The goal is to convince other people, not to rah-rah the already-believers.
Trivially: these websites go back up in a few days, is that more convincingly malice or just “these people don’t know how to operate a government?”
If it’s malice then it’s an attack. You have react differently to an attack than to incompetence.
The EU made the same mistake with Trump‘s appeasement to Putin. They hoped it’s some kind of clever negotiation tactic but they learned it’s not. It’s just two autocrats teaming up at the expense of Ukraine.
Meh, feel free to disagree. How many MAGA voters do you talk to on a daily basis?
Online? More than enough and they show the same kind of malice like our own type of MAGA: AfD voters
There were many dems who remembered Trump as the funny orange man, didn't really care to turn out against him, and fell for the "both sides bad" messaging that was absolutely rampant on the left (esp with regard to Kamala and Palestine). So no, I don't think the most important rally-the-base rhetoric was to ratchet up "Trump is Fascist" so much as suppress "Both Sides Bad" while we had an election to win.
What was Kamala's 2024 campaign slogan?
I saw that slogan and cringed immediately.
Agreed the "both sides bad" messaging was a huge factor here. But that's exactly why we should talk about these fuckups as questions of competence. They are unambiguous evidence of a difference in both sides' ability to actually operate a government!