General Discussion

Last edited Sun Jul 20, 2025, 10:19 PM - Edit history (1)

... because I think Trump's motivations and the GOP's motivations are pretty much entirely different.

For Trump personally, I think his decisions pretty much comes down to one (or more) of these things...

... his own personal financial gain
... retribution
... narcissistic desire to see himself as a king-like ultimate ruler (e.g. his emulating or cozying up to people who rule with an iron hand, past or present)
... longing to be seen by others as a "winner," especially by those he feels have never given him the respect he craves (e.g. his lust for a Nobel)
... and maybe an indebtedness to Russia, e.g. for having saved his financial ass when legitimate banks wanted nothing to do with him, and finding ways to funnel plenty of money toward him over the years (and maybe they still do). And/or as has been speculated, maybe they are indeed holding something over his head ( "kompramat" ).

I think that is pretty much the sum of what he cares about. The rest of the GOP doesn't care about any of those things, their motivations are completely different. And Trump personally doesn't care about anything the GOP cares about, except where it may happen to overlap with those items above. So the Trump agenda and the Republican agenda have virtually nothing in common philosophically; rather they are each using the other to further their own goals.

So if that's all that motivates Trump, what's motivating the rest of the GOP?

For some in the GOP/Conservative movement, I think the motivation may be genuinely philosophical. By way of analogy (while trying to avoid stepping on any religious toes here), the reason so many people have such a fervent belief in their religion is a kind of brain-washing... impressionable children are told by the people they trust most that their religious beliefs are the Truth of the world. As an extension of that, our typical secular education similarly teaches us from a very young age what all the wonderful virtues of America are, e.g. democracy, equality, and the rights declared by the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed to us by the Constitution. I think the Project 2025 "purists" so to speak (as an example) look at the typical citizens' view of these ideals kind of the way an atheist looks at a bible thumper. We're rubes blindly following a dogma we were brainwashed to believe. They simply don't believe that is the society we should be aiming for. As the Orwell line goes, we may all be created equal, but some are more equal than others. The natural order of the world, then, for people as much as for animals, is that the weak get crushed by the strong. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is a feature, not a bug. Survival of the fittest. A kind of eugenics applied not to individual people, but rather to the governing institution itself. Instead of a master race, there is a master way to run society, and democracy/equality ain't it.

For the GOP Congress and other policy-makers, I think there are a variety of reasons, which can vary by the individual/group, and by the particular policy. Some may actually have genuine convictions about something, as discussed in the previous paragraph. Others are bought by lobbyists. Others may feel they're truly representing what the voters of their state want. That also means these may be the policies that will help get them re-elected. So then also, endorsement of these things and aligning with Trump and the rest of these policies can be a way to increase their power, or at least be a way to avoid being primaried out of it.