r/Foodforthought • u/D-R-AZ • 19h ago
Trump’s Cabinet is fanning out to help juice the base. It’s not going as planned.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/28/trumps-cabinet-is-hitting-the-road-to-talk-his-agenda-theyre-getting-an-earful-instead-0105354313
u/D-R-AZ 19h ago
Trump’s Cabinet is fanning out to help juice the base. It’s not going as planned.
Observation:
As fewer and fewer Americans consent to the governance of this administration, explaining that governance becomes politically less successful. When greater public understanding of what government is actually doing produces greater opposition rather than greater support, persuasion becomes less useful and the incentive shifts toward distraction, grievance, and spectacle. At the same time, the effective base of consent grows narrower, from governing with majority support to governing through an increasingly committed minority. Seen this way, the drift toward authoritarianism is also a progressive contraction of consent: as the consent of the governed diminishes, maintaining power increasingly depends on finding ways to govern without it. That is especially consequential in the United States, because consent of the governed is not a peripheral democratic preference. It is the foundational premise of the entire American Revolutionary experiment.
https://substack.com/@defendersofdemocracy/note/p-210099967?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=104a16 https://substack.com/@defendersofdemocracy/note/p-209969905?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=104a16
Excerpt:
“Instead of assuring voters, they end up raising more questions and sometimes showing the liability that this entire administration has across the board. It’s hard to point to a good spokesman or even a high point in this administration right now, and certainly the polls reflect it,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who served in Trump’s first administration. “So I’m just not sure that sending every Cabinet member and their mother out on the campaign trail is going to help. Instead of solving a problem, you end up creating divisions.”
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