What is Trump even saying here?
Trump: Which is incapable of solvin’ even the sollest problem. We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on pic.twitter.com/eM7dTV8iHe
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 23, 2024
On his good days, Trump is still fine. On his bad days he can barely string two sentences together.
Still, his meaning is clear: America is going completely to hell. It's doom porn. For some reason, there's a big audience of people who just can't get enough of this stuff. Like Ted Johnson, who was profiled today in Politico:
“People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”
What's remarkable is this description of Johnson:
He’s 58. He’s married to his second wife and has three young adult sons. He was in the Army for 22 years — he retired as a lieutenant colonel — and now he is a senior project manager for an IT security company and works from home. He lives in a classic three-bedroom house he bought almost four years ago for $485,000 that’s now worth roughly a quarter-million dollars more.
This is not some discouraged working class guy who lost his job to outsourcing and has never been able to recover. Johnson is married, upper middle class, makes good money, and lives in a nice, safe small town where almost everyone has a college degree. But after watching Fox News he went from thinking he'd vote for Nikki Haley to being a die-hard Trump supporter. Because Democrats are destroying the country and someone has to take a wrecking ball to it before we can rebuild.
I know that not everyone is as well off as me. Still, it's just a fact that the vast majority of Americans are in pretty good shape and the country as a whole is as strong as any country in the world. The burning desire among many conservatives and liberals to believe that everything is horrible—and getting worse—is nothing short of inexplicable.
I'd be curious to hear from his brother his thought on why Ted became so fucked up in the head? Is it just Fox News? You know, a lot of the people convicted of crimes during J6 had curiously one thing in common: all of them had some sort of money problems in their lives. Maybe it was a tax lien, or they got sued by fellow investors and lost in court or the divorced wife took half and custody of the kids. I wonder if that happened to Ted too. It takes a lot, especially when you took oath, to turn your back on your country but that's why they say money is the root of all evil. And if you believe the system actually cost you, then it's no surprise that some would take that step.
No he's not "working class". Very few Trump supporters are. The working class are never a big part of fascist movements. Such movements were made of small merchants, tradesmen, skilled laborers, farmers, civil servants, upper middle class, people with university educations, hardly fellows on the shop floor. They acquiesed to the Nazis, the Falangists, the central and Southern European Fascists because they were just grateful to have work during the Depression and never really liked the Communists to begin with much less the Socialists and so they went along even if their unions were banned and their leaders thrown in jail. It's the fear of Communism and other left radicalism (and racism) which are the drivers of membership in Fascist movements.