If you tell the public you don’t care about a president enlisting foreign aid to undermine an American election, do you think anything less will somehow matter? Hunter Biden? Hillary Clinton’s emails? Hey, Republicans, nobody cares. Nobody, anyway, except the people who already watch Fox News and are all-in on your politics of grievance, outrage, and resentment.
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If a nominee dodges questions about foundational concepts, there’s simply no basis for senators to make an informed decision about a nomination beyond blind partisanship — which is what they tend to use anyway. … Barrett’s evasiveness (which, to be fair, has been practiced by other nominees, as well) is the confirmation hearing’s version of “taking the Fifth.”
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Trump’s immovable “base” isn’t loyal to him so much as they’re desperately loyal to the idea of a vanishing white-majority nation. He’s made himself a symbol of that by pandering to white supremacists and defending Confederate symbols, so they’ve latched onto him as a potential savior. But the fact is that, despite their panicked fervor, they’ve never pushed Trump’s popularity into majority territory.
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So many things about the world today seem nonsensical. They seem antithetical to what I thought I’d figured out about the human nature. It turns out I don’t know as much as I think I did, which is too bad, because the stuff I thought I knew was a lot more encouraging than what I’m finding out. Here’s what I don’t understand.
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Why did Trump believe it was a good idea to drop out of the second debate? Because he believed it was a good idea to drop out of the second debate. It’s as simple as that. There’s no master strategy, no art of the deal, no nothing going on behind the scenes. It, and virtually every other action Trump takes, is the product of circular reasoning by a mind caught in the endless loop of its own self-delusion.
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Going into the debate, the election was a referendum on Trump, and nothing about the debate changed that — nor could it have, no matter what happened. The thing that saved Pence was that this was a vice-presidential debate, and those almost never matter. It won’t this time, either, which is a good thing for Pence, because he lost. Bigly.
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