A big part of Bernie's appeal is that he's not a Democrat, or at least not "Establishment."

An awful lot of people don’t like either party.

Prior to 2016, I remember people making jokes about America being “under the Bush and Clinton dynasties.” That was when it seemed likely that Hillary would be facing Jeb! in the 2016 presidential election.

Well, Republican voters rebelled against their Establishment in the primaries by supporting Trump, who openly mocked the Bushes and talked about how stupid and horrible Dubya’s Presidency was—and a lot of Republican voters absolutely loved him for it. That and the fact that he was “not a politician”, at least not in the conventional sense. In this regard Trump’s complete lack of prior experience in government at any level was an asset.

After all, Republicans love nominating businessmen, like Dubya or Romney, and they love a celebrity, like Reagan. Trump is both businessman and celebrity, and he’s not afraid to be a contemptuous asshole to the people who Republicans hate. He’s a classic “populist” in that way.

Moreover, the seeming contradiction of a billionaire trust funder having the support of many working class voters isn’t so mysterious when you consider how this is America, the land of business hucksters and get-rich quick schemes and the Prosperity Gospel, etc. And the Trump family history in America—from Frederich and Elizabeth Christ Trump to Fred and then Donald—has demonstrated just how successful that kind of vulgar, predatory capitalism (buying up a lot of real estate, licensing the family name to be used by other developers, reality television, and of course, cheating the government out of untold amounts in tax revenue) can be in this country. Support Trump, and maybe, just maybe, you too will be very rich.

But that works for Trump and the Republican Party. Democrats are different. So while Bernie’s form of principled left-wing populism is popular among a significant chunk of the Democratic base, it clearly isn’t the level of support that can win the party’s nomination for president, at least if 2016 and 2020 are any guide. We’ll see if someone else (who’d have to be considerably younger than the octogenarian Sanders) will take up his baton and actually win the nomination in 2028.

For Trump, everything is zero-sum.

Trump’s view is that the “killers” win and have others pay them tribute, while only “suckers and losers” pay—whether it be paying off a loan or paying taxes—and/or allow themselves to be “ripped off” by foreign countries (free trade deals, international alliances) or foreigners in general (immigrants), and so it’s better to be a “killer” like Roy Cohn, Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, Jair Bolsonaro, or indeed, Donald’s father Fred Trump.

Better to be a grifter than a sucker—that’s the narcissistic, sociopathic, zero-sum mentality of people like Trump. And if George W. Bush was Mr. “Us vs. Them”, Donald Trump is Mr. “ME vs. Them (read: everyone else).”

It seems to me the Trump-Vance strategy is to get massive turnout of "the five Cs"

Cultists, Crazies, Conspiracists, Creeps, and Christofascists.

But I’m not convinced that’ll be enough for them to win. They’re a bunch of WEIRD, sick fucks and most Americans—most voters, and most people in general—are repulsed by this “very online” Nazi or Nazi-adjacent shit.

They don’t even realize how weird, creepy, and off-putting they are, because they only talk to each other. Guys like Vance, Musk, Don Jr., and the mush-brained 78-year old asshole himself are so up their own asses, high on their own supply of fascist memes and far-right conspiracy theories…they’ve all but completely lost touch with reality.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re every bit as dangerous as they’ve always been, and we should never underestimate the threat they pose, but man…they just seem increasingly pathetic on a number of levels, especially since Democrats have been reenergized and got on the counter-attack w/Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The GOP really don’t know how to deal with them, so they’re just doubling down on being gross, creepy, and WEIRD far-right extremist bigots—how unoriginal.

We really can beat them.

The media would not have focused on the cookware if it had been any previous VP.

That’s for damn sure.

This is not about one person or another. Unlike the other side, we are not cultists.

We are better than that. We value our democracy and our country too much to be that way. Joe knows this…and so does Kamala. I have great respect and admiration for both.

Now, let’s get on with it and defeat that wannabe fascist cult!

There's no love in that family. Fred Trump made sure of it.

Donald takes after his father, and Melania is just as bad in many ways.

And the Trump children—at least, the three eldest—are just pathetic little brats competing for their father’s favor. They’re not competing for his love, because again, there’s no love in the Trump family.

Putin and his pals certainly seem to believe that the West is out to get them and Ukraine is part of a larger struggle

It seems they’ve come to believe their own propaganda. That’s not good…

The right-wing media infrastructure is so much more established and better funded

than anything on the left.

Also liberals, progressives, left-wingers, moderates, and anti-Trump conservatives are all to one extent or another on the same side, but there are so many divisions and sharp disagreements that make it very hard for people to come together. Meanwhile Trump has his cult of personality and slavish right-wing base who will walk over glass to vote for him, along with plenty of big money supporting him and other Republicans

It’s not a fair fight.

The Republicans who control all these state governments have the power to improve the lives of so many people.

Yet they choose exactly the opposite—hatred, greed, bigotry, cruelty, malice, spite.

What the fuck? Have they no shame or sense of decency? (of course they don’t, their leader is Donald Trump, aka Roy Cohn’s disciple—McCarthy might have been shamed by censure and being discredited, but shame was certainly a foreign word for Cohn, as it is for Trump.)

These fucking assholes!

Mehdi Hasan calls out media's false equivalence re: the Culture War.