Sunset Ombrè Maned Wolf

I think it’s a combination of two things: Trump as a cult leader and Trump as an accelerationist. The first one is easy, Republicans simply line up to viciously defend anything their Dear Leader shits out. There is no line he could cross, he’s their special boi. With the second one, Republicans have always been terrible, which is why they took so quickly to Trump’s mask-off bigotry, but something that distinguished Trump from a lot of other Republicans is that he wasn’t a regular politician who was trained how to wrap up his bigotry in coded language, he’s just a reality show star that says whatever he wants (he also never had a filter because he’s genuinely one of the stupidest people alive). MAGA voters since 2016 have gone “he just says what everyone is thinking!” They’re wrong that everyone thinks it, but every Republican thinks it. The way he was/is totally unfiltered and not afraid to be proudly bigoted is what drew shit stain voters to him, and it had a radicalizing effect. Having the leader of the party openly, unabashedly embrace naked white supremacy (and not face any real consequences for it!) made Republican voters and politicians embrace thoughts that had only been kept private before, or maybe things they didn’t think possible until their Dear Leader told them that their wildest racist fantasies were righteous, true, and within their grasp. So when you have the leader of the party, one who stacked SCOTUS in his favor and has been given insanely preferential treatment after doing outrageous shit, come out and say “yes of course birthright citizenship is a disgrace and we should get rid of it and we can totally do it because fuck the Constitution”, it just opens a door that was previously closed.

two of them