And I apologize for going deeply overboard a few days back.

Slight misunderstanding in your post. And it's my fault because I put quotes as I was trying to differentiate and I described both of those individuals back and forth. Like I said, my fault.

To clarify:

Trump advisor who is now under indictment is being interviewed by the pr person.

To answer your question:

Try to keep in mind that our electorate is about 30% either stupid or insane. Another 15 to 25% have policies that they want implemented and they don't care if the guy on the top is either insane or an asshole. They actually prefer it since they think it will scare the leaders of the other nations because of the unpredictability.

The bottom 12.5 iq of the bell curve is not allowed to be in the military. They are too stupid. Even if they are not crazy racists to start they are easily manipulated into it. Their lives suck, they have a horrible existence, and it has to be somebody else's fault.

Add in the portion of INSANE religious indoctrination and you pick up another 10 to 20%.

And then add a level of hardcore "I did it myself so f*** the other guy" attitude with people who have no idea that the society allowed them to build it. Without the cops or roads or trade treaties, they'd have nothing. That's the libertarian party. Think of it as Republicans who want to pay zero taxes but they still want to smoke pot. They will vote for less taxes over all else and don't understand that Trump tariffs are taxes on them or they are at the high income bracket and it's a regressive tax that hits the lower brackets so they're fine with that.

Add in people who will never understand macroeconomics. They didn't understand the cost to the world of the pandemic and then the recovery. They don't understand how inflation works, how it's related to interest rates, or how productivity, population count, or supply and demand affects it. They just know that when Trump was President their financial lives were better. If they bring back Trump they will get better.

Essentially cargo cult programming.

Then add in the people who were simply raised by their parents to vote a certain way and they kept going as they went through their life.

And then add in the hardcore racists. And the softcore racists who won't admit it.

The Venn diagram has many overlapping circles but you get the point.

All those people put together is huge.

Simply the Texas portion of those people control our textbooks. They buy enough of them and have enough authority over them to reject things they don't like and add in things they want. After they go through this process, they buy millions and millions of them and the publisher simply sells the same copy to the rest of the country. Much of it ignores how bad those books are and much of it doesn't care.

School boards are controlled locally. They are the easiest types of vote to manipulate and get your people in there. They get a few years in there for experience and then they launch into real political careers. Many of our crazy religious people came from school boards from that perspective. During that time frame they implemented this type of textbook damage. Along with book banning. From there they went to controlling the libraries both within the schools and the township public libraries.

You know our civil war? The one we fought to free the slaves? Yes, there were many bits of decision in that war that was not entirely that. But that was the cornerstone of it.

Many of those textbooks call it the War of Northern Aggression. They didn't fight it to free the slaves, they fought it to stop the North from waging economic and then physical war on the South. Or they give support to it. They talk about how much benefits the slaves got by being slaves.

Long before it was in those textbooks the teachers in the southern states were calling it that. But now they have power to affect the whole country based on their population count and how many kids they've got in the school systems.

So to answer you: we are anywhere from 45 to 55% of insane, selfish, assholes.

The insane selfish assholes know that they are screwed demographically. They're not that dumb. They see that their dominance is on their way out.

We've always fought dirty. We've always pretended to truly care about democracy, but we don't. Let me rephrase. A significant portion of the population doesn't. They want what they want and they don't care about the other guy. Unless the other guy is in their family or their religion. It is pure tribalism.

We've had enough oversight for the most part on the national level. It didn't matter. We trusted our elections, or at least enough of us did.

That's why you see us bounce back and forth at the top level all the time.

But now they know they're losing bigly. So they have to cheat or else they will lose forever.

The demographics have changed. Enough of the old bastards have died off and Taylor is pushing the registrations like crazy and this might be the swing point. Every new generation learns a bit more and rejects their parents attitude. It's taken us a long time to get to the point of a super majority shift.

I say super majority because it takes up 2/3 of us to make significant changes such as a constitutional change. That could take 30 years as it works through the states (and probably fails). When the Congress people are debating or yelling at each other, many of the votes require way more than half to pass. Supreme Court justices are picked by chance. It depends on who dies since it's a lifetime appointment to try to protect them from political influence. It has created lopsided majorities that have nothing to do with the population for 30 years.

This country is designed to make change hard.

It was a compromise to bring the initial States together. Our colonies were nothing more than religious camps of assholes. They grew into States of assholes. They did not want the other states to tell them what to do.

Our first colonies were Puritans who were kicked out of England. Think about this. The cornerstone of our first people were religious assholes who wanted to tell the other people in England what to do so England kicked them out.

My first wife was descended from that group. Puritan assholism ran deep in her.

Our Senate system is designed to over represent the tiny states. There's 100 senators split between 50 states with every state getting two senators. A state with 1/10 the population has the same amount of power as the larger one. Those very few amount of people have a huge say when all the votes are counted.

Our electoral college is almost all winner take all. That means states are assigned votes. It is based on the population of the state, but those popular votes are not combined for the final tally.

Each state votes within itself and all the votes from that state go to whoever won that particular election. That means a huge number of votes are thrown away every year when you take into account the populations within the states and the distribution of how people vote.

I could go on and on. So I will stop babbling. The bottom line is we have a huge history of being a bunch of idiots and we occasionally will do the right thing as the majority occasionally gets a say.

The old people are dying out, there are less and less racists every year as people interact with people of other races, people are looking around and seeing that their belief in God probably isn't realistic.

There will always be stupid people. There will always be racists. There all will always be selfish people who will never have enough money yet have enough money to have an outsize influence. There will always be people whose religiosity rules their lives.

We are physically predisposed to vote one way or the other. There is a large genetic predisposition for this. Conservative or liberal. Nervous people vote conservative. This is a great survival mechanism when there is a tiger hidden in the bushes. If those bushes rustle you should run every time. Even without all the above these people do not want any change. It hurts them psychologically. We're not getting rid of them. Worse, they have a higher likelihood of breeding.

So we will always be like this.

At least in my lifetime.

Even when Trump loses this election, he's not going away until he's actually in jail. We will hear from him for quite a while. When he's finally gone, the maga people will be very sad and the Republican party will attempt to rebrand itself and it will implode from the maga people fighting with the rest of it.

Right now it's the Trumplican party.

After that point they will regroup and possibly come back. But they will be a consistent under 45% at that point and it will only get worse for them.

Not quite sure what's next.