By the standard they've set, let's just elect another Hollywood and give up collectively.
Trump was gonna "drain the swamp", fucking LOL
If anything he made it ten times bigger and has proved that almost everything he said was empty campaign sloganeering rhetoric
(Cliff notes at the end for those of you not interested in reading War and Peace)
The psychology on the right, as with any collective, was really warped and skewed. I'll try to layout briefly what happened...
- Years of Rush Limbaugh types drummed up rage at the "elites" and "establishment" IE the competent leaders and whatever intellectuals were left.
He had some points, however, those points were scattered among the demonizing of the core of the movement/Party.
- Fox News, the internet, and the generally dumbing down of Americans further exacerbated the rage.
- President Obama's ascendancy and seeming Republican impotency inflamed the divisions. Evangelicals waned, and the alt-right on the fringes, and a National/Libertarian block seized the initiative.
- The Republicans (for big business reasons) turned on their own and decried them as racists*
*(Nativist, or at worst xenophobes would be accurate but is rarely used, because, they are not as loaded and do not get the emotional effect of throwing the racism bomb - note, some alt-right reprobates are up and up racists, but that is a tiny segment of the American right, at least in my opinion, had some good debates about this but at any rate the numbers look to be between tiny and very small although inflated by their noise on the internet)
- Frustrated quasi-Nationalists, the alt-right, and disaffected Buchananittes gave Trump a chance to seize the reigns.
And ride he did - over the leaders, the planners, commentators, and scattered intellectuals, the most vicious attacks have been from within the right, "With us or against us!" cries by the Nationalists and braying howls of the pundits saw most of the sane, honorable, and decent right utterly collapse or be marginalized by the waves of haters.
The Weekly Standard just went down this week, slightly related.
Now, as a quick aside, I do not fault any Republicans who rallied to "The Don" once he won the nomination. People are not, and should not change their deeply held views because the figurehead is a menace.
They might see more social and cultural good in not voting for The Donald (my choice.)
They might see what happened to Justice Kanavhangnghn, John McCain, or even the hamstring job on Mitty Romney and feel getting a Supreme Court Justice and a guy who "fights" is a compromise they are willing to make. Fair enough. The left does hate them, and many of them hate the right and "know" the left cheats in the media, social journals, social sciences, and hard sciences when possible. Although, for many, their answer was to shoot the messengers time and again - their thinkers, what fever thinkers they have. (Luckily for the right, while dead broke on intellectuals, the few they have are formidable, one or two are even mighty in their stand against the tide.)
Cliff notes conclusion - To those who supported Donald Trump form beginning to likely bitter end, gambling on an irate, megalomaniac, whose brick and mortar businesses imploded and then sold his namebrand... it has always looked like one of the world's greatest con jobs, from the start.
John Baron was always too much Carlos Danger in disguise, and he played the game at first on some bad people, then a lot of good people... and riverboat gambler with no poker face is holding few aces left in the hand of political capital.