How Trump's Lying Made Him President

 There are going to be a LOT of Hot Takes about why Trump was re-elected after losing four years ago. The simplest explanation - it was the inflation - has a lot of merit to it. We are seeing incumbent parties around the world get smoked in elections since Covid. I honestly think that if Covid had burst forth in the spring of 2019 rather than the spring of 2020, Harris would've won. People forget that he presided over a shitshow of a response and therefore give him a pass on a catastrophic aspect of his presidency.

I also think that his incessant lying actually helps him.

For normie libs like me, lying is bad. It show low character.

For low information voters, "all politicians lie" so they don't register it as such. This - I think - is how you get the wide discrepancies between support for Trump and support for protecting abortion in ballot measures. Trump was the instrument to overturn Roe and has bragged about it, but now he lies about it and there are actual voters who think he will protect abortion rights.

There read on him is that he's a libertine and wouldn't ban access to abortion. And he might not! Who the fuck knows?

It also gets you this.

In Michigan, Trump currently has 2,795,917 votes. Harris has 2,714,167

In the Michigan Senate race, Mike Rogers (R) has 2,672,303; Slotkin has 2,690,332.

You actually see more third party votes at the Senate level than the presidential. Add all the votes up and you have about 80,000 votes for president that don't vote for the Senate at all. There's an almost 100,000 vote gap between Trump and Rogers, as opposed to the 25,000 vote gap between Harris and Slotkin.

I think the past eight years has made a compelling case that Trump is sui generis. He's unique - for whatever reason that might be unfathomable - in that those normal rules don't apply to him. He's getting votes that normal Republicans won't. 

And I think that is linked to the fact that exactly those sort of Trump voters simply don't take his words at face value.

Now that he's won, he's dusting off Agenda 2025, which many of his voters will be surprised to discover what they have voted for. I fear that we won't flip the House, which could be disastrous for things like the Affordable Care Act. He's going to loose RFK, Jr on public health and Elon Musk on the federal bureaucracy. He told us he would, and those with ears to hear and eyes to see believed him. 

Many of his voters didn't, and we will all live with the consequences. Well, those of us who survive.