. Not even the most backward countries in the world do look so stupid, so overtly corrupt, so I am at a loss: why does the USA? Is this really considered acceptable? Maybe some Americans can explain how this is being perceived in cultural terms.
Everyone who would have said no, every leader, with self-respect, has been removed or fired, at least in the executive branch. Every person with a spine who resigns or gets fired is replaced by someone a bit more sycophantic (and craven/stupid), and the whole thing slowly ratchets into what it is now. Lots of good people are gone -- more true the higher up you go.
You have to understand that most Americans do not approve of what's going on here. But, most people go with the flow, and are waiting for all of this to blow over and go "back to normal" next election. We'll see if it ever does, it probably won't. We took the whole thing for granted, big time.
Enormous amounts of money and 30ish years (about 1980 or a bit after, to 2016) were spent building the largest web of propaganda distribution probably ever, to make this happen. Plus pioneering PR and crisis management strategies and testing the limits of voters’ tolerance for bullshit (very important post-Nixon—an early major experiment was the Iran-Contra scandal, and it went great for them)
After 30 years it was so good it could make Republicans who’d been making fun of Trump as a notorious failed businessman, clownish self-parody, conman, and philanderer five minutes earlier (and I mean common voters, not politicians) do a 180 on a dime and send the dude money.
None of this was built for Trump, but in priming their base to never consider voting for a democrat, they made them both way too right-wing and also made them wonder why Republican politicians weren’t going after democrats way harder (they’re so terrible, after all!) which teed up a coup within the party just perfectly.
Except that many of the swing states were solidly democrat for decades. It was only after repeated failures at providing meaningful change (healthcare, stopping the erosion of jobs to China, providing cheaper access to education among other promises) that people had enough and started voting red consistently. look at Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Hell even Florida voted for Obama. He was just another in a long line of controlled opposition. People have become wise to the grift.
