This is a big reason for Trump’s appeal - being able to rally behind someone who can so effectively withstand constant derision from all directions. Moreover, the apologists on this site and elsewhere will continue to excuse this behavior until they are backed into a corner and enclosed into a tomb of their own making.
One of the fascinating aspects of the Trump phenomenon to me is how a globalist billionaire celebrity who started his career with a million dollar loan from his father managed to convince a demographic that hates globalists, billionaires and celebrities that he was the scrappy underdog and hero of the common man running against someone with a fraction of his net worth, a better pedigree of political advocacy and who actually held down a real job at least once.
Granted, it amounts to the difference between a silver spoon and a platinum spoon but it's still surprising.
who started his career with a million dollar loan from his father
I've never understood why people keep repeating this line as if it's derogatory.
I know a fair number of first and second generation immigrant business owners, and they have almost all started their businesses with help from their families. This has been very common in America for the last couple of hundred years. Probably longer. Why is this now considered a bad thing?
No, it is not very common in America to have parents wealthy enough to loan a million dollars to their kid on a whim - most people take out loans from banks or work to pay for new businesses, rather than being born into it and then marrying it. It indicates a degree of privilege the vast majority of Trump's working class base can never hope to have access to.
I mean, Mitt Romney was ridiculed for being rich and upper class and even he was less rich than Donald Trump.
Trump did largely all the same stuff, canceling Kaepernick and others.
Not sure if they are both professors, but, if so, I'd wager his evangelical base wouldn't allow either woman in the article to teach at their evangelical schools on ideological grounds, canceling them from reaching a whole set of students.
Why is it happening? Because they can. And we are making it increasingly easier for them by building these centralized, mostly open platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
There has been no collapse in the intellectual life of Americans. If anything maybe a peak then moderate decline. The only difference is these platforms.
By what mechanisms could Russia and China influence the US a few decades ago? Substantially more limited.
