Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Gotta Keep ‘Em Scared

Opinions vary. That silence means people are tired of Trump. So we should make them more tired?
Now, as the 2024 campaign cranks into motion, with Trump hoping for a comeback even while in legal peril, I get the sense again that these people are exhausted. You hear little excitement about Trump’s candidacy when you hang around in bars and coffee shops and parks, talking to a whole host of different types of people in critical rural, suburban, and former industrial parts of Pennsylvania (think Erie or Beaver Falls), Michigan (think of Oakland and Macomb Counties), and Wisconsin (think of Racine or Kenosha). 
Obama won those three states in 2012. Trump won them in 2016. And Biden won them in 2020. Tie up all three of those states and you’ve pretty much won the presidency in 2024. 
In those places, there is little interest, at least at this early date, in Trump’s antics and his angry insistence that his legal prosecution is really a political persecution. Mainly there’s silence—a telling silence. Think about what we saw on the day of Trump’s arraignment last week: Sure, there were protests and counterprotests around the courthouse in New York City, but did we get any in the Rust Belt? The Midwest? 
This is not to say that the extremists—on both sides of the aisle—are not out there. But the public in general is tired.
And by “blast” I guess you mean Twitter. 😝 His opponents in the GOP, maybe. The Democrats don’t want him to self-destruct. Not until the general election, anyway. Trump used to say he kept cable news in business. He also likes to say he, alone, can fix it; whatever “it” is. The problem with opposition is that which you oppose becomes your reason to exist; and you become more like it. Well, for the GOP. For the rest of us, it’s just tiresome.
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