How he beat the 19 Republicans he had to run against in the primary and end the Bush & Clinton dynasty is kind of beside the point. He did it. That to me is still insane. <snip> BUT that crazy is exactly why Trump was able to secure the Republican nomination and Bernie allowed himself to get rolled by the DNC. Trump is a fighter, and at times a bully. And if he even so thinks you hit him- he's going full psychopath and he's going to try and hit you back 1000x harder.
How he beat them? By understanding that there's no such thing as bad publicity. By changing the game. Donald Trump, being the narcissist that he is, got everybody to talk about him, all the time. It didn't even matter if it was positive. He would constantly say crazy bullshit to get attention.
He sucked all the air out of the room. The other candidates were serious politicians. They were the type that thought "if I just say crazy bullshit all the time, people won't vote for me." Trump realized that if everyone was always talking about the crazy bullshit he said, the other candidates wouldn't get ANY airtime.
That's how he won the nomination. Not by understanding politics, or understanding what voters wanted. But by understanding the power of
celebrity, and exploiting it while all the other candidates were playing by normal political rules.
It's one reason why I didn't bring up Trump's statements about 2 weeks ago where he told a Christian group that they just need to vote for him one more time, and after that they won't ever have to vote again. It'll be fixed so good that nobody will have to vote.
There are a LOT of very bad ways to take that statement. Which IMHO is what Trump wanted, but not for the reason one might think. It was said when Harris' poll numbers were rising, when her ascending to be the presumptive nominee was dominating the news cycle,
and nobody was talking about him. So he had to say the craziest thing he could think of, to get attention back on him. Because he doesn't want anyone talking about Harris. He wants them talking about him.
And Trump is not holding the R party hostage. I don't know where you are getting that. Trump is who the R voters wanted- and that's who they got. That is how this thing is suppose to work. The RNC establishment and it's mega-donors tried everything in their power to have anyone but Trump in 2016 and in 2024. That is just an objective fact of reality. His movement, his grip on the base/primary voters- was too strong for them to do anything about it.
There is no Republican Party. There is the Trump Party. The Republican Party is "what Trump says, we follow".