Thread by @bgmasters

I hope @realDonaldTrump wins reelection.

1. Here are some thoughts on why, what Trump is up against, and why I think it’s very bad for our country if he loses. A thread...

2. Joe Biden’s career has perfectly coincided with our country's decline. Sometimes he was an architect of decline, sometimes just a bystander. Today it's not clear he's any more than a prop, for an utterly failed establishment.

3. Four years ago, Trump arrested that decline with something very new. His election was the first thing that woke the zombies up. The 2016 win resonated for elites far more than the twin crises that preceded it: the financial crisis and series of endless wars abroad.

4. Almost every elite tried to delegitimize Trump from day 1. They screamed for years about Russia, Russia, Russia. Now that's all been proven false, and the crazy folks have moved on to chant other slogans, they pretend he's a "white supremacist" & lie their way back to power.

5. Perhaps you've noticed: the tactic of the media is a constant alternation between amnesia and serial bouts of monomaniacal hysteria. The intended result is the replacement of thinking with outrage.

6. Remember supposed Russian bounties on US troops? The NYT reported this in June, it was a weeks long media freakout. Anonymously sourced, never corroborated, now it has faded from memory. But the derangement lingers.

7. Compare that media outrage to the quiet and forgetfulness that quickly buried the WaPo's Dec 2019 bombshell release of literally decades of secret memos about the failed war in Afghanistan. One day news story. Do you remember it?

8. The pattern is clear: momentary outrages overwhelm long-term chronic failures -- and that is how the people responsible for failure like it.

9. The natural outlook of power is to see itself as timeless and lasting forever. Media hysteria works well for the powerful because it locks everyone else into an eternal present.

10. We end up ignoring the decisions that have caused deep damage over time (like the military's deluded approach to Afghanistan). Instead we cycle through an endless series of occasions for intense momentary outrage.

11. The eternal present of media outrage betrays deep support for the eternal present of a stagnant leadership class that is never held responsible for its mistakes. This fake elite doesn't feel responsible for the future of America, merely to the perpetuation of the present.

12. But the future is coming, whether or not we try to ignore it. We can act to shape that future, or merely wait until it crashes down upon us.

13. That vital impulse is what Trump represents. An end to an elite bureaucratic order that seeks to ban dissent. That vows to never again make the mistake of allowing a free people to make a free choice. But you can still choose a vital future instead of certain decline. Vote!