The Democratic party has often expressed the hope that a defeat for former President Trump would spell the end of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary and a surrogate for Kamala Harris, recently suggested that a Trump loss could restore "normalcy" to the GOP and effectively dissolve the MAGA movement. He further insinuated that the absence of Trump might reduce political division, even going so far as to suggest that Thanksgiving could return to normal.
According to The Post Millennial, Buttigieg stated on X on Sunday, "A vote for @KamalaHarris is a vote to get politics out of everyones face - and maybe even start to see a normal Republican Party reemerge." He expressed to Jen Psaki, former Biden press secretary, his hope that a Trump loss would "lead us to a moment where the Republican Party finds some way to part ways with what him and everything he represents. And we can sometimes, just sometimes, like at Thanksgiving dinner, maybe leave politics on the back burner."
However, it begs the question, who was responsible for politicizing Thanksgiving in the first place? In 2021, The Texas Observer encouraged readers to confront their "racist" relatives during Thanksgiving. The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune echoed this sentiment in 2018, while HuffPost provided advice on handling "racist" family members at the holiday gathering. As early as 2016, McClatchy published a guide on discussing race and politics at Thanksgiving dinner.
The ACLU offered a guide on discussing abortion rights at the dinner table, while The Nation expressed gratitude for abortions in 2022. USA Today suggested that Republicans could use Thanksgiving to better understand liberals, providing a guide on how to achieve this. In 2018, Rep. Maxine Waters urged Democrats to confront Trump supporters in public, and Harper's Bazaar advised readers in 2017 to divorce Trump-supporting spouses. This trend became so popular that it was even printed on t-shirts. CNN advised readers to avoid dating Trump supporters, and former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci revealed that his wife filed for divorce when he joined the administration. Newsweek recently acknowledged the dating challenges faced by Gen Z men who support Trump.
"There's one other message that I think is important," Buttigieg told Psaki, "and it is something that is kind of evoked by some of the craziness and ugliness of his campaign, which is I think that a lot of people, left, right and center in this country, who are just yearning for a more normal future, one which frankly has a more normal Republican Party. A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for politics not to be punching you in the face every day, every time you turn on the news."
Over the past weekend, it was reported that a Trump supporter was assaulted by an author in a New York grocery store. A man in California sustained a brain bleed after his Kamala-supporting neighbor attacked him over a Trump sign. Liberal Eagles fans attempted to remove MAGA hats from brothers Jack and Kevin Posobiec during a game, an effort that did not end well for them. President Joe Biden expressed a desire to "smack" Trump, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul stated, "If youre voting for these Republicans in New York, you are voting for someone who supports Donald Trump, and youre anti-woman, youre anti-abortion, and basically youre anti-American."
In July, Buttigieg stated, "beating Donald Trump the first time in 2020 ended his term, but it did not end his grip on the GOP. Beating him twice would, I think, will have a different effect on a lot of people in the GOP who know better than to be on board with him. He goes against their values, too, not just my values, but they've gone along with it because they think it's the path to power."
Buttigieg continued, "And it would become abundantly clear that that is not true, if we beat him, not just the way we beat him in 2020, not just the way we indirectly beat him in 2022 in the midterms, but beat him a second or so to speak third time. And we will always have fierce and meaningful disagreements between Democrats and Republicans, but there's a chance of that difference, those debates being a little less ugly. Or to put it another way, a little less weird."
The ultimate objective of the Kamala campaign is not merely to defeat Trump, but to dismantle the movement he symbolizes and eradicate the policies he advocates.
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