"My party"... I am registered "Non Affiliated" ("Independent" is an actual political party in Oregon). Sure, my world view is right of center but the only person/entity that agrees 100% of the time with me is me and I'm not running.Unit2Sucks said:Yes, I'm talking about Trump, the leader of the Republican party who will be the GOP nominee in 2024. Same guy. He is likely to run unopposed for the GOP nomination and we're already seeing potential adversaries withdrawing like Tom Cotton.tequila4kapp said:
Are you talking about Trump?
My views there are likely not as you suspect. I happen to agree with some / many of the America 1st agenda. Not all of it. But I am very worn down by the divisiveness. Trump is personally a tool. And IMO democrats have largely responded by showing their more ugly sides in return. They could have taken the high road, instead they get in the gutter with him. I'm tired of it all and want something better. (see the recent pot shot at DeSantis. You D's may not like DeSantis but for regular conservative types he's solid, certainly not deserving of in-family pot shots. And Trump is going to attack him? ***? I'm done with that version of politics).
I think Trump was right for 2016 but his window has closed. If he is losing people like me who are actually receptive to some amount of his policy stuff then...see window closing. My hunch today is he only gets elected if things continue to suck (IMO) with the economy AND D's nominate someone that really motivates R's. I currently see Biden as more of a guy who is too far to the left of the country and who is fighting dementia, not someone that people viscerally hate like HRC and Trump.
Also, I live in Oregon. My Presidential vote doesn't matter. Our ECs are going to the D candidate no matter what.
As for being disappointed by the D's not taking the high road, we have all seen how Obama's high road failed. You can't fight insurgents with traditional warfare, we learned that lesson in Vietnam and elsewhere. Trump has realigned the battlefield in American politics and is the only Republican that matters. You might think DeSantis is a "regular conservative type" but he's really just a very slightly cleaned up version of Trump, He apes everything Trump does and spends most of his time as governor of Florida engaging in white grievance / culture war stunts. Let's not pretend like he is some old fashioned conservative type. If you want to talk about someone like Kasick or Larry Hogan or DeWine, then that's a completely different story. But there are very obvious reasons why people like that have no national platform and zero pull within the GOP. Your party has been completely overtaken by the crazies and it's caused ripple effects throughout the political landscape.
As for Trump's "agenda" I think we can dispense with pretending there is one. The GOP had an actual party platform in 2016 which Trump largely ignored (apart from literally forcing them to take out the anti-Russia elements) and in 20202 they removed the platform entirely. There still isn't a Republican policy platform because the party has realized that its base doesn't care about policy. There is no agenda - there is grievance / culture war nonsense. This works great for GOP politicians because they've never really had answers for anything and now they can focus on whinging about things that they have no intention of changing. Once in a while they'll make something up - like Trump saying he would like to execute all drug dealers without due process - because that's red meat for the base, but by and large the GOP is just here to ask questions, not to generate policy positions and execute on them.
Speaking of which, Trump's infrastructure week should be any day now and I hear the GOP is about 2 weeks away from announcing their amazing Obamacare replacement.
Re Republican platform, I agree with a lot of what you say. What does it mean to be a Republican anymore? Take away abortion and maybe being opposed to judicial activism and I don't know. It certainly isn't the party of Reagan. I tend to think many of Trump's policies align to 1950s-1960's Democrats; it certainly isn't traditional Repub dogma to be opposed to free trade, to flirt with Isolationism, etc. Anyway, I see the Republican party as being in the midst of an identity crisis. Who's going to win, the establishment people with no core beliefs other than winning elections or the Loon with some core political beliefs but who's primary interest is taking care of himself?
At the same time, I would say the same thing about D's. The party has moved massively to the left. On social issues it was only 14 years ago that Candidate Obama was opposed to gay marriage. Now we have drag shows being performed in elementary schools. Economically, the socialist Bernie Sanders wing has had a massive influence. There is exactly 1 prominent D in the entire country who is pro-life. This isn't the part of Kennedy or even Bill Clinton any longer.
One of the two parties is going to wise up and realize they can dominate if they just take a nominal move to the middle, where the Independents live. Or they can keep playing to people on both sides who drink the koolaid and believe their side is perfect and the other side is evil. Some of those people spend a lot of time on this board.