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duhragonball · 3 years

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Cult Classic

I had a really exhausting week, so I’m going to try to chill out by writing this thing about cults that’s been bouncing around in my head since... oh, like January 6th? For some reason? But it’s also about my insanely long OC fanfic slash vanity project slash concept album. Join me, won’t you?

Okay, so back in... geez 2018? Has it been that long? Around October 2018 I started working out the details for the big climax of the “1000 years ago” section of my fanfic. From the start I had this idea that the Legendary Super Saiyan would be locked into a death struggle with pretty much the entire Saiyan population, led by a Saiyan King who just can’t handle being upstaged. But I had to figure out a lot of details to make that actually work. What I finally ended up with was the Jindan Cult.

Why a cult? Because I wanted my King character to be the main villain, but also be physically weaker, but also he needed to be powerful enough to challenge the heroine. I came up with all these different ways to beef up his power level without making him a Super Saiyan himself, but ultimately I wanted him to have an army of Siayans at his back. That led me to consider some sort of magic elixir that would make them all stronger, but especially the king, since he’s ultimately in this for himself. At first, I considered having him mind-control all of his goons, but I spent the mind control nickel in earlier arcs, and I’ll have to use it again later, because Towa and Demigra use it. Then I thought of drug addiction, which is sort of like mind control but not literal brainwashing or anything like that. And that led me to the cult concept.

One major inspiration for me was the real-life cult called “NXIVM”, which made the news back in 2018 when their leaders started getting arrested, including “Smallville” star Allison Mack. Every time I read about it, it felt like something from a movie, but it was real. I guess the celebrity angle made it more bizarre to me, because it’s sort of like “Hey, this isn’t just some group of randos; someone you’ve heard of is in this thing.” Not that I ever paid much attention to “Smallville”, but you get the idea. She didn’t just join NXIVM, she eventually became one of the top recruiters. Some of the character arcs in my fic were my own attempt to understand how a person goes from Point A to Point B.

The big plot hole, though, in my mind, was that I came up with this whole master plan for the bad guys, but it involved sending wave after wave of Saiyan cultists to die in pointless, unwinnable battles against Luffa. I couldn’t have them win much, because if they beat her, they’d just kill her, and the story would be over. It struck me as fishy that these Saiyans would sign up for a war where the casualty rate is 100%, but I tried to lampshade it as best I could. “Yeah, all those other chumps couldn’t beat Luffa, but I’ll pull it off because I’m special!” It still seemed a bit unlikely.

But then 2020 happened, and I guess the main thing I learned from that year was that people will accept almost anything in order to believe a comfortable lie. The joke I’ve seen on the internet is that we need to retire the expression “avoid it like the plague”, because it turns out a lot of people don’t actually avoid plagues very well at all. The horrifying thing about COVID-19 is how easily people will accept the climbing death tolls. “Oh, well this person was already in bad health, so they would have died eventually anyway.” I don’t want to get too political here, but I’m pretty sure a lot of the anti-mask, coronavirus-is-a-hoax crowd are the same people who made up tall tales about “death panels” in Obamacare. “They’re gonna euthanize your grandma!” they would say, but now they say your grandma is acceptable losses if it means reopening bars and restaurants.

Actually, I do mean to get political, because holy fuck, Qanon stormed the Capitol Building. Look, if you don’t believe Joe Biden won the election, I don’t know what to tell you, except please get far away from me, right now. If you’re not familiar with Qanon, a few years ago some guy on an image board posted a bunch of cryptic messages and claimed to be an important government figure who would know about important things. People started “deciphering” his “clues” and when he stopped posting new ones they started inventing their own “clues” and interpreting them any way that suited them. This led to an overarching narrative that Donald Trump was actually part of this massive sting operation to arrest hundreds, maybe thousands of left-wing politicians, celebrities, and whoever else. Any day now, he was supposed to have Hilary Clinton arrested, and also JFK Junior would somehow show up and help him, even though he’s been dead for 22 years. Every day, these Qanon guys would add on more bizarre lore to their “theories”, and every day none of their predictions would come true. Then Trump lost the election, which put them in a bind, because their whole mythology is based on the idea of him saving the world as POTUS, and now he wasn’t even going to be POTUS for much longer.

