maybe they follow trump because it's fun.

no, really. clinton was boring; trump provided some excitement. and, maybe he blows the world up, but that's america, a country built on risk. americans have never been these cautious, conservative creatures - they want to throw wrenches into systems, to shake things up.

americans are inherently nihilistic in that way, so you might be going about this the wrong way.

clinton was the safe option; trump was danger, danger! so, of course america picked trump. that's america.

and, reagan ran on cutting government and left the country with a structural deficit due to tax cuts. the obama-trump switchers are really rather similar to reagan democrats, but here's my point - matt doesn't remember reagan. you'd might as well talk to him about lincoln.

the reason trump won, if you accept the official narrative, is that he reconstructed the reagan democrat constituency.

i don't remember the 80s very well (for a different reason than most people claim; i was under 10 years old throughout it), but, up in canada, it's a sort of an open secret that the current prime minister's father, pierre trudeau, was pushed out over disagreements regarding the 'star wars' system, which he refused to support. trudeau had pre-existing issues with nixon, but they were economic. years later, chretien was pushed out over similarly shady issues surrounding his refusal to participate in iraq, which is a policy that his eventual successor more or less reversed - after paul martin got into a big fight with the bush administration over a model that would have put our city of edmonton in the debris zone of a missile defense system. and, the republicans have had longstanding issues with france more than with germany, as well. so, while trump may have run explicitly on reforming nato, the actual content of that discussion really goes back to the 80s as well, if not the 70s.

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but, trump at that time was literally an actor. he had a tv show. how do you put an actor on stage and run on that actor not being an actor? i mean, that's absurd. that's an act, itself - the act is that he's playing the role of not being an actor, potentially because of the backlash to bush, particularly. who in their right mind could have possibly seen trump as anything but a puppet and a front? so, you can point these things out, but it's very difficult to take any of them seriously. i don't think trump was much different than bush or reagan, myself, the difference is just that they bailed on him halfway through, because biden is a better front.

imagine you're the deep state, and i don't mean robert mercer, i mean the neo-cons and big tech and the real power brokers, in actual reality. you put this idiot in place because you think he's an easy stooge, and it turns out he can't run a lemonade stand. he's just too incompetent. so, you cut your losses and you fire him.

i've had conversations with libertarians who essentially interpret marxism as this giant conspiracy theory, and while it's a facile analysis, it's also rooted in some valid observations. we have this tendency to think they're all in kahoots, and have all these super powers, when all evidence suggest the exact opposite.  it's perfectly plausible that they realized they made a mistake.

to me, the turning point was when kellyanne conway resigned. that was the exact point where they pulled out and decided on biden as the preferable option, and the exact point that trump lost.