Voting Stupidly.

People ask why or how Donald John Trump got elected. They look at the stupidity, the bigotry, the cruelty, the greed and fraud and lies. People knew what they were voting for, and they chose this, holding our collective hand on the hot stove for four more years after we had finally healed up from the last time the same people voted for this.

I tend to think most of the people who voted for Donald John Trump, both times, did not know what they were doing. They took their cues from the media they use and from the political arena, neither of which made things clear for them.

In 2015 and in 2016, he got put on the same debate stage with senators and governors. His new peers treated him like a legitimate choice, despite the fact the had none of the background skills or personal aptitude required for the office. Like in a movie, when they do the police line-up. And it’s a bunch of cagey-looking guys, and there in their midst is a literal squirrel. The victim looks down the line, points at the squirrel. “There’s the one that stole my purse!”

If you put an obviously-wrong option on the table, don’t be surprised when people choose it. That’s the moral for the media and the parties. We should have some basic competency test for president and for other offices. The media is supposed to provide it. The parties are supposed to guard their followers from bad leaders. When they don’t, the system corrects itself: the pain of the hand on the hot stove teaches you not to do that. But only when it hurts badly enough.

Come 2020, everyone knew things were going badly. Joe Biden was a credible alternative to what everyone knew was a bad time. The built-in revolution of an election opened the door. But come 2024, with the Republican party still stuck on Donald John Trump, and without even pushing for him to honestly engage with the primary, they put him back in as nominee.

Biden’s presidency wasn’t going terrible, but between the bad debate, the switch to Harris, and the noise of inflation, enough people had doubts. And it was the same as before: Donald John Trump was the only other choice. The right-wing media failed to announce him unfit. The Republican party has yet to guard itself against being abused by him and his ilk. The nomination was his to claim. The larger media did not stand up and point to his past crimes, his continued unfitness. They still treated him as a legitimate option, as eligible.

There are a couple things that need to happen to fix this mess. One is that people should reject partisan-aligned media. That’s a hard sell given most conservatives actively love being pandered to. The more mainstream media has not committed to greater transparency or told better stories, which makes reforming the right-wing media all the harder: we can’t point to a media shift that they aren’t joining.

The other change is a Republican party that actually cares about its product. They are packing their boxes with rat turds and calling it cereal.

There will be a drubbing in November. The House will be solidly won by the Democrats. The Senate remains an unknown, but odds are over 50 percent that Republicans lose that too. It’s doubtful that changes anything for how Republicans approach reality (they don’t).

In all likelihood, it will not be until 2028’s Republican presidential primaries for the first real efforts to see the party move on. That’s if Donald John Trump is still in office. If he is, he will obviously push for a successor or try to use his sway. But it won’t work: he’s in solid lame-duck territory now, well ahead of the midterms. The Republican party of 2026 already knows that, but hasn’t had to admit it. They all know that the rest of America has formed a new TEA party. They know we’ve been trumped enough already.

Come 2036 you’ll be hard-pressed to find many Republicans who will even smile at the name Donald John Trump, much less want to return the party to one in his style. The Republican party is the party of the fad diet. It rages for a time, pretending that stupid gets you somewhere, and once everyone’s been sold all their grapefruits and cottage cheese, it sours, curdles, falls into a brief coma, only to reawake as the next fad pops up.