Make America Gape Again

This nationalizing of GOP campaigns that started over a decade ago was hypercharged under Trump https://t.co/aL5aJEfbFj

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 24, 2022

I’ve seen this on the school board level (about as local and grassroots as it gets), and while it worked to get crazy people on school boards this time, it won’t work again.

The victories were due to fear-mongering campaigns following hot on the heels of the turmoil of Covid lockdowns and upsets. How do they do that a second time? Proclaim they defeated evil and yet they have to do it again? How does that work? Besides, the second time you cry “wolf!” is always less effective than the first. Fewer people respond, and that can be enough to make you lose.

People appalled by the incompetence (and all that flies from it) won’t vote for the crazies, and will work for their defeat. Maybe they’ll say “CRT will come back but for me!”, but frankly fewer people want to drink from that well 2 years on. Make the school district scared again, again?

And what did you do the last two years if not drive the money changers from the Temple and purge the schools of Marxism? People won’t care about that then (most don’t now), but they will care about the last two years of incompetence. The people paying attention, anyway; the ones guaranteed to vote in the election. The others? Can you scare them again? Are you sure?  (Some of the local board members are realizing, slowly, just what the job of a board member actually is.  The others are disappointed their public displays of outrage don't wow the crowds and win them accolades at every board meeting.  Turns out being the enemy of teachers, administrators, and parents of students is not a formula for winning friends and influencing people.  Who knew?)

Trump lost the House, the Senate, and the White House. Whither his political power? Does it lie in the fact that the party in the White House loses the midterms? That’s only been true for 30 years, not for all of American political history. It’s the aberration, not the rule. And all anyone has heard for the past two years is his incompetence, if not deliberate malice (which category do the MAL documents fall into?). GOP primary voters may love Trump, but the rest of the electorate? Not so much. Nor, it seems, do they love his endorsed candidates, either.

There is no royal road to political power. Trump didn’t really obtain it. Nor have MTG, Boebert, Matt Gaetz, or Gym Jordan. They get attention; but Pelosi and Schumer , to name two actual leaders, get things done.

It always comes back to that. Trump pretty much shook the tolerance for incompetence out of the system. The last gasp for the acceptance of that is the sheer racism of Trump and his acolytes. That’s not nearly as politically attractive as DeSantis thinks it is. Or the rest of the GOP, for that matter.