Josh Marshall offers some good advice to people on the left who have been hemming-and-hawing about whether Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” threat was a threat of a bloodbath:Bruce’s Contradicciones Newsletter is a reader-supported publication.
Trump is a chaos agent. There's been far too much parsing of his scrambled words and disjointed thoughts from the beginning--right across the political spectrum. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, like when he said maybe we should try to get along with Russia or that we kill people too--but it's all meaningless drivel coming from the guy who also said he loves war and was within 12 minutes of launching a massive attack on Iran only to change his mind on a whim, later pretending to care about projected Iranian military casualties.
It was obvious what he was hoping to incite on Jan 6, but at the same time it doesn't mean he had a clear plan in place, and without part of the military willing to revolt, theoreticians will debate whether it was an attempted coup, an insurrection or a mere riot.
Still, the fact that roughly have of American voters think this insane, incompetent clown should again be given control over the nuclear launch codes tells us everything we need to know about the state of American democracy.
Yep, that's the situation. To me one of the main lessons of the German Weimar Republic is that if enough people want to do away with democracy, and enough people are indifferent to it, even the best-constructed governmental arrangements can be undermined. Trump really is running a "chaos agent" strategy, although I have the impression that his personal model is an aspiring mob boss but whose main talent is a flair for showmanship and demagoguery.
The former Texas Governor and Commerce Secretary Rick Perry had his own variation of the stopped-clock theory: "Even a stopped clock is right *once* a day."
Trump is a chaos agent. There's been far too much parsing of his scrambled words and disjointed thoughts from the beginning--right across the political spectrum. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, like when he said maybe we should try to get along with Russia or that we kill people too--but it's all meaningless drivel coming from the guy who also said he loves war and was within 12 minutes of launching a massive attack on Iran only to change his mind on a whim, later pretending to care about projected Iranian military casualties.
It was obvious what he was hoping to incite on Jan 6, but at the same time it doesn't mean he had a clear plan in place, and without part of the military willing to revolt, theoreticians will debate whether it was an attempted coup, an insurrection or a mere riot.
Still, the fact that roughly have of American voters think this insane, incompetent clown should again be given control over the nuclear launch codes tells us everything we need to know about the state of American democracy.
Yep, that's the situation. To me one of the main lessons of the German Weimar Republic is that if enough people want to do away with democracy, and enough people are indifferent to it, even the best-constructed governmental arrangements can be undermined. Trump really is running a "chaos agent" strategy, although I have the impression that his personal model is an aspiring mob boss but whose main talent is a flair for showmanship and demagoguery.
The former Texas Governor and Commerce Secretary Rick Perry had his own variation of the stopped-clock theory: "Even a stopped clock is right *once* a day."
I was including a.m. and p.m. but perhaps that's being too charitable.