I’m pretty sure this had a lot to do with the lies about election fraud. Trump himself refused to accept defeat, and his supporters didn’t want to accept it either, so they all told each other that it wasn’t real, and they believed each other so much that they dug in their heels. But then they’d take this stuff to court and the judge would be like “Uh, what evidence do you have of mass voter fraud?” and they would just be like “lol nvm!” I mean, if there was proof for any of this, why would they not want a judge to see it? But for Qanon, it was more than just being sore losers. They needed all their whackamaroo predictions to come true, and Trump losing re-election would upset the applecart.

So then they started telling themselves that they could win this thing through the boring certification process. I think it was like, December 14 when all the states had to certify their results. So they held out hope that nothing was over until then. Then they pinned their hopes on the Electoral College, and that there would be enough faithless electors to hand Trump the victory, in spite of the voters. I found this one amusing, since I used to see tumblr suggesting the same thing back in 2016, when they were still trying to come up with ways for Bernie Sanders to win.

Then they decided Mike Pence could fix everything, because on Jan 6, Congress would officially count the Electoral Votes and formally declare the winner, and Mike Pence would step in and overrule the whole thing, because the Vice-President oversees that process. Except he just oversees it, he can’t legally change the outcome, especially on a whim. And then the riot at the Capitol happened, and I’m pretty sure all these Qanon types thought it would mark the beginning of a nationwide uprising, with all seventy-odd million Trump voters going apeshit, but it... didn’t work out that way.

Then they convinced themselves that everything was building to January 20, because the innauguration was actually a clever trap, and once Joe Biden took the oath of office, he could then be arrested for treason, so you see, they had to make it look like Trump lost the election, because it was the only way to fool Joe Biden into incriminating himself... or... something. But Jan 20 came and went, so the latest fallback position I heard was that there’s a double-secret REAL inauguration day, and it’s in March, and the January 20 one isn’t legitimate, even though Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2016, but whatever. That, or the guy we see in the White House now is actually Trump disguised as Joe Biden, or a Joe Biden android or something.

I think I sort of understood that Qanon is a cult, but I didn’t really put the pieces together until the events of January unfolded. Pre-November, it just seemed like a conspiracy theory, without any real timetables or prophecies, like Flat Earth. But once the end of the Trump Administration was in sight, it really started to look like all the doomsday cults I’ve heard about over the years. The predicted events wind up failing to come true, and they invent new predictions to explain away the old ones. It’s not about the veracity of the claims as much as the claims themselves. People want to believe there’s this whole elaborate explanation for everything. They wanted to believe that Trump was this hypercompetent superheroic messiah, because the alternative is to face the uncertain reality: that he had no idea what he was doing, and real people were going to suffer for it.

I think I sort of worked that idea into my fictional cult, but I backed into it. NXIVM was a sex cult, not a doomsday cult, or an elaborate conspiracy theory, so I was mostly fixated on all the depraved things the cult could do to its members. But they all share the same lure: a belief system that promises to make everything fit. I’m not sure what the hook was for NXIVM, but Allison Mack didn’t go in thinking about how much fun sex trafficking would be. That came later, after she was convinced that NXIVM had all the answers, and one of those answers involved sex crimes, apparently. In the same vein, Qanon attempted to explain mass arrests and executions by claiming that Hilary Clinton eats babies or something. “Well, I don’t want babies to get eaten, so I guess breaking into the Capitol building seems like a reasonable course of action.”

Weighed against real life, a bunch of Saiyans accepting a 100% casualty rate doesn’t seem so outrageous. It also helps that sometimes the leaders of these groups can buy into their own hype, and think they’re infallible when they’re really not. This week, I started reading the Darth Plagueis novel again, and I’ve seen the Sith from Star Wars referred to as a cult, but I never gave it a lot of thought until I noticed that Plagueis buys into the whole Dark Side of the Force thing a little too hard. At times, he’ll wax philosophical about how the Jedi are the real bad guys when you think about it, and he’s not just saying that to be manipulative. He honestly believes that the Sith can save the galaxy from decline, which is stupid and hypocritical, because they’re the ones causing all the decline. I always got the impression that Darth Sidious understood that it was all about accumulating power as an end unto itself, and any high-minded talk of necessary evil was just to keep the rubes in line. Rise of Skywalker plays into that idea nicely. He somehow survived Episode VI, but he let the Empire collapse, because if he can’t rule it, he doesn’t want it to exist at all. But he’s still playing himself, because he thinks he can win by following the same failed ideology that got all the previous Sith Lords killed.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about it right now. I need to move on to other topics, because Towa’s not doing a cult thing, so my fic is moving in a different direction. But I feel better for getting this out of my head.

