Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party has survived countless political setbacks, a global pandemic, and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. It will survive his ugly Monday morning social media post about the death of Rob Reiner too.
However, the immediate backlash to that post, in which Trump suggested that the Hollywood director had somehow brought death upon himself due to his disdain for the president, illustrates just how much that grip has slackened.
So far, in the intervening hours, congressional Republicans and other figures on the right have taken to the internet, without being prompted, to criticize Trump. The critics aren’t just swing-district Republicans, like Rep. Mike Lawler, of New York, or Trump adversaries, like libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie, of Kentucky. Instead, even an otherwise loyal Republican, Rep. Stephanie Bice, of Oklahoma, has chastised the president for the post. “A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son. We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics,” wrote Bice on Twitter.
They don’t push a narrative that trying is pointless, they are doing the opposite, they are showing pandering bullshit to both sides, every day. It is in corporate interest that we are all fighting each other and hating each other for whatever group we belong to, and then funding those groups and reinforcing those lines of division.
Part of that plan is to constantly push and design algorithms to push pandering news stories for both sides to consume and believe themselves winning against the eeeevil enemy. News stories like this are part of that machine. Nobody on the right saw this story, their version is the complete opposite of your reality, but the people who design these atomized universes know neither side is ever going to cross lines and look at what the other side is seeing.
This situation is not going to change until a better story is introduced, but right now the people controlling the distribution of the stories are the wealthy oligarchs and corporations and donor-class. Our last and only chance for change is slowly, deliberately ripping the foundations out of the political structure they build. Local communities and town and state elections are largely uncontested and produce all the people, representatives and judges who have allowed corporations to have basically unlimited power to do what they want.