2 weeks Ago By NIRMALYA DUTTA
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus argued that there was only one fundamental question: suicide. The handsome mug declared, “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” All other problems – whether the world is multi-dimensional, whether the MCU can improve after Robert Downey Jr returns, or if Scotch actually improves with a little water – are less important.
He was obviously wrong because the real question – at least according to Democratic pundits, whose joy has left them: How could Donald Trump win so comprehensively? How did this orange-headed monster return to the White House, despite comedians like Stephen Colbert , Jamie Oliver, and Whoopi Goldberg assuring Americans that he was evil incarnate? How did he do a Return of the Jedi despite the sombre warnings of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Rachel Maddow? How did he beat a Democratic Party so flush with funds that they made Mammon look frugal, and one armed with Chomsky’s five filters of propaganda? This included mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, top sports stars, and the who's who of US elites. Now, if you are one of those whose joy has left them, let us explain why Americans love Donald Trump despite the rhetoric he has faced. More than 75 million Americans voted for Trump, helping him become the first Republican since George W Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote.
Tyler Durden meets Gina Linetti In an era of stifled speech, where the Republicans of today sound like Democrats of the 90s, and the Democrats of today sound like the queer version of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, Trump appeared as the Chosen One to bring balance to the cultural wars, the man chosen to red-pill America. Donald Trump is the amalgamation of id, ego, and superego, the horse, charioteer, and charioteer’s dad rolled into one. He is Gina Linetti meets Tyler Durden , beyond filters that apply to normal mortals.
Take his victory speech. This was no requiem for a dream or the audacity of hope; this was an everyman, thrilled after getting a promotion. Most people sound fake when they thank their friends, but Trump doesn’t.
Consider how he gushed over Elon Musk , like a proud father whose autistic son has changed the world. But what truly set Trump apart in that speech was his query about paint: why did the rocket look so beautiful going up and so horrible coming down? Ordinary leaders would never ask that question. Vain ones would rather plant a question about quantum computing and explain it wrongly, but Trump appeared simply curious.
Trump is like the Shakespearean fool who can get away with saying the most outrageous things. He can discuss cocaine on a podcast during a presidential run. Or explain his desire to be a whale psychiatrist.
Or how his Indian counterpart was a loving guy who could become a "total killer" if his country was threatened. His campaign is basically what a 14-year-old loves doing: riding a garbage truck , working behind the scenes at McDonald’s , swaying to music at a rally instead of giving a speech, or even spending a chunk of his speech discussing a dead golfer’s junk. Legendary POTUS When he was POTUS, his antics were legendary, like the time he wanted to call up his old friend (and late Japan PM) Shinzo Abe, but someone had to explain the concept of time zones.
Or when he joked about Mike Pence hating “gays” and wanting to hang them all. He has no filter at all, as evidenced by the time he met Kim Jong-un and begged the cameraman to “make them look thin.” He kept the peace by angry tweeting, once memorably telling Kim Jong-un that he had a bigger nuclear button and it worked better.
His speech announcing the death of Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi was the funniest a leader of the free world has ever sounded, particularly when juxtaposed with Barack Obama’s speech announcing the neutralisation of Osama Bin Laden. Money and Peace When Trump left the White House, the sentiment was that adults were back in charge and the world could breathe again. But America’s aggressors actually became bolder, whether it was Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea.
All said and done, Donald Trump’s unpredictability made it impossible for America’s enemies or allies to predict what was going to happen. As it was for foreign policy experts, who are condemned to write about a sport they can’t watch. Under Trump, the economy was booming, and the world was more peaceful, and it’s an American truth that irrespective of the President’s behaviour or peccadilloes, as long as the economy is booming and their lives are peaceful, Americans are happy.
'I get knocked down but...
' Trump faced the full brunt of the American establishment after he left office. He was de-platformed from social media and hounded with numerous cases, but his ability to bounce back could be straight out of a Chumbawamba song. Trump turned the numerous cases against him into a symbol of sympathy and rebellion, even turning his mugshot into memorabilia.
Trump’s “Fight. Fight. Fight” image was one of the most iconic in American history, and it was the moment that even hardcore non-Trumpians wondered if he was God’s Chosen Warrior.
