A Quote by Bret Stephens
The more Mr. Trump traduces the old established lines of decency, the more he affirms his supporters' most shameless ideological instincts.
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Looking back, Mr. Trump's exploitation of the term 'fake news' to smear journalists was the single most consequential thing he did during the transition period. He built the scaffolding for his supporters to reject any and all information that wasn't Trump-approved.
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Where all the people who used to say they were unbiased and uninterested in the outcome, all of that's off the table and we're up against some of the most vicious partisans everywhere we look, and Trump is the answer. That's why [Donald] Trump supporters are not abandoning him. That's why the left can't force his supporters away. That's exactly why they haven't been able to put him away so far, because Trump answers that question: "What can we do?"
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There are basic lines of human decency, norms to which society generally agrees and to which we adhere, and we continue to see the Trump presidency eroding these lines.
The agricultural co-operative movement has been a severe ideological and political struggle from the very beginning. No cooperative can be established without going through such a struggle. Before a brand-new social system can be built on the site of the old, the site must be swept clean. Invariably, remnants of old ideas reflecting the old system remain in people's minds for a long time, and they do not easily give way. After a co-operative is established, it must go through many more struggles before it can be consolidated. Even then, the moment it relaxes its efforts it may collapse.
I don't think the entire universe outside of Trump and his supporters has any way of understanding how many Trump supporters thought, and maybe still do think a little, that we're on the verge of losing the United States of America forever. And that is a big deal.
As people buy less and less records, it's become more and more important for me to spend more and more on them - to lavish that much more attention on them. The Bad Seeds were always quite protective and old school, but Grinderman has opened us up to do anything and be shameless. We're not so precious about it.
Everybody dealing with Trump is making the big mistake of trying to plug Trump into the age-old political handbook. Trump's not part of that. You don't deal with Trump in the standard, political handbook way on policy and issues and things like that. That's not the way to separate Trump supporters from Trump. It isn't gonna work.
Donald Trump has spent his entire campaign offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.
If anti-Trump activists in journalism and politics want to put out stories that actually change Trump supporters' opinions, they will have to begin to understand what Trump supporters' opinions are.
The energy behind Mr. Trump is just off the charts. This is a rank and file movement that you're seeing, with massive turnouts from New Hampshire down to Mississippi, Alabama. I mean, his supporters are representative of the entire country.
George McGovern and his supporters committed what, in a two-party system, are capital crimes: they did not compromise, they took hard ideological positions, they alienated a large portion of their party's traditional supporters, and they lost - very, very badly.
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