He told a rally

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

Was Trump on the ballot, or no?

“I’m on the ballot,” he told a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, on October 22. “Just because I am on the ballot, really. It’s our stuff that’s going to be taken away…if we don’t win.”

In Corinth Mississippi on October 26, he declared, “And in a certain way, I am on the ballot.” He repeated the same thing in Bullhead City, Arizona, on October 14.

He was on the ballot. Ok then! He lost the election!

Trump’s call in to Fox was noteworthy given that he had twice attacked the conservative cable news network on Truth Social that evening, declaring in one post: “Fox News Ratings are way down (27 percent!) because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats! All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It’s them, not me.”

In a follow-up, he attacked the network for having former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio on air as a guest, fuming: “Fox News bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”

His objections did not stop him from joining the network’s election night coverage twice, however.

Well he has to join some network’s coverage, and Fox is bigger than any of its rivals, so you do the math. Not joining some network’s coverage was never on the menu, because Attention is All.

Republicans, meanwhile, are blaming Trump for the “Blue Tsunami.”

“We are beyond candidate quality. It’s a bloodbath,” a senior Senate GOP official told Politico. “Trump did this.”

Now you notice?

Comments

4 responses to “He told a rally”

  1. Your Name's not Bruce? Avatar
    Your Name’s not Bruce?

    ” It’s a bloodbath,” a senior Senate GOP official told Politico. “Trump did this.”

    Now you notice?

    So, you regret not distancing yourselves from Trump not because he is (and always has been) manifestly corrupt and evil, but because he cost you votes. Let’s hope lots of people remember this for a long time.

    In the meantime, you could help investigate his illegal acts, and help impeach his ass for good. You owe the man no loyalty, because for him, loyalty is always and ever unidirectional. Let’s hope that lots of his underlings decide to rat him out in order to avoid longer jail sentences.

  2. What a Maroon Avatar
    What a Maroon

    I’ve seen reports that Congress is going to initiate impeachment hearings against Hegseth next week, while the Republicans are still in charge. Buyer’s remorse, I guess.

  3. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    In the future, there’s gonna have to be a lot of “Now you notice?” on both sides of the aisle.

    Over the last ten years, I’ve seen a kind of parallel between both parties’ extremes: MAGA on the right, and what I guess I’d broadly call “woke” on the left. The right had its principled conservatives, the Never-Trumpers, who were all run out of DC; the left has, well, us: dissidents who cling to liberal principles even though we’re surrounded by people who’ve gotten behind the authoritarian-left mob and attempted to cancel us.

    “Woke 1 was crazy” became a catchphrase a couple months ago after AOC picked it up. It’s a small sign that an air of reform may finally get underway on the left. But the left has a long way to go.

    The New York Times published a fascinating infographic that shows how virtually all demographics in the US shifted heavily rightward in the 2024 Presidential election, and all demographics have now boomeranged back toward the left, landing even further leftward than they were back in 2020 when they elected Biden.

    Something strange happened to politics over the last decade. Both political sides became extreme, and as a result, the electorate has become volatile, lurching one way or the other, opting for what they perceive to be the lesser of both extremes at any given moment. In 2024, voters pulled the lever for Trump over three issues: anxiety about inflation and immigration, and among new young voters — whose numbers tipped the balance of the election in favour of Trump — fear of a growing, self-righteous streak of authoritarianism across the left. Their distaste for the extreme left mattered more than their distaste for the extreme right at that particular moment.

    Today, economic anxiety has exploded in a sense of full-blown crisis, and this is the reason the voters swerved so hard away from Trump. It’s not so much that voters no longer care about the left’s extremism — they still do — it’s that the right’s extremism has overshadowed it on something politically analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s just that the current state of affairs brought on by the extreme right is a higher-order level of crisis.

    Which means, if and when the sense of crisis dies back down, voters may very well go back to prioritizing their disagreement with Dems on culture-war, “woke” authoritarianism and swing right back the other way.

    It feels like the same kind of volatility is playing out in Europe, where far-right parties are quickly making huge gains and then just as quickly losing them, as global political volatility leads to rapid temperature swings in the popular mood.

    On the whole, the US electorate dislikes both parties right now; it’s just a tennis match, people throwing their votes against whichever side they think is worse at any given time.

    Both sides need to pull back from extremism. The Dems have to do much more than just be “not as terrible as Trump”, they have to come back to genuine principles, or they’ll find people walking away from them, marching right back to the GOP as soon as they feel the country is no longer in crisis again.

  4. iknklast Avatar
    iknklast

    Other things the Dems need to focus on, and immediately: ending the tariffs, and ending the war of choice in Iran.

    The reality is, voters care about prices. They voted for Trump, supposedly, because the cost of eggs was high. Now the cost of everything is high.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts