Mile High View Trump managed to subvert or destroy everyone he touched, and he managed to rally all those with a personal interest in his success. But the United States is a bureaucracy, home to a culture that lives by bureaucracy, with a bureaucratic economy, a bureaucratic society and a bureaucratic way of life. "Let me speak to your manager." "I'm going to sue." "People will hear about this." We are not swashbucklers, us Americans. We firmly believe in procedure and place. Not everyone, of course, but everyone who matters. Thing about bureaucracy is it's the safest, most secure method for power distribution because everyone will protect their fiefdom first and foremost and if they dream, they dream of a bigger fiefdom. We tell stories of the janitor who stormed the boardroom but they're bullshit, ours is a society of incremental improvements sprinkled with a few rags-to-riches stories to keep us all hustling. I think the first notification I had of the Jan 6 riots was BFX commenting that they'd stormed the capitol in chat or something. 'cuz yeah - Josh Hawley is going to object to the election or whatever and the Republicans are going to be sore losers about it but HUNDREDS of bureaucrats, Republicans all, had again and again and again and again gone "this is my fiefdom" in response to the question "do you want a coup". Great. You took a shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk. What's your 100-day plan? Yeah - the rabble-rousers are never gonna let it go. Oswald didn't act alone, the Towers didn't fall because of jet fuel and Trump won the election. They're rabble-rousers, though, and if they were any fucking good at interfacing with a bureaucratic society they wouldn't slurp down chemtrails videos. It's much easier insisting that Trump is your true president while continuing to pay your taxes and stop at traffic lights. Ultimately? We love the bureaucracy. We love the system that continues to work even when the president advises people to drink bleach. "don't take him literally, take him seriously." Okay, whatever rich sociopath the main thing the Trump presidency accomplished was hollowing out government for a generation of Democrats with an axe to grind. There's a bunch of missing text messages now because the little people went along with the coup because they weren't high enough up to recognize how little was in it for them. That's the whole of the Trump administration - pie-eyed rubes who couldn't do political calculus. Those opposing? Needn't like Democrats in the slightest, they just need a nagging suspicion that a cabal that doesn't keep its word is a cabal you don't gain from joining. You aren't supporting Trump, you're supporting the destruction of the system that got you where you are, dipshit, and this new system doesn't seem to benefit anyone who isn't named Donald Trump in the long run. Trump. Was NEVER. Going to retain the presidency come hell or high water. The minute the court challenges started going against him it was all over. Even if he'd won half the ones he'd brought it would have been fuckin' done. Liberals don't want to talk about this. Conservatives don't want to talk about this. But fundamentally, we adore process and the process, broken as it is, selected Joe Biden.