But it still seems to me that a much larger, but currently less vocal, contingent of people in the conservative ranks of the country will just let the Trump wave peter out. And I think it will. Maybe not immediately, though.
Well, my point on conservatism is, it stopped being the party line when George W. Bush was elected and McConnell and Trump completely wiped it out. Conservatives started fleeing the party when Dubya was president. What may have been left of them took off once Trump was elected. They saw the writing on the wall. I think you are wrong that there is a much larger silent majority of "conservatives" out there that will work to slowly let "Trumpsim" peter out...it won't peter out. The trend is actually in the opposite direction and all you need look at are the voices that the right wingers listen to and who they are electing if you want to make a prediction. FOX News rating have been going down. They have lost viewership to three places it would seem, CNN, Newsmax, and One America Network. Now, FOX does not intend to compete with CNN because CNN actually does news. If FOX did that they would basically be CNN with more beached blonde hosts. They are not looking to be that. So, FOX is broken up into two sections, their news section which essentially ran from the middle of the day to early evening when their opinion section (all their big hosts) take over and they don't do news...they are according to the FOX lawyers "entertainment" which we know means, well, a lot of lies and fiction. FOX is looking at trying to get viewers back from Newsmax and OAN...that do ZERO news and are 100% lies and fiction. So, the FOX solution is not to move away from the Trump fictional universe...it is to step further into it. They turned their "news" division over to Tucker Carlson (their favorite fiction and opinion guy) and cut the number of hours down that the news division were allocated and allocated more time to their opinion division...hosts like Carlson, Ingraham, Hannity etc.
They have turned up the propaganda and lies by inventing a false "War on the 1st Amendment" and will be attempting to provide content that people see on Newsmax and One America...which needless to say promotes QAnon garbage like it was a book in the New Testament.
So, the Republican leaning voters won't be getting more truth and news now that Trump is gone they will be getting even more lies and propaganda. The elected Republicans in Washington use FOX news as their gauge as to what they should be saying and promoting if they want to be relevant to their base. One thing that Trump did was make sure that he repeated what FOX news opinion shows were saying. The Murdochs loved that Hannity, Carlson, and Ingraham would literally dictate policy to Trump and Trump would push that policy all day long threatening other politicians if they did not follow the FOX marching orders.
Trump may be gone but the entire concept of promoting an alternative reality to right leaning voters is not petering out. Trump was an idiot that was easy to manipulate for people like the Murdochs or Putin or MBS. The danger here is if they get a smarter authoritarian lunatic elected...and I think about two thirds of currently elected Republicans want to see if they can do this.
So, my point is, yeah, Trump is out, but Trump was just a front man for this nonsense. A guy with no shame, no morals, no ethics, that felt no embarrassment over trying to do things most politicians would not ever attempt.
Now these elected Republicans are not trying to distance themselves from Trumpism, not at all, they are gathering behind it to see if they can find an even better Trump. Trump himself is expendable, but the groundwork he laid toward destroying our country...that has value to these people and they will now chase this. FOX is turning up the volume not toning it down and that is the drum these elected Republicans will march to.
They feel they have to because they feel that their ability to attract voters is slipping away. Hence all the appeals to white supremacists, sleazy groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, Oath Keepers, all manner of racists, and lunatic conspiracy theorists. This now probably represents about 33% of their voters. Mix them in with the evangelicals and single issue voters and man...you've got one seriously messed up party on your hands.
Trust me, I'd love to be with you that Trumpism will peter out but as of this moment, watching what FOX and elected Republicans and state Republican parties are lining up to do...well...it does not look like they are attempting to bring their party back to any form of normalcy or move back toward conservatism. It looks like they will make it an even bigger freak show than it was under Trump.
All sense of cost control and investment discipline would go out the window.
On this line above, I mean, really? All that went out the window under George W. Bush and Trump does not even know what cost control and investment discipline are. Sanders would have shifted us back toward these things not thrown them out the window. Not sure what you looked at to make you think this. I know there were a lot of hit pieces written about Bernie, many of them prompted by Democrats but again, his tax plan would have been far kinder to the wealthiest Americans than FDR's was and that tends to be one of the places people start when they want to knock him down.
