By Hal Brown
Read my related Mar. 15 blog here.
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My version |
I read this in Salon...
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The real image |
... and I thought that the article could just as easily be referring to both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. You can see how I changed the illustration.
Just about everything that Amanda Marcotte writes in her article about Jim Jordan and Tucker Carlson, with some modification, could describe what might happen with Trump and DeSantis.
Jumping the shark (
see Wikipedia) of course originated with an episode of the popular TV show "Happy Days" where Fonzie was on water skis and jumped over a shark. After that the popularity of the series gradually declined but the term has expanded to mean a stunt meant to be a wowza which turns out to have been be a dud.
Marcotte calls Jordan and Tucker's conspiracy theories lazy. I'd call them desperate. As far as I'm concerned the same goes for Trump and DeSantis.
Jordan and Tucker are actors. This is from Marcotte's article (emphasis added):
Both Carlson and Jordan have become famous and powerful by dint of their effectiveness at spreading conspiracy theories. Carlson gets paid $6 million a year, strictly due to his acting chops, whether he's pretending to care about the sexiness of M&Ms or to believe in the intelligence of Donald Trump. Similarly, Jordan rose high in the ranks of House Republicans because he's talented at faking outrage. Yet both these men are showing less passion for conspiracy theories these days than your average unpaid and anonymous QAnon troll. It must be tiring, looking forward to the rest of their lives spent trying to feign zeal over fake culture war fights or made-up controversies. Not that they deserve your pity, of course. Being professional liars is the path they chose for themselves, and they're clearly stuck following it to the end.
Not that I have to point out the obvious, but Trump and DeSantis are professional liars.
I don't have a comparable example from Ron DeSantis. The one thing he has in his advantage is that he always comes across as dull.
He wisely doesn't try to out-Trump Trump in feigning outrage. He depends on using a dry presentation of the dire consequences of woke policies. I don't know what latest policy announcement could, in retrospect, be seen as him having jumped the shark. I expect it could just the a straw the breaks the camels back executive order.
Both of the top contenders for the GOP nomination depend on not being boring. They are very different in this respect from Mike Pence and Joe Biden. Both of them are naturally low-key. You could call them boring in how they present their ideas and policies. When Biden is particularly animated, or expresses anger, more than usual people take notice, for example:
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Click above to read article |
Neither Pence nor Biden have to worry about boring MAGA-world since residents of this land of won't vote for them anyway. It's Trump and DeSantis who have to worry about boring the denizens of MAGA.
Addendum
I was curious about this...
so I looked it up:
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Click above to read article |
Trump can try to gin up hysteria about a nuclear attack but does he really care about the rest of Americans when his house has three bomb shelters? None can withstand a direct hit but why would Putin want to take out Mar-a-Lago when Trump is his pal?
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