Known rapist and active criminal defendant Donald Trump won the Iowa Republican presidential caucus Monday. However, Iowa has a population of 3.1 million people, and a mere 56,260 voted for the once-and-future insurrectionist. Taylor Swift draws bigger crowds.
Nonetheless, MAGA stooge Matt Gaetz crowed over Trump’s commanding victory in the anti-democratic sham caucus.
“There is a relentlessness and a persistence in the Trump campaign that I think really emerges out of the candidate himself,” Gaetz gushed. “In Iowa, this victory was so huge and really it was a testament to the resiliency of the Trump voter. Because you had the worst conditions possible, historically, challenging weather and ice and these folks came out and voted overwhelmingly for the president.”
Trump’s cult members didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the freezing rain. That is impressive! Sorry, I’m more likely to view this as a testament to democracy if Trump voters didn’t willingly support someone who openly rejects democracy.
“I've met with a lot of those folks,” Gaetz said. “This is the blue-collar realignment of the Republican Party.” It’s a popular myth, even one too many liberal politicians accept, but it’s just not true that the Republican Party has a “blue-collar” base. The majority of voters earning less than $100,000 backed Joe Biden in 2020, and those earning more than $100,000 voted for Trump. Even if you define “blue collar” strictly based on educational background rather than income — so a struggling public school teacher with a master’s is somehow more “elite” than a well-paid plumber — Democrats consistently win voters of color without a college degree. The true “realignment” within the GOP is how it’s steadily become a white Christian nationalist party.
However, women, who can actually vote, might not consider a political party led by a rapist traitor a great fit for them. Gaetz isn’t worried and here’s the grotesque argument he shared with Newsmax: “And what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there's a there's a Julio and Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement. And that [bodes] well for our ability to be more diverse and to be more durable as we head into not only the rest of the primary contests but also the general election.”
Yes, that actually happened. You can watch below or take my word for it and spare the only eyes you have.
I won’t get into how most documented “Karens” — a misogynistic slur thanks to assholes like Gaetz — are usually entitled racists like Megyn Kelly or Kari Lake, who called the manager after losing the Arizona governor’s election. I’m more stunned by Gaetz’s farcical use of the names “Julio” and “Jamal” to indicate working-class men of color.
I personally know a fair share of Black men and none of them are named “Jamal.”
Jamal is a nice enough name, even if the hiring managers at some companies might recoil when seeing it at the top of resume. When I was in sixth grade, a white classmate told me that when he used the “n-word,” he didn’t mean people like me, per se, but people named “Tyrone” or “Jamal.” What did a mythical Jamal ever do to white people?
Gaetz is repulsive but he correctly identifies MAGA as an overtly anti-woman movement that would prefer more knuckle-dragging men of all creeds and colors than the suburban, well-educated white women who were once the face of polite conservatism. It’s why they don’t care about the powerful Dobbs backlash. It’s why Nikki Haley underperformed in Iowa and will likely do the same in New Hampshire. Matt Gaetz’s punchable face is what best reflects the current Republican Party.
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Tangential to that is the notion that the irrational anti-science anti-reason thrust of the MAGA movement represents a crisis of education. Most people in the MAGA world are boomers and fellow GEN Xers. If anything we were the privileged generations that grew up at the zenith of an American education that was the envy of the world. So this isn’t an education crisis, it is a moral crisis. The idea that anyone learns how to be a decent person through a K through12 education is just silly. There are other much more nefarious factors at work. And blaming it on education deflects from the harder truths
“punchable” ❤️😵