The Washington Post does a review of how the Real Estate, Entertainer, and ex-President has has NOT cooled his heels since he got and then left his government job….
Embracing extreme positions is nothing new for Trump: Since launching his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and then pledging to ban Muslims from entering the country, he has promoted divisive policies, made inflammatory comments and prompted constitutional showdowns with Congress and the courts. But a return to the White House, in Trump’s own articulation, would be his chance to take revenge on his political opponents and push even further on his most polarizing programs.
The hardening of Trump’s stances comes as he has been operating for more than two years without the official apparatus of the White House, putting fewer gatekeepers and layers of review between him and the public. It also follows a long list of grievances he has accumulated from his eight years in politics.
To experts who have reviewed his proposals, Trump is sketching out the contours of a second term potentially more dangerous and chaotic than his first. Critics across the political spectrum have voiced alarm at his increasingly menacing rhetoric. But Trump’s most loyal supporters have relished his combative speeches and followed him in espousing harsher stances….
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In the storyline Trump presents, he is always the victim, but so are his supporters: The shared experience of suffering through conflicts brings them closer and strengthens their bond, according to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University and the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.”
“When authoritarian leaders lose office, they come back, like, 10 times worse — they never get less extreme, they always get more extreme,” Ben-Ghiat said. “January 6 was a profoundly radicalizing event for the base, for the GOP and for Trump himself, because even assaulting the Capitol you could get away with. His campaign events have to be seen as that of an extremist radicalizing people and emotionally reeducating people to hate people.”….
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Trump’s aides have repeatedly encouraged him not to talk so much about Jan. 6 and the rioters, believing it is not a winning issue politically, according to advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions. They have tried to get him to talk about the ongoing criminal probes he faces as “election interference” rather than looking back to the last presidential election. But Trump has regularly talked to some of the families of people in prison, aides say, and has convinced himself that they are being mistreated. He also has a number of aides now who stay in touch with Jan. 6 families and rioters.
Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly said he understood Trump’s recent defense of Jan. 6 to be his actual view, adding that Trump is prone to changing his position….
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Not only has Trump never acknowledged his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, but over time his false claims of rampant fraud have become more elaborate. In the past, he attacked the expansion of mail voting during the pandemic to suggest the Democrats could have inflated their tallies; now he claims (falsely) to have definitively found millions of fraudulent ballots stuffed into drop boxes….
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Trump has a long pattern predating his current campaign of backtracking or even apologizing in the face of public outrage, then later retrenching and taking an even more defiant position, according to The Post’s review…
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And over the years, Trump has intensified his vilification of Democrats and those Republicans who don’t support him. In 2016, he said he was running against “globalists” and elites; in 2020, it was radical-left socialists. Now, he now routinely describes the 2024 election as an apocalyptic showdown with nothing less than the irreversible destruction of the country at stake…..
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The Hill does a political ad piece for Trump suggesting that Doandl Trump’owns’ todays Republican Party base and I guess that all these people lining up to get in the 2024 sweepstakews darwing should instead go find something else to do?
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who endorsed Scott last week and wants to move past Trump, says “we have to have a consensus candidate if we’re going to win” and thinks Scott “can bring our country together.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said after the 2022 midterms that “too much chaos” and “too much negativity” associated with Trump’s influence on the GOP had “turned off a lot of these centrist voters.”
But polls show many Republican primary voters love Trump’s appetite for political combat and applaud when he takes shots at his enemies, either on the political left or within the Republican establishment in Washington.
A Harvard-Harris poll of 2,004 voters nationwide conducted May 17-18 showed Trump dominating the Republican primary field with 58 percent support, well ahead of his nearest rival — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had 16 percent support. Scott garnered just 1 percent support in the poll.
Trump’s dominance is reflected in other polls. He leads by an average of nearly 37 percentage points in recent national surveys. …