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-still-back-trump/

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

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Importantly, Trump is increasingly fixating on the Republican-backed audits as he pushes the lie that he won the election. He needs to keep talking about this lie because he faces an existential political threat: His brand is based on winning, but he lost. Winners don’t lose, particularly winners who promise their fans that “we will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning.”

Since When Do Republicans Care More About Criminals In Jail Than The Cops Who Put Them There Since Donald Trump

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell pauses during his testimony at the first hearing of the select committee investigating the deadly storming of the Capitol, in Washington on Tuesday, July 27, 2021. “The GOP overwhelmingly stuck with Trump, perpetuating his sick mythology about a day we all saw with our own eyes,” writes The New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd.

| Aug. 3, 2021, 1:00 p.m.

Washington • It was, I must admit, a virtuoso performance by Sean Hannity.

Not since the sheriff in “Blazing Saddles” put a gun to his own head and took himself hostage has anyone executed such a nutty loop de loop.

Opening his show Tuesday night, Hannity gave a monologue defending the police . “Attacks on law enforcement are never and should never be acceptable ever, not at the Capitol and not anywhere,” he declaimed.

Yet Mr. Pro Police had nary a word for the four police officers who had appeared before Congress that morning to describe going to “hell and back,” as a Washington police officer, Michael Fanone, put it, as they relived the scarring, desperate hours of Jan. 6 when they were attacked by Trump’s mob .

When it came down to it, the question of whether Republican lawmakers in the House would side with Donald Trump or the police who risked their lives defending them, it wasn’t even a close call for the law-and-order party.

Since when do Republicans care more about criminals in jail than the cops who put them there? Since when do they coddle domestic terrorists?

We Looked At Which Gop Primary Voters Are Most Likely To Vote Based On Support For His False Election Claims

Many Republican senators, watching the harrowing footage of the Jan. 6Capitol insurrection played at Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial, were moved to tears, presumably remembering their own experiences that day. Yet it did not persuade many of them to vote to convict the former president on the charge of inciting the insurrection. Even though many prominent Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell , appeared to want a clean break with the president after the insurrection, those who turned on Trump have been rebuked by the party’s grass roots. And Trump has threatened to recruit and support primary challengers against Republicans who do not line up behind him.

So were the votes against conviction motivated by a desire to win primaries and, therefore, reelection? Our research shows that the situation is more complicated than that. The Republican rank and file is deeply divided over Trump and his false claims about a stolen 2020 election. This creates a minefield for Republican members of Congress.

Why Republicans haven’t abandoned Trumpism

Opiniona Republican Civil War Is Coming Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia Crusade Is Just The Beginning

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, moderate Republicans started to walk away from the party. Even some conservatives who stuck with Trump all through his presidency couldn’t stomach the insurrection. Currently, 53 percent of Republican voters believe Trump won the election. Similarly, in a national poll last month by Quinnipiac University, 66 percent of people who classified themselves as Republicans said they want Trump to run for president in 2024.

The fact that Trump still controls so many Republican voters explains the assertion by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that the Republican Party can’t “move forward” without Trump. Speeding up the Republican Party’s hardening into a right-wing extremist party is Trump’s demand that anyone who doesn’t toe the line and repeat the lie be ousted and exiled.

Trump advisers and confidants have many reasons not to push back. For one, the former president often rebuffs advisers who tell him to drop the whole stolen election story. But those in Trump’s inner circle also need to keep voters riled up if Trump’s political future — and presumably theirs — is to continue. Dangling the possibility that Trump will be reinstated in August accomplishes this.

A Disturbing Number Of Republicans Still Believe All The Lies Donald Trump Tells Them

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One of the enduring legacies of Donald Trump’s runs for office and four years as president is the phenomenon in which a shameless politician can tell a brazen, easily fact-checkable lie and his or her supporters will buy it without question, even when evidence to the contrary is screaming in their faces. The earliest example of this was the claim Trump made when announcing his 2015 bid for office—that he was going to build a wall and Mexico was going to pay for it, an absurd lie that he was still telling in the fall of 2020. And of course an equally audacious lie was the one he started spreading last November and hasn’t stopped spewing to date—that he won the presidential election and a second term was stolen from him.

