The early 2000s Republicans are the same people as 2025 Republicans.
Some of them changed their beliefs. They moved right - or were moved right by an incredibly effective decades-long propaganda campaign.
And some of them didn’t change their beliefs at all - they’re simply more emboldened to express beliefs that weren’t acceptable twenty years ago.
Give it twenty more years and Democrats will be where Republicans are now.
I’m a big fan of IRL, personally.
… Britney. Britney.
Christ, that meme’s old enough to drop bombs on Yemen.
Sounds like an excuse.
What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.
I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.
Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.
The Republican and Democratic establishments are very much the same.
Trump - and his Heritage Foundation minders - isn’t business as usual.
The Rs and Ds both opposed tariffs and supported free market capitalism. Trump demanded tariffs because he’s a boomer, and he wants to go back to his childhood when the economy was based on manufacturing and coal mining.
The Rs and Ds both gave lip service to free speech. Trump has sued universities for allowing protests, deported students for writing op-eds, and is appointing political commissars to monitor major news networks and veto dissent.
The Rs and Ds both believed that unbiased economic data was important, even if they wanted different economic policies. Trump fires people for reporting data he doesn’t like.
The Rs and Ds both believed that soft power was as valuable as hard power, and that USAID and PEPFAR and so on were important, not just on humanitarian grounds, but in building support for the United States around the world. Trump and Musk think soft power is for wimps and are viscerally disgusted by helping black people.
Frankly, if there is any genuine distinction right now between the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment, it’s because Trump bullied the Republicans into it. And if this country survives it’ll be interesting - albeit horrifying - to see if the Rs go back to business as usual or continue their slide into an anarcho-capitalist theocracy.