The real reason the January 6th Committee was able to destroy Donald Trump and Josh Hawley
For years I’ve been saying you take down a right wing “strong man” type like Donald Trump or Josh Hawley not by assigning them evil magic powers and insisting they’re more powerful than they are, but by mocking the living crap out of them. If you make them look incompetent, voters in the middle will turn against them. And if you make them look weak, right wingers will turn against them.
During the Trump era, the media and pundit class helped Donald Trump quite a bit by insisting he had evil magic powers that he simply did not have. This gave him the leverage to get away with making threats that he couldn’t actually carry out, and it caused people on our side to sit and cower to him instead of actively pushing back against him.
The narrative of Trump as an “omnipotent evil strong man” also did nothing to turn voters in the middle against him. People in the middle like a strong leader, and they always dismiss it when one side calls the other evil. The liberal pundit class unwittingly helped Trump a lot.
I always tried to highlight Trump’s vulnerabilities so they could be exploited by activists on our side, and mock his weaknesses so people who like strongmen would see him as a punchline. But I was always told I wasn’t being “vigilant” enough. When I point out these days that Trump comes off as at least partially senile during his rare public appearances, I’m still told I’m not being “vigilant” enough.
But this week the January 6th Committee went for Donald Trump’s legs by portraying him as a bumbling fool who couldn’t carry out his evil plans in competent fashion. The committee also painted Josh Hawley not merely as a fist pumping fascist, but as a fragile wuss who ran away from his own mob in a panic, for fear of being trampled by it.
And you know what? That strategy worked. With the footage now going viral of Hawley awkwardly running away from a mob he’d incited, Hawley’s grand ambitions of running for President someday just took a major hit. And the January 7th footage of Trump bumbling and stumbling like a broken loser is going a long way to making people on all sides of the political spectrum finally realize that the guy’s brain really has been mush for awhile now.
The January 6th Committee – primarily made up of Democrats – is making clear that it understands how political strategy really works. People like Trump and Hawley want to be seen as strongmen. They don’t care if they’re portrayed as evil strongmen, so long as they’re portrayed as strongmen. You only help those types by portraying them as all-powerful villains. If you want to take their legs out, you expose them as weak, inept, soft, confused, tepid, buffoonish – and that’s what the Democrats just did to Trump and Hawley.
Yet now the liberal pundit class is insisting we portray Ron DeSantis as being an all powerful evil genius, and that we cower to him. In reality DeSantis is a dummy. He has half the savvy of Trump, and twice the insecurity. But we’re being told he’s super smart and savvy, and that we must cower to him or we’re not being “vigilant” enough.
Here’s hoping that you’re all willing to take the lesson from this public hearing – one that I’ve been trying to drive home for years – and apply it to the next right wing wannabe strongmen. Their trajectories are built entirely on being seen as powerful. Their trajectories collapse if you can successfully paint them as the kind of weak inept loser who alienates the middle and embarrasses the right.
By the way, the folks in the media and pundit class who keep insisting we openly cower to the other side, are the same folks who have most loudly pushed the false narrative that “Democrats are bad at messaging.” But the people telling us to cower are, obviously, the ones who are terrible at messaging. Why would we ever again listen to these folks about anything?