Obviously, the most chilling repercussion of Trump’s supporters believing he, and not Joe Biden, won the election, was the January 6 attack on the Capitol, an insurrection that left five people dead and which Trump, in his final tweet before being kicked off the platform, described as “the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” And three months after the fact, a majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie.

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A Large Share Of Republicans Want Trump To Remain Head Of The Party Cnbc Survey Shows

A CNBC survey conducted in the days before former President Donald Trump‘s impeachment trial finds a large share of Republicans want him to remain head of their party, but a majority of Americans want him out of politics.

The CNBC All-America Economic Survey shows 54% of Americans want Trump “to remove himself from politics entirely.” That was the sentiment of 81% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, but only 26% of Republicans.

When it comes to Republicans, 74% want him to stay active in some way, including 48% who want him to remain head of the Republican Party, 11% who want him to start a third party, and 12% who say he should remain active in politics but not as head of any party.

“If we’re talking about Donald Trump’s future, at the moment, the survey shows he still has this strong core support within his own party who really want him to continue to be their leader,” said Jay Campbell, a partner with Hart Research and the Democratic pollster for the survey.

But Micah Roberts, the survey’s Republican pollster, and a partner with Public Opinion Strategies, emphasized the change from when Trump was president. Polls before the election regularly showed Trump with GOP approval ratings around 90%, meaning at least some Republicans have defected from Trump.

Squawk on the Street

Trump Mike Lindell And Why The August Election Conspiracy Should Worry Republicans

In late May, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” and said: “Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August.” He also said that eventually even liberals such as Rachel Maddow would admit that the election was stolen. Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election. Trump and others are watching the Republican-backed audit in Arizona because they believe in a “domino theory” — if Arizona ballots can be proven to be fraudulent, election results in other battleground states that President Joe Biden won can also be overturned.

There is, of course, no legal or factual basis backing up any of this.

Lindell’s bizarre theory is that all Team Trump needs is a shred of proof of election fraud to overturn the entire election.

‘this Was A Scam’: In Recorded Call Trump Pushed Official To Overturn Georgia Vote

It’s worth noting that, even without Georgia, Trump won 13 states where slavery had once been legal and these states provided nearly 70% of his Electoral College votes.

The move to the right, and the focus on the South, have been the route to renewed success for Republicans again and again.

It was there Trump began his big rally strategy nearly six years ago. It was there he would emerge as the clear front-runner for the nomination in 2016 by winning South Carolina’s primary, dominating among the staunchest conservatives in that legendary bastion of Southern independence.

So it seemed more than appropriate that South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham would be the first Republican senator summoned to confer with Trump about the party’s plans after the impeachment trial ended. And appropriate that the meeting took place at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, where Trump has relocated his legal residence and political operation.

If Trump is to rise again, it will once again be as a born-again conservative and an adopted son of the South. And if the next Republican is not Trump, nearly all the top contenders to succeed him are from states with at least one college football team in the Southeastern Conference.

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Trump Blasts Mcconnell And His Leadership In Lengthy Response To Recent Criticism

Where will the party turn in its hour of crisis? If the past is any guide, it will turn in two directions: to the right, and to the South. These have been the wellsprings of strength and support that have brought the party back from the brink in recent decades.

That was the strategy that led to Richard Nixon’s elections as president in 1968 and 1972, and it was still working for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Solidifying the South and energizing conservatives were also crucial factors in the Republican tsunami of 1994, when the GOP surged to majorities in Congress and in statehouses. That hamstrung the remainder of Bill Clinton’s presidency and presaged the election of Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

It was a lesson not lost on Trump. While not even a Republican until late in life, he started his primary campaign billboarding the party’s most conservative positions on taxes, trade, immigration and abortion. And the first of his rallies to draw a crowd in the tens of thousands was in a football stadium in Mobile, Ala., two months after he declared his candidacy in the summer of 2015.

Whether the next standard-bearer for the GOP is Trump himself or someone else, there is little doubt the playbook will be the same.

