This election is a contest between reality and illusions, including the illusion of perpetual fear. Trump's troubles flow from how he speaks into the social media hall of mirrors, but what he's saying is fundamentally true. Don't underestimate how many people prefer illusions.
https://twitter.com/brithume/status/1313818406387355653
As the WSJ put it, "Trump doesn't do nuance." Nuance belongs to the realm of illusion. With enough nuance, the plain meaning of words can be inverted and the truth can be completely obscured. Many Americans are sick to death of getting "nuanced" into ruin.
But many people PREFER illusions - role-playing, virtue signaling, social media freakouts. Cancel culture flows from children achieving illusory "victories" by silencing people they hate, without changing a damn thing about the great social issues they claim to care about.
There's never been a campaign more illusory than Joe Biden's. The candidate himself is a placeholder who occasionally emerges from hiding to deliver the same hollow speeches he's been giving for half a century. He plagiarized someone else's biography.
On the issue killing Trump's re-election campaign, the coronavirus, Biden has nothing different to offer except vague assertions that he would have encouraged more people to wear masks - which are a largely illusory defense against the very real coronavirus.
And of course, Trump is stuck with being the guy who was in charge during a hideous calamity. It's easy for any challenger to claim he would have done so much better and saved thousands of lives. Those claims will never be tested.
But here comes that appetite for illusion, which should not be underestimated. People want to believe that magic masks can kill the coronavirus. Their belief has been reinforced by months of media mask mania. It's easy to sell people a fantasy they desperately want to believe.
People want complicated and intractable problems to be simplified. That's why socialism still has so many believers after decades of failure and corruption. People want to believe that super-smart and honest elites just need to spend a few billion more to fix society's problems.
People would rather become invested in fantasy problems with improbable solutions than grapple with real problems that don't have easy answers. They crave the quick rush of "victory" over never-ending battles for truth, justice, and the American way.
They like the fantasy sold by the Left that you just say the correct things, sign a petition, join a social media swarm, vote the right way, applaud another billion-dollar program, and BOOM! Victory! We cared a little more today, and if we care enough, problems will disappear!
Trump is in trouble largely because of what he says in the world of illusions, especially that most feral of dreamlands, the social media bubble. What he's actually done, or would do if re-elected, have faded to secondary issues, much of it forgotten because it was pre-pandemic.
But he's absolutely, scientifically correct when he talks about the importance of dealing with Covid as a long-term problem that can't be allowed to destroy our way of life. He's objectively far, far superior to Biden (or Harris, the real candidate) for economic recovery.
The reality of Democrat governance is crime, riots in the streets, politicized violence, thuggery, endless hatred cultivated for political power, unicorn-fart spending plans that do little but enrich big Democrat donors at the expense of hard-working Americans.
The reality of the permanent political class - Dem-dominated for decades, but including quite a few Republicans - is the hideous corruption of the Russia collusion hoax, the outrageous refusal to peacefully transfer power in 2017, weaponized government protecting elite interests.
Trump has to do a better job of reframing the election as not just an up-down referendum on the last year of his first term, vs. the most generic Democrat ever. He has to get people focused on reality instead of illusions and "nuance." This should be the Down to Earth election.
It's always been hard to beat the Left by arguing about promises, predictions, and storylines. The Left loses when you focus on the actual outcomes of its policies, what's really happening on the street, how much force they must use against innocent people to get what they want.
And of course it's hard to fight in the realm of illusions when the media is completely aligned behind the Democrats - and in this case, motivated even more by their seething hatred of the Republican. You can't play on a field where the "referees" openly work for the other team.
Trump's big success came from shattering the illusions of the permanent political class, defying conventional wisdom, working openly for America's interests against a foolish globalist "consensus." He has economic and foreign policy achievements they said were impossible.
That's what people should be invited to vote for. Real problems are messy and complicated, but real achievements ARE possible. Lofty goals can be realized, but only by working hard down on Earth. Most of what the political class believes is untrue, AND THEY KNOW IT.
Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. That's the political class in a nutshell, as exemplified by Joe Biden, the 50-year veteran of mediocrity whose ideas will finally work THIS TIME, just give him another few trillion bucks and you'll see.
Trump's first term highlights were all about breaking the loop of insanity, the dead end of consensus and endless failure, rattling cages that held mummified political parrots. For all his wild rhetorical misadventures, he's the candidate of sanity, and should run as such. /end
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