In his own indescribable style, he later pointed out that most people needed to die to give such an iconic image, but not him. The ongoing kulturkampf, with the woke peak in 2022, had also reached an inflection point, and Trump became the natural champion of all anti-woke groups, the king of Red Pills. As YC Recombination co-founder Paul Graham had predicted, the woke movement would die out in 2024.
For most Americans, sex isn't a spectrum and it's a no-brainer that men shouldn't participate in women's sports or grown men shouldn't use the bathroom with little girls. Regular people don't think that pronouns are more important than actual issues, something even the Dems caught on as Harris quickly dropped her pronouns and started talking about her Glock instead. Make Coalitions Great Again Trump also assembled the greatest coalition ever to vote for a Republican candidate.
Elon Musk made it normal for Silicon Valley tech bros to back him, and he even picked a tech bro as his VP and managed to make major inroads with Silicon Valley that always leaned towards Dems. He managed to get the pro-Israel vote by pointing out that Biden-Harris couldn’t bring peace to the Middle East, and the Arab-American Muslim vote by saying he was the peace candidate who could actually stop the war. He got Hindu voters by speaking against California’s caste bill or the condemning the attack on Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, and to improve relations with Modi.
He made massive inroads with Latino and Hispanic voters fed up with Dems taking them for granted, and even Puerto Ricans who didn’t listen to AOC and JLo telling them Trump was racist because a roast comedian made a stupid joke. He got the undecided male vote with a podcast strategy crafted by Barron. As one joke went: in 2020, Republican campaign managers told Trump he needed to get suburban moms.
His sons pointed out that it was their sons he needed to target. More surprisingly to Democratic watchers, Trump even got Black voters, who didn’t seem enthused by Harris’ strategy of wooing them with recreational marijuana, crypto, and vacillating accents. Most astonishingly, he got the Amish vote, a super-religious Christian group that doesn’t believe in using modern amenities and doesn’t even drive but was driven to vote by a young gay man called Scott Presler after Pennsylvania authorities raided an Amish raw milk farm.
Elon Musk even figured out how to get them there because, while they are barred from driving, the Amish can sit in vans. Team Trump A lot of folks also voted for his team, which had been drained of neocons. In Musk, he had one of the smartest men to ever live, who just pulled off the greatest coup with just $44 billion.
In JD Vance, he had the most articulate orator in America, not defined by his party’s orthodoxy, like Bill Clinton. In RFK Jr, he had a Jungian archetype who was the hero of the anti-vaxxers and also Kennedy royalty. In Gabbard, a former Democrat who could point out her own party’s excesses.
And finally, he had Vivek Ramaswamy, the master of making a point without belittling his opponent, whose religion and skin colour repudiated the white supremacy tag. All in all, it was the grandest coalition of voters that a Republican has ever assembled, including some folks who just voted for Trump to see what he would do, a group Bill Maher called the “Let’s get the cat high” vote. Read: Meet the MAGAvengers Perhaps Trump’s messaging to all can be summed up by the last campaign MAGA ran, which read: “Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them.
” While narrow-minded Democrats took that to mean transphobia, it was a message that Trump cared about the economy while Democrats cared about what pronouns you used. The combination of these things brought Trump back to the White House, but perhaps the best way to describe it is through an Eminem song released at the start of the millennium. Of course, it’s a sad reality that the oratorical rebel is now a cog in the Democratic establishment, where he watches idly as Barack Obama murders his lyrics instead of rapping them.
Eminem sang in The Real Slim Shady: “...
there's a million of us just like me. Who cuss like me, who just don't give a f*** like me. Who dress like me, walk, talk, and act like me.
..” He goes on to sing, “I'm like a head trip to listen to.
.. 'Cause I'm only givin' you things you joke about with your friends inside your livin' room.
.. The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y'all.
.. And I don't gotta be false or sugarcoat it at all.
.. I just get on the mic and spit it.
.. And whether you like to admit it (Err), I just shit it.
” For millions of Americans, that was true of Donald J Trump, who dressed, walked, and talked like them, or at least an imaginary sel-actualised version of themselves. That’s the simple truth, and if Democrats can’t figure it out, they will be condemned, like Sisyphus, to keep rolling the proverbial rock up a hill. And we don’t imagine they will be happy.
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