Kruse is an unabashed (if not shameless) dem cheerleader but he’s not a total idiot. I can’t decide if he’s outright lying (to rally the dem troops) or if he actually believes there’s no upside for Trump. At first I was going to write that he’s surely lying but then I realized people can poison their own brains by pumping out propaganda nonsense every day. And the easiest person to deceive is yourself.
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I think Trump’s fist pumping will turn out to be the most powerful political images* in all of American history and there won’t be a close second.
Edit: By “political images” I mean how that’s defined in the media or in history books or in textbooks and not how we define it.
The New Yorker agrees with you:
But what makes the image is Trump. In its surface details, it carries echoes of the marines at Iwo Jima. In the former President’s bloody defiance, it even evokes Rocky Balboa. On that stage, Trump seemed well aware of the image he was creating. It is an image that captures him as he would like to be seen, so perfectly, in fact, that it may outlast all the rest.
Trump looked like the American heroes of myth, such as (staged war photo) and (entirely fictional character)
That Iranian guy was so right
I realized people can poison their own brains by pumping out propaganda nonsense every day. And the easiest person to deceive is yourself.
The initial reactions in the comments on the .world news comms really show this. People didn’t want to believe there was even an actual shooter.
I’m not sure it really rivals the 9/11 images or Saigon Execution, those images and the cultural context surrounding them led to material changes while here it’s just gonna be Trump winning even harder.
Saigon Execution
The average American would have no idea what those words mean in 2024. Or 2014. Or 2004. Or 1994. As for 1984 - my wild guess is that 2 out of 100 Americans might know.
9/11 images
Well, of course the Dubya-Cheney administration milked the shit out of that event and it made a 2004 win easy for them.
Saigon Execution is an irrelevant photo now but at the time it was iconic for the antiwar movement which is why I think it’s a very powerful picture, there was a world where the war lasted a bit longer but mounting pressure from the domestic anti-war movement played a role in stopping the war. Only a secondary role to the absolutely heroic struggle of the Viet Minh, of course.
