I’ve said for a long time that the primary means of American education is advertising. He was advertised as a competent businessman on TV, and so that’s what a lot of Americans believe. The guy’s a walking advertisement. A flim-flam man.

He wins because he’s the best at lying in a country that prizes lying for money as the best skill set one can possess.

Wherever this thing ends up, it will be begging for the most obvious bit of vandalism ever. One little hole turns it from a “touching tribute” into a real-life kirkpost.

All the “best” conservative arguments are just repurposed left-wing arguments that someone ran ctrl+f and replaced each identifying term with it’s counterpart.

The infuriating part is that the reason it works is because left-wing arguments are fundamentally structured better and are more compelling. At some point in the past, a lefty made that argument to the right-winger and they could feel that they were losing the argument, so they quietly adopted the aesthetic of the same argument and later deployed it like they came up with it themselves.

It’s why every right-wing argument has to construct a fiction where their enemy already holds all the power and has been in control for decades. Everyone can intuitively feel that they’re being scammed by an unfair system that’s rigged for the benefit of the wealthy. All right-wingers have to do is convince people that the structure of society can’t be blamed on the people with the power to shape it. They just need people to blame someone they’ve already been convinced to hate. Immigrants, minorities, queers, and anyone else who would tell them who their actual enemies are.