_portrait.jpg){kind=link}
Transcript:
I've been a loyal Trump supporter since 2016.
I lost a job, friendships, been smeared online, doxxed, and pressed charges on people who've stalked and harassed me for supporting him.
If Trump doesn't want my support, because I care about the Epstein Files, then I'm done.
Bye.
Baffling that THIS is their line.
Not that surprising. Republicans have been painting Democrats as Satanist baby killers for decades. Republicans have also been campaigning on the lie that the Epstein list is all Democrats, Woke Hollywood, and Silicon Valley Tech Bros. To the average brainwashed minion, there is zero reason to hide the client list. They want their righteous lynchings.
Also note that Trump has campaigned on "draining the swamp" a lot, and now people realize that he himself is the swamp that he rallied against.
Swamps are great. They're havens of biodiversity. Trump is the logging machine from Ferngully, and Stephen Miller is Hexus.
i know right? in my next life there's a 50% chance that i'll be an insect living by a swamp
I spent a week kayaking in a burning swamp full of alligators, and I can honestly say it was the best time of my life.
Shout-out to Stephen C Foster state park in GA.
Republicans went hard on the conspiracy crowd for support. QAnon, antivax etc. /r/conspiracy became a conservative propaganda group. A lot of the diehard Trump people are very invested in this narrative.
It's going to be difficult for the party to say, "oh yea, that thing we've been feeding into for years, please stop immediately" and have people listen. Some are going to go along, but a lot won't. It's become their identity.
This is where RFKs support came from.
This is their OUT. Many of them know they're idiots but are too proud to say they are wrong.
So when he got elected the FIRST time. He got elected twice so far don't forget that, i was 100% convinced that people can not be this stupid and when they realize how vile and stupid he is, they suddenly just cut all ties and are gonna pretend they never voted for him and only idiots did. But no, they doubled, tripled and quadrupled down so often that i think americans are just build different and they actually don't need a way out.
I suspect that possibly, it's actually not about the Epstein files but about the BBB.
Notice that it's probably not a coincidence that this drama broke out 1 week after Trump signed the BBB on July 4, which is gonna put millions of people of Medicaid.
Also notice that a lot of conservatives are probably pissed off about Medicaid but realize that it's difficult to move their fellow people to care about this, as the point of not giving "free handouts" has been enforced too much. Instead, they focus on Epstein as it's a moralizing drama, that people get very emotional about rather easily.
All the other bad stuff is generally stuff they wanted. They wanted authoritarian punishment of "others", minorities and news outlets that were telling them things they didn't want to hear. They were true believers that government regulation was incompetent and that the companies would self-regulate more effectively because capitalism would, somehow, punish them otherwise. The general grift and corruption may not have been desired, but they accepted rich people do rich stuff.
But here we have a cause that Trump's team jumped in and cheered with these guys, and ultimately they turn around and call them fools for believing in the very same cause that folks including Donald himself said had merit.
This combined with the medicaid cuts (even as many of them were benefitting, most assumed cuts would punish some nebulous "unworthy" benefits making the system better for them) and all sorts of other austerity to... generally get no new tax cuts. The downsides are starting to hit and the logical tradeoff upsides are nowhere to be seen.