If you go back and read carefully, I suggested going directly to the source because we live in an age of unprecedented direct access, and it is no longer necessary to have same-side "explainers" about what the other side thinks and says.
To hear what Team Blue thinks, I'd recommend Team Red simply read the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Time Magazine, et. al. Or watch CNN, MSNBC, BBC America, network news... Even Wikipedia.
My reading directly from the voters is that they feel Democrats are out of touch, pandering only to a very limited set of elites with very specific, weird values who are dangerously authoritarian, dogmatic and powerful. They feel that Democrats have contempt for the poor, working and middle classes, but mask this contempt by dismissing any policy debate or disagreement as racist or transphobic. They feel that Democratic partisans have a firm grip on mainstream media, academic institutions, and much of government, and a demonstrated willingness to promote lies through those institutions, so Team Red views any pronouncements from those sources as deeply untrustworthy when not outright false. They see the rioting as madness, and believe that continuing down the path set by Democrats as bringing more of the same. Whenever they try to have Team Blue effectively address these concerns, their feedback is only "Wow! Racist much? Take your Russian asset ass out of here, dinosaur. Adults are talking." That's not really much of an exaggeration, by the way. Trump, again, according to them, is an underdog in that fight, but will at least try to restore order.
That's my take on what they're collectively saying and why Trump won. Yours might be different. Like I said, go to the sources. But, when I compare the way Team Red and Team Blue we're talking about issues, it did not surprise me that Team Red won this round. Team Blue needs to become less hysterical and bullying to win next round. My personal hope is that Team Blue will listen, reflect and reform, but I've been hoping for that for several cycles now. They'll probably just wait until Team Red overreaches, as each side always does.
It is also a theory which (very wrongly) presumes that no member of minority groups voted for Trump.
Consider Starr County, Texas – at 97% Hispanic/Latino, it is the most Hispanic county in the 50 states. In 2016, Clinton won it 79.1% to Trump's 19%; in 2020, Clinton won it 52.1% to Trump's 47.1%; in 2024, Trump won 57.7%, ending a 132 year streak of Democrats winning it in Presidential elections.
https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2024/11/06/starr-county-flip...
One has to think that this palimpsest property of his speech, be it intentional or accidental, is key to his appeal. Every listener to parse the message they want to hear out of his language.
Not all. No need to be careful or generous. A very straightforward, plain reading of his statement makes it clear he explicitly excluded the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, because he explicitly did so in the same speech, practically in the same breath: "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally." He said it that clearly, but you cannot find a clip which includes that quote from NYT nor WP nor CNN nor from any outlet to whom Team Blue is likely to listen.
... which illustrates my main point. A helpful answer to the question of why anyone would vote for Trump will simply not be found in Blue sources. Blue sources will only impart a conceptual model of Trump's victory that is frightening and the opposite of helpful.
> One has to think that this palimpsest property of his speech...
Support Trump or not, most of the controversies regarding his speech are similar deliberate misreading of his intent by people we had hitherto entrusted with the curation of facts to be used in our national dialogue.
The left did not hear or read the condemnation at all, as we have established. Rather, they continue to be presented with curated sounds bites crafted to bolster a very particular narrative.
It really will serve you to listen carefully to what your fellow Americans, including your President, are actually saying. You don't have to agree, but you will have a better idea of what's happening. It will not serve you to consume third-hand think-pieces discussing what they really meant by that "dogwhistle".
What are we talking about here? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im...
Trump is a fascist at his core, a textbook one.
> "So I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice’," Trump wrote in a message posted Saturday to his Truth Social account. "He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went CRAZY!"
His explanation is not printed at the beginning. It is printed near the end, only after quoting 10 people who disapproved of the meeting, plus an extensive catalogue of Ye's and Fuente's moral failings. The article relies on emotionalism to craft a specific view. They even capitalize CRAZY, which makes the explanation sound less plausible.
Trump may indeed be a "textbook fascist" whatever that means, but this article does not grant its audience the intelligence to work that out for themselves. Rather, to accept the article without skepticism requires one to believe that Trump is a white supremacist anti-Semite. That will be much easier to do if one has been primed by similar low-quality articles to believe it.
Ye has been a friend to Trump and is clearly disturbed. He brought people along with whom Trump was not familiar, yet the article makes it sound as if he deliberately invited them to attend some kind of sinister summit. The idea that a Latino and Black man would be welcome in white supremacist circles is absurd.
Trump has been the most pro-Israel President in history, and has a Jewish son-in-law - one of his closest advisors - and grandchildren. He is not an anti-Semite, so the article's attempt to tar him with that brush is silly.
Just walk through each article about Trump with the skeptical view that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you will see that most such articles - even from formerly well-respected journals like NYT and WaPo - rely on emotionalism to convey an impression about Trump. The only evidence that Trump is a dangerous fascist is of similar low quality. Like the evidence for alien visitation: lots of evidence, but all of it very low-quality rumors, innuendo and wishful thinking.
The question of whether Trump is a good President is a separate matter. He may be petty, vindictive, selfish. On the other hand, he invited a friend for counseling at great political risk to himself. He's also the only President in my lifetime who did not start a new war. So, a mixed bag, like all the others. The extreme hysteria around Trump actually prevents people like me from evaluating Trump on his actual merits. Every article only highlights the negative of anything Trump does, which is as unhelpful as highlighting only the positive.
But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise. I think the unhinged reactions to Trump are far more dangerous to our country, to be honest. We allowed the FBI to suppress a news story last election that would have been bad for Biden. That's terrifying.
The matter of concern here (completely independent of the article) is that he doesn't seem to mind inviting such characters into his house.
But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise.
The concern is that he unmistakably flirts with fascist rhetoric and techniques of psychological manipulation.
The unhinged reactions to Trump
"Unhinged" is what we can call several of his recent cabinet nominations.
And he's just getting started.
There is no coherent standard by which both Trump did not start a war and every other recent President has. This is just a “say something often enough and people begin to accept it as true” thing.
> The extreme hysteria around Trump actually prevents people like me from evaluating Trump on his actual merits.
You seem to have a very firm opinion of him on the merits, which is inconsistent with believing that you have been prevented from that.
> Every article only highlights the negative of anything Trump doe Where'd you get the idea that he is the only President in your life not to start a war then? The truth is that there are plenty of outlets pushing neutral and positive Trump outlets, and even actively suppressing stories that might hurt Trump (less so now than immediately before the election, as a whole bunch stopped such suppression when it no longer served to influence the election), and “every article highlights only the negative” is a lie.
> But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise
He openly has proposed personal-loyalty-based purges of the military officer corps and thr civilian civil service, deploying the military domestically in a deportation operation he explicitly modeled on the notoriously racisr, due process denying, legal injigrant and citizen expelling Operation Wetback of the 1950s (which itself, unlike Trumps overt olan, stopped short of using the military), massively scaled up, and has proposed solving urban homelessness by forcibly relocating the homeless to concentration camps.
And lets not get started on Musk, D.O.G.E., and fascist corporatism.
(But I, too, think Trump is not exactly a fascist, he’s a kleptocrat hiding behind fascism. But the functional difference between that and an actual fascist is likely to be minor.)
> If your own political conviction influence your works as a professor, then you're perhaps not that great a professor
Indeed. This is a major ongoing crisis in academe. And journalism.
As a self check, if you think that Trump's "very fine people on both sides" remark referred to white supremacists as "very fine people", then you need to upgrade your sources. Find the extended original video. It is hard to do! If you give up, let me know and I will send you a link. The search is instructive, however.