Trump Announces Presidential Bid for 2024

[Dill]

(11-20-2022, 11:19 AM)hollodero Wrote: Sure, but that's different. Attack is easy. But attack might also be a conscious or subconscious reaction to the permanent defense mode Trump put his followers in. This week he drew hurricane paths with a sharpie and goes public with it, next he claimed China respects Trump and his very big ah-brain, next he called his former handpicked employees dogs or dumb as a rock, no chronology in these examples, but it just goes on and on. The list of issues that every neutral observer (not just "libs", I for one am not one) must consider deeply embarrassing in the mildest of reactions, the list of things when if Biden said it today he would be declared pretty much braindead, is endless. I guess many people got and get how this is indefensible, just would never admit it, and even understandably so in your climate. And a mechanism to make it defensible is accusing the other side of even more horrific deeds to rationalize. And the worse Trump is, the worse libs have to be. A reaction even self-declared independends often take to stay in balance.

Not that I could ever rationalize believing in conspiracies like the one you mentioned. These are extremes, and these people are obviously cought in their ever-loyal fandom and are lost for any rational discourse. Wild stuff, never peddled in my country to any comparable extent. I'm sure these extremes have nothing to do with a strictly dualistic political system though.

Agree with everything up to the bolded.

There I just want to make the point that the Foster conspiracy goes back to the '90s. He was killed in '93. 

The multiple conspiracy worldview that now grips the GOP was cultivated over two decades before Trump took control.

Now it's rather like a machine which sets to work on every new scandal. And the goal is not simply to deny or normalize
Trump's brutal interpersonal behavior, but his criminality. Think of Tulsi GAbbard's sudden "realization" that Biden had weaponized the DoJ. This is part of an ongoing effort to create a false mirror image of Biden/Garland doing exactly what Trump was always actually trying to do with government offices, with much resistance by his own lawyers.  

Pence spoke of that in an interview with Tapper today, when he expressed deep concern over the raid on Mar a Lago and how it hurt the image of the U.S. abroad. The DOJ had not tried everything to resolve the issue before the raid. 
Nevermind that classified material was leaking out of Trump's storeroom, and he'd had over a year to give back the stolen documents.
This sort of framing keeps the onus for stealing and withholding classified docs on the DoJ and not Trump. Pence also could not say
whether Trump understood the Constitution and respected its institutions. 

There seems to be great difficulty holding Trump accountable, publicly within the party, perhaps in part because it risks popping the 
anti-Dem bubble, still the necessary cement between voters and leadership. 

Millions of people have lived inside this bubble for decades now.