Low points, then turnarounds

Perhaps the most discouraging of these for the GOP was Johnson’s tidal wave, which carried in the biggest majorities Democrats in Congress had enjoyed since the heyday of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump The Answer Is Simple: Attitude And Gratitude

Scott Jennings | Los Angeles Times

Why do Republicans stick with Donald Trump?

It’s a question I’m asked again and again by Democrats, “Never Trumpers”, and journalists. But the answer is simple. Attitude and Gratitude.

For years, Republican voters wanted someone — anyone — to come along and do two things: Stick it to the Clintons and punch back against the media-Democratic Party alliance that fires on every Republican brave enough to stick a head out of the foxhole.

If you attended any GOP fundraiser or grassroots event between 2000 and 2016 — and I went to hundreds — you heard this sentiment over and over. And over. And over.

The secret sauce is Trump’s continued deliverance of an attitude for which Republicans thirsted for years.

For Republicans, it seemed like those awful Clintons got to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. And they always seemed so smug about it. Many had tried and failed to oppose them. The first Bush and Bob Dole, decent men and dedicated public servants, were steamrolled by the Clintons in ’90s.

Sure, we had George W. Bush after Clinton was termed out, and Obama managed to knock Hillary down a peg in 2008. But she still wound up Secretary of State while Bill traveled the world, racking up speaking fees and foundation tributes that would embarrass Croesus himself. Damn those Clintons.

The natural conclusion of this pent-up anger finally boiled over in 2016!

Have Expressed Reluctance Or Misgivings But Havent Openly Dropped Their Backing

Paul Ryan and John Boehner, the former speakers of the House: Both have expressed their dislike of the president, but have not said whom they will support in November.

John Kelly, a former chief of staff to the president: Mr. Kelly has not said whom he plans to vote for, but did say he wished “we had some additional choices.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: She has said that she’s grappling with whether to support Mr. Trump in November. She told reporters on Capitol Hill in June: “I am struggling with it. I have struggled with it for a long time.”

She said: “I think right now, as we are all struggling to find ways to express the words that need to be expressed appropriately, questions about who I’m going to vote for or not going to vote for, I think, are distracting at the moment. I know people might think that’s a dodge, but I think there are important conversations that we need to have as an American people among ourselves about where we are right now.”

Mark Sanford, a former congressman and governor of South Carolina: Mr. Sanford briefly challenged the president in this cycle’s Republican primary, and said last year that he would support Mr. Trump if the president won the nomination .

That has since changed.

“He’s treading on very thin ice,” Mr. Sanford said in June, worrying that the president is threatening the stability of the country.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Republicans Still Orbiting Trump Dark Star Fail To Derail Bidens First 100 Days

Trump continues to exert a massive gravitational pull on the party while the president forges ahead with ambitious agenda

Last modified on Tue 27 Apr 2021 07.01 BST

For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.

The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem.

The former US president remains the unofficial leader of the party and exerts a massive gravitational pull on its senators, representatives, governors and state parties. Obsessed with “culture wars” and voter fraud, the Trump distortion field has made it difficult for Republicans to move on.

“Trump is like a fire,” said Ed Rogers, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. “Too close and you get burned. Too far away, you’re out in the cold. So the party spends a lot of time talking about the fire, managing the fire, orbiting the fire. It takes a lot of energy out of the party.”

It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t exist

Trump is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for Republicans

‘combative Tribal Angry’: Newt Gingrich Set The Stage For Trump Journalist Says

All these factors combined to produce a windfall for Republicans all over the country in the midterms of 1994, but it was a watershed election in the South. For more than a century after Reconstruction, Democrats had held a majority of the governorships and of the Senate and House seats in the South. Even as the region became accustomed to voting Republican for president, this pattern had held at the statewide and congressional levels.

But in November 1994, in a single day, the majority of Southern governorships, Senate seats and House seats shifted to the Republicans. That majority has held ever since, with more legislative seats and local offices shifting to the GOP as well. The South is now the home base of the Republican Party.

The 2020 aftermath

No wonder that in contesting the results in six swing states he lost, Trump seems to have worked hardest on Georgia. If he had won there, he still would have lost the Electoral College decisively. But as the third most populous Southern state, and the only Southern state to change its choice from 2016, it clearly held special significance.

