Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).

Obvious tax cuts for the rich.

That’s all his financiers hear.

Constantly attacks marginalized groups.

That’s all his voters hear.

Everything else goes in one ear and out the other, muddied up with enough “whataboutism” and “both sides” rhetoric from the financiers to keep the voters from actually considering alternative options.

What’s keeping him in the race is the delusional nature of his supporters. Think about all those points you wrote about what a horrible person he is. How many other candidates could survive even one of those controversies? He lives in an imaginary world of his own creation where whatever he says he believes to be true, and his cult like followers are so brainwashed that their perfectly smooth grey matter just soaks it up like a sponge. There’s precious little he could do or say at this point that would have his base leave him.

My naive understanding of the GOP candidate selection process is that there’s no way to select a new one after it’s been decided. Also, I think there are states where the deadline to be on the ballot has passed. So that alone is enough that Trump can’t be forced out of the race.

Then there’s his cult, the money invested in him, and the “loyalty” of the GOP to itself above all else.

Hatred of brown people and Adderall

Rich donors who don’t want EU like welfare states in the U.S.

It’s a race between junk food vs. an actual meal. Junk food is easy and self indulgent, real food requires time and effort. It doesn’t matter that junk food is a terrible value and lacks any nutrition. The Trump people choose junk, conservatives choose Trump people because the Trump people are mathematically mandatory to maintain their caste.

Judging by some of my distant acquaintances it’s something along the lines of HURR DURR GASOLINE WAS CHEAPER 8 YEARS AGO. They focus on a global commodity of all things.

Seriously, the only stuff I’ve seen from them that even approaches a policy comparison rather than “lol black lady is a ho” caliber stuff revolves around money. And some of that might actually be a valid discussion if it were correct and if it weren’t for the absurd amount of other issues.

It’s just a low-information team sport, regardless of how insane reality is.

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Many good points on here. I’d also suggest watching “Get Me Roger Stone”. In it, Stone basically details his secrets to getting the ‘silent majority’ to pay attention. He says that fear is a bigger motivator than love. He says that the uneducated can’t tell the difference between entertainment and politics. There’s so many lines in that documentary that will make your ears perk up and be like, damnt, this was exactly how they did it.

The GOP’s desperation for relevancy in a world where literally every problem can be blamed on Republicans

Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?

It’s depressing as hell that this is where we are.

I dunno wheres my 20k in student loan forgiveness?

To Paraphrase George Carlin “You get the exact type of politician you diserve.”

1. metacognitive myopia explained why people didn’t/couldn’t update their beliefs about the existence of “weapons of mass destruction etc”.
2. dogwhistling the threat of sexual revolution “comrade kamala” (i.e., he’s implying hypocrisy when he doesn’t understand what lenin’s use of the term “prostitute” meant).
3. playing the fool until you can’t (i.e., making his base feel insightful and “seen” as playfully serious, homophilically/mimetically charismatic; e.g., his base feels like their inference-making is being promoted based on linguistic sympathy through the aura of charisma).
4. from (3) somewhere in his administration they’re letting the would-be “fool” base do the grunt-work and creating cover; see “Optimal Team Formation Under Asymmetric Information”.

Cultists and the GOP that feels beholden to those cultists lest they get primaried