Crazy how effective at making everything worse this admin has been.
But it's true he is a symptom.
To prompt with something more specific: there is a possibility of a Gavin Newsom vs. Tucker Carlson in 2028, it's crucial to understand why Tucker might win and why he would be ten times worse than Trump.
None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.
Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.
Dems lean more on moderates/independents. Trump won because he persuaded that group, particularly the young men.
https://www.thirdway.org/memo/why-republicans-can-win-with-t...
If Trump is the most charismatic political personality America has to offer...
Trump is very much a symptom, not a cause. He is simply the kind of personality most fit for the media environment.
The media environment on the right has essentially eschewed journalistic standards for political and economic velocity.
Fringe theories get introduced during podcasts, which then get brought up by guests on Fox. Members of the government point out that the news media is talking about fringe theory X, which then gets repeated by the news media. Eventually the government opens up an investigation or creates a task force to address the issue.
It is not that people don’t come up with objections or counter narratives on the right, it’s just that they don’t get platformed.
Verification is the expensive part of journalism. If you eschew verification. You can be more efficient. Today the right is simply the more “efficient” political consensus manufacturing machine.
This is foundation upon which the rest of the events occur. This is why there will always be space for another character to appear.
Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?
It's that a significant number of Americans are mean, selfish, racist, arrogant, and delight in the victimization of those they perceive as belonging to an outgroup.
2/3 of your electorate either voted for him (meaning they liked what they saw) or were sufficiently unbothered by him to not vote (meaning they were more or less okay with Trump).
These crocodile tears about how "we were bamboozled" are just that. It was plainly obvious to the rest of us looking in from outside, even before his first term but certainly after, that he was exactly the person he is now, and fully two thirds of American voters accepted this.
http://exiledonline.com/we-the-spiteful/
>The left won’t accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix “if only the people knew the Truth.”
>But what if the Truth is that Americans don’t want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance–and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left’s wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America’s rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it’s not so much Goering’s famous “bigger lie” that works here, but the dumber and meaner the lie, the more the public wants to hear it repeated.
Every time there's a cycle of fringe-right blowing up in popularity, pushing an agenda and flaming out, it's still the same people they're appealing to who are voting for them.
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*EDIT*: Corrected word. Lol.