Opinion | MAGA-friendly centrists are yada yada-ing over Trump's threats

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% : But Trump is a known quantity in 2024.
52% : Trump and his allies have also spent the past four years plotting to do it again -- and thanks to state-level election overhauls and a sympathetic judiciary, they're much better equipped to do so now.
47% : And then look back at Trump.
45% : You've got a tribe; it's Trump's, and you're a reputation sanitizer for his presidential campaign.
38% : Smith's brief says he also encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, refused pleas from his own staff to call for calm, and after being told by an aide that Vice President Mike Pence's life was in danger thanks to his own instigations, he reportedly replied, "So what?"As I've previously written, if Trump hadn't ever given his riot-inciting speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, he still attempted a self-coup through alleged fraud, intimidation and threats of violence.
32% : As someone who is actually without a political tribe -- in that I don't neatly fit into any ideological box and feel no need to carry water for either party -- I've concluded that Trump is, by leaps and bounds, the greater threat to American democracy and rationality.
29% : But if your criticisms of Trump, MAGA and Republicans are rare, trivial and half-hearted -- and you denounce Trump opponents (including those exiled from the center and the right) as TDS-afflicted liberals -- you're not politically tribeless and you're not fearlessly independent.
20% : And yet, I'm reminded of the late legendary libertarian humorist P.J. O'Rourke, who despite leaning right his entire adult life, explained his vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016 on the basis that "she's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.
19% : In just the past 30 days, Trump has helped whip up a racist, xenophobic furor against Haitian immigrants in Ohio based on lies; suggested that people who criticize Supreme Court justices should be imprisoned; and mused that police should be allowed free rein to commit wanton violence on retail thieves over the course of "one real rough, nasty" day.
19% : It's all there: Trump knew he lost the election very early, but Smith's filing says he engaged in numerous criminal acts to overturn it anyway.
19% : Ever since Trump's escalator descent in 2015, warnings that Trump could do unthinkable things (like try to steal an election he lost, then preemptively discredit the next one) have been dismissed as the panicked bleatings of basic establishment Chicken Littles.
10% : At what point do Trump-sympathetic independents think it's OK to take Trump at his word when he promises to do horrible things -- like once again pre-emptively attempting to overturn an election based on nothing?To be clear, I'm not here to police anyone's political preferences.
9% : Only the humorless, Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted could possibly take the former president's rhetoric seriously: "That's just Trump being Trump, shooting from the hip, flying off the handle, being funny in his uniquely Trumpian way that triggers the hated establishment.

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