But it's not realism. It's PTSD from 2016. Liberals were so shaken by Trump's victory--and now so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump administration burning everything to the ground--they're completely ignoring fundamental political realities and, as I said, ascribing literal magic powers to Trump that allow him to ignore massive, glaring problems for absolutely no reason.

That's not rational. That's the opposite of rational. It's not wishful thinking, it's noticing basic facts.

At the risk of retyping everything I just said:

Trump lost 2020. He lost the popular vote in 2016. Most of the candidates he endorsed lost. Some would call this "evidence" that maybe he's not that great at politics and the odds of him getting re-elected are really, really low.

At his "most powerful", when he was still novel enough to attract "centrists" willing to roll the dice, he still had an extremely narrow, one-dimensional base. He never had a popular majority. Ever. And over the next four years, he did nothing to expand it and everything to shrink it.

People see polls that say things like "70% of MAGA Republicans would be okay with Trump being on the ballot after being convicted of a felony" or whatever and freak out. "They're so devoted to him!!"

But what they fail to realize that, assuming these numbers are even vaguely accurate, it would mean Trump losing 30% of his base, and he would have nothing to fall back on.

And this is the real tedious part that I am so, so sick of typing every time I point out obvious weaknesses in Trump or Putin's terrible strategies and someone tells me "WELL DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THEM" as if I'm suggesting we should become cartoonishly complacent and just take a nap or something:

Of course we need to fight as hard as we can. And that means treating him as if he's a skilled campaigner who won't constantly sabotage himself.

But we also have to be realistic, and realism is not ignoring vast swathes of data in favor of magic fucking powers.