Arizona Election Official Reacts To ‘check Your Six’ Threat From Republican

There was an exchange Thursday between Fox News’ John Roberts and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady that is remarkably telling about just how lost the Republican Party is at the moment.

Roberts: “President Donald Trump says the ‘Big Lie’ was the results of the 2020 election. Liz Cheney says, no, the ‘Big Lie’ was suggesting that the 2020 election was stolen. Between the two of them, who is right?”Brady: “I’ll leave that dispute to them.”alreadyhe is retiring

In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe!

The Point: Political courage is in short supply among Republican elected officials these days. Very short supply.

Why Has No Trump Ally Faced Consequences For Trying To Overturn An Election

His solution is to insist that he won. To do this, he and his allies have devised an elaborate alternate reality in which he won the election but it was stolen from him through voter fraud.

Similarly, how does a would-be authoritarian retain power after having been ousted from office? Trump figured that one out, too: remain relevant by retaining control over the Republican Party. His election lies are a big part of this strategy, as well. It becomes self-fulfilling. The more people there are who believe the election was stolen, the more real it feels to Trump and the more he hammers the point home in speeches and blog posts.

List Of Republicans Who Opposed The Donald Trump 2020 Presidential Campaign

This article is part of a series about

This is a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed the re-election of incumbent Donald Trump, the 2020 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Among them are former Republicans who left the party in 2016 or later due to their opposition to Trump, those who held office as a Republican, Republicans who endorsed a different candidate, and Republican presidential primary election candidates that announced opposition to Trump as the presumptive nominee. Over 70 former senior Republican national security officials and 61 additional senior officials have also signed onto a statement declaring, “We are profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”

A group of former senior U.S. government officials and conservatives—including from the Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump administrations have formed The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform to, “focus on a return to principles-based governing in the post-Trump era.”

A third group of Republicans, Republican Voters Against Trump was launched in May 2020 has collected over 500 testimonials opposing Donald Trump.

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Such an embrace of insanity creates a cycle in which the Republican Party sheds itself of nonbelievers, finds ways to keep the true believers angry and engaged and unhinges itself even more thoroughly from reality and becomes, arguably, increasingly dangerous. The result is that conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell have somehow become influential, despite their very clear record of belligerent gibberish. And Trump, as he has been for five-plus years now, remains at the center of the Republican Party as it veers deeper into a made-up reality.

On Trump Approval Asking Why Reveals Differences By Education Within Gop

Many pollsters, including our team here at SurveyMonkey, track President Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen to an all-time low. We wanted to delve deeper—to ask respondents not just whether they approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president, but why.

We did this in the simplest way possible: by immediately following our question on presidential approval with the open-ended question “Why?” This way, we can get explanations in respondents’ own words as to how they feel about our current Commander in Chief.

Republican Approvers: “Kept Promises” — Republican Disapprovers: “Childish”

In SurveyMonkey’s most recent Trump approval update, 59% of people said they disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president.

What’s making these Republicans frustrated enough to split with their own party? To find out, we used structural topic modeling to explore how different groups of people explained their various reasons for approving or disapproving of President Trump. Structural topic modeling is a machine learning technique that discovers themes or “topics” within a large collection of responses, then predicts the prevalence of these topics according to certain respondent characteristics .

The graph below presents the differences in prevalence of various topics mentioned in response to our “Why?” follow-up, comparing responses among Republicans by whether they approve or disapprove of Trump’s performance as president .

Most Republicans Still Believe 2020 Election Was Stolen From Trump Poll

May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats

Last modified on Fri 4 Jun 2021 19.39 BST

A majority of Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election and blame his loss to Joe Biden on baseless claims of illegal voting, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.

The 17-19 May national poll found that 53% of Republicans believe Trump, their party’s nominee, is the “true president” now, compared with 3% of Democrats and 25% of all Americans.

About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll. The figures were roughly the same in a poll that ran from 13-17 November which found that 28% of all Americans and 59% of Republicans felt that way.

Biden, a Democrat, won by more than 7m votes. Dozens of courts rejected Trump’s challenges to the results, but Trump and his supporters have persisted in pushing baseless conspiracy theories on conservative news outlets.

US federal and state officials have said repeatedly they have no evidence that votes were compromised or altered during the presidential election, rejecting the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud advanced by Trump and many of his supporters. Voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.

