Because it’s #3 in the nation in per capita impact of opioid use disorder, after West Virginia and Ohio?

Fact is, these places that MAGA wants to label as hellholes are the cultural and economic engines of our country. Even places like Texas are driven entirely by their urban blue counties.

I think it’s better understood as many different factions with their own desires:

• Those who want raw power for the sake of power. Trump is almost certainly personally in this category. This is probably the primary motivation behind the Project 2025 stuff, tearing down the guardrails that limit their power.
• Those who are trying to enrich themselves: Trump’s family is probably here, and Trump himself and his inner circle do seem to be motivated by financial gain to some degree.
• Those who want to use the Trump administration to make the U.S. whiter by expelling non-white people and restricting immigration of brown people (while increasing white refugees admitted).
• Those who want to assert dominance of certain types of Christianity (with some internal tension on whether that extends to Catholics/Protestant/Mormon/other beliefs)
• Those who want the government to pursue business friendly policies like lower taxes and lower business regulations.
• Those who want to leverage the government’s power to win a culture war (bullying schools, libraries, Hollywood, the media, etc., into supporting right-wing cultural principles).

There is tension between all of these things, and there’s tension within the Trump coalition. The business interests and the immigration hardliners jockey for position with Trump and his inner circle. The religious groups and the war hawks and the cryptocurrency scammers are all trying to advance their own agenda, too.

Not everything is going to make coherent sense. Not every idea is going to win, either. And if anything, the business side of things is less powerful than in the typical administration with several areas that are actively hostile to traditional Republican business interests (immigration, tariffs, pardoning securities fraudsters, shaking down corporations for donations or tribute).

It’s important to recognize the tensions because those are also weak spots in their coalition. Defeating fascism will involve fomenting some internal tensions and peeling off different factions.

You’re talking about a guy who congratulated Putin on his sham election victory while staring at a card that said “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.” And he’s aged 7 years since then.

The American political system was designed for weak parties, and geographical representation above all, in a political climate where there were significant cultural differences between regions.

The last time we updated the core rules around districting (435 seats divided as closely to proportionally as possible among the states, with all states being guaranteed at least one seat, in single member districts) was in 1929, when we had a relatively weak federal government, very weak political parties, before the rise of broadcasting (much less national broadcasting, or national television, or cable TV networks, or universal phone service, or internet, or social media). We had 48 states. The population was about 120 million, and a substantial number of citizens didn’t actually speak English at home.

And so it was the vote for the person that was the norm. Plenty of people could and did “switch parties” to vote for the candidate they liked most. Parties couldn’t expel politicians they didn’t like, so most political issues weren’t actually staked out by party line.

But now, we have national parties where even local school governance issues look to the national parties for guidance. And now the parties are strong, where an elected representative is basically powerless to resist even their own party’s agenda. And a bunch of subjects that weren’t partisan have become partisan. All while affiliations with other categories have weakened: fewer ethnic or religious enclaves, less self identity with place of birth, more cultural homogenization between regions, etc.

So it makes sense to switch to a party-based system, with multi member districts and multiple parties. But that isn’t what we have now, and neither side wants to give up the resources and infrastructure they’ve set up to give themselves an advantage in the current system.

I could sell you a virtual deed to the Golden Gate Bridge right now, you could buy it but it doesn’t really mean anything.

Yeah, that’s possibly the most famous scam in history (people selling deeds to the Brooklyn Bridge), enough to where “I’ve got a bridge to sell you” is a figure of speech for calling someone gullible or naive.

And then despite the world knowing about the Brooklyn Bridge scam, the cryptobros actually went and found a bunch of suckers to fall for the exact same scam, only with blockchains instead of notary seals.