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Dear Vincent: We arrive at the same conclusion, albeit for different reasons. I hate to say it, but, some of your reasons are better than my own. Thanks for your (indirect) support on this. Best regards, Walter

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thanks for your support. I'm not as much against him as your are, but I see your point

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I'm not sure that being a "blustering liar" or not being a "team player" or having a propensity for supporting candidates in spite of their lack of "electability" is a deal-breaker for most contemporary Republican voters. Trump's working class base loves him precisely because he unapologetically dishes out middle-finger bluster against the Establishment (including all the corrupt RINO sellouts within his own party), and makes no effort to maintain the usual state-legitimizing pretense that politics has anything to do with personal honesty and virtue. They forgive Trump because they know that "team players" and respectable "electable" types are precisely the sort of politicians who have been assaulting their culture and undermining their standard of living for decades while crudely insulting them as being a hate-filled "basket of deplorables" who bitterly cling to their guns, to their religion, to their stars-and-stripes flags, and to their carbon dioxide-belching cars, instead of eating bugs, waving rainbow flags, and chopping off their reproductive organs like properly woke serfs do.

The real problem with Trump is that his policies don't live up to his rhetoric. Instead of draining the corporatist Davosian swamp or bringing the Deep State under control, he implemented Big Pharma's vax racket at "warp speed," he stood by and did nothing even as his own on-line supporters were being ruthlessly censored by Big Tech at the behest of the Deep State, and allowed the swamp to grow enormously on his watch. Now he urges Republicans not to do anything about the looming budget-busting fiscal train wreck of Social Security and Medicare and thus leave federal finances at the mercy of Wall Street and its fiat money/fractional reserve rackets.

Some members of the House Freedom Caucus and a few Governors like DeSantis in Florida have demonstrated that it is possible for Republican politicians to move beyond Trump on these issues. Vax mandates/injuries and social media censorship (and more generally the Deep State's intervention in domestic politics) are huge concerns among the base now, and even the Social Security/Medicare fiscal disaster is starting to get some traction.

While I don't think libertarians should delude themselves into thinking that we have much say in who the Republican Party nominates in 2024, it is heartening to see that many of our basic concerns about the erosion of civil liberties, interventionist foreign policies, growth of Deep State power, and the subordination of the economy to the federal Leviathan now resonate strongly among parts of the Republican base.

Maybe Trump will see which way his base is moving and try to catch up with them, but I wouldn't bet on it--he will never admit having made any mistakes, which leaves him vulnerable to other candidates who do have a better track record on these issues and who can articulate better principles. Whether any of them can emotionally connect to the visceral revulsion that the base feels against corporatist Establishmentarians the way Trump has done remains to be seen, but in a contest strictly on the basis of the issues, there certainly are candidates who can beat him and who libertarians would find to be more palatable than Trump.

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Trump has become so toxic that I’ve begun to wonder whether he’s been shilling for the Democrat Death Cult all along. He’s certainly helping push their green agenda. Every time he opens his mouth, he sucks the oxygen out of the atmosphere, blows hot air and causes an eruption.

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