First, Drew Magary went to a Trump rally back in 2016. His base hasn’t changed much since then:
“I know the greatest negotiators in the world,” he said. “Now some of these people are horrible human beings. You wouldn’t have them to dinner. They’re vicious. They’re crude. They’re unhappy. They treat everybody badly. Who cares? I want them negotiating against China. Think of Carl Icahn, a friend of mine. He’d be great. I’d say, ‘Carl, take China’.”
Now, people applauded this, which alarmed me because (A) Who has friends like this? And (B) Sending a vicious, crude, unhappy person who treats everyone badly to go yell FUCK YOU at the Chinese strikes me as unwise.
But a Trump rally isn’t about thinking more than half a second ahead. There is a first BOLD step, and then you are left to assume that everything else will fall neatly into place. In Trump’s white-trash, Louis XIV universe, all you see is the pretty gold paint before it starts chipping off the walls.
Second, Matt Taibbi talks about policing in America:
Basically we have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else.