Reuters contributed to this report

Why Does Donald Trump Still Seem To Hold Sway Over The Republican Party

Why — after leading the Republican Party during a period when it lost its majority in the US House of Representatives and the Senate and its power in the White House — does former president Donald Trump still seem to hold the Grand Old Party of Lincoln and Reagan in his thrall?

For US politics watchers, who on the weekend watched on as 43 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of an act of reckless incitement played out in front of the cameras, that is the $64,000 question.

Or rather, it’s the 74,222,593-vote question.

That is the record number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump last November — more than has been cast for any previous president. Unfortunately for them, an even greater number — 81,281,502 — voted for his rival, now-President Joe Biden.

As much as anything else, those numbers sum up the quandary Republicans find themselves in.

They have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, and only remain competitive because older white voters, who tend to be more likely to support conservative candidates, also tend to vote in greater numbers in a non-compulsory electoral system.

Those same voters are also the most likely to cast a ballot in next year’s house and senate primaries, and the next midterm elections in November 2022 — which will again determine who holds power in congress. They are the voters who initially flocked to Donald Trump.

The Night In 1968 When A Nation Watched An American Presidency Crumble

When this fistful of five states defected, it was a stunner. They had resisted Republicans even when the Democrats nominated Northern liberals like Illinois’ Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy , who was not only a New Englander but a Catholic.

Before that they had stuck with the Democrats even in the party’s worst drubbings of the century, although some had left the fold for third-party attractions such as segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who left the Democrats for a time to form the States Rights Party in 1948.

This shift in Southern sensibilities in the 1960s was linked to the national Democrats’ embrace of the civil rights movement, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and then to the creation of Medicare and other “Great Society” programs in 1965.

To be sure, there were other factors buoying what had been the “party of Lincoln” in Dixie, including the arrival of affluent Northern retirees and of industries lured by the lower cost of labor.

But the salient issue was race. As Republican strategist Kevin Phillips expressed it to New York Times reporter James Boyd in 1970: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

“The Southern Strategy”

Why Do Republicans Continue To Support Trump Despite Years Of Scandal

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It was late September last year when a whistleblower complaint revealed that President Trump had tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Within moments the scandal captured headlines. What followed was months of back and forth as Republicans supported the president while the Democrats used their political capital to get him impeached.

But this was not the first time – or the last time – the president was caught in the middle of a scandal. Since the impeachment trial that followed the Ukraine incident, episodes from The New York Times uncovering unsavory details from President Trump’s tax returns, to his questionable dismissal of multiple Inspectors General, to his refusal to clearly condemn white supremacists have all sparked widespread media attention and partisan fighting in 2020.

Although with his polls dropping, some Republicans may finally be distancing themselves from the President, the question has been regularly asked the past four years: why do the Republicans continue to support the President despite these troubling charges being leveled at him? And, what is it that the Democrats stand to gain from repeated allegations?

In addition to demonstrating how polarization accelerates scandals, the paper also found that:

Republicans Fear That Trump Has Set The Party Back By A Generation

Republican leaders and operatives have been expressing concerns recently about the fact that Donald Trump has drive away plenty of talented lawmakers and would-be Republicans because of his behavior. They now fear that his antics have set the Party back a generation, and this has now become a “generation of lost talent” for Republicans. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains why they feel this way and why its a scary thought, even for those who despise the GOP.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Politico in recent weeks has spoken to more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisors, aids, and all sorts of other members of the Republican party, where they have all said the same thing. And that thing is that they’re terrified that Donald Trump has chased away what they call a generation of talent from the Republican Party. Here’s what they’re talking about. During the Trump years, we saw a record number of Republicans, including plenty of younger Republicans who could have had, you know, 10, 20, maybe even more years to keep running for office. Right. They were, they were in their prime. To be honest, Paul Ryan is one of those people, and I’m not saying we want any of those people in office, trust me. But these were people who had no reason to resign other than they understood the toxicity of Donald Trump, didn’t want any part of it. So there’s a lot of lost talent right there.

Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent

The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but he’s driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.

06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what they’re calling the party’s “lost generation.”

In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged — that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they can’t survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — perhaps inadvertently — offered a personal demonstration of the case.

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