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It’s a Big Mistake 
There is now a debate over whether to change the income caps for eligibility for those $2,000 checks. (Actually, it’s an additional $1,400 which combined with the $600 from December will equal $2,000.) Specifically, the discussion is whether to lower the income cap from $75,000 to $50,000.
This is a major, major mistake.
From TPM Reader CC …
One of the things it would be hard for you to grasp totally is the extent to which Trump’s omnipresence was not just limited to the U.S. It was felt around the world and here in Australia he was covered and became part of everyday conversation so much more than Obama (except for Obama’s “honeymoon” period). Now he is gone and the coverage of US politics has really dialed back because it is so much more normal than it was. I think if it was not for COVID19 and how bad it is in America (particularly relative to here) the coverage would be virtually non-existent. So our de-trumping story is like a withdrawal from more than just Trump. It will be interesting to see what coverage of the impeachment trial will be but for the moment I don’t think I am the only Australian grateful to be able to ignore you again for a while.
Where Things Stand: The Fox News We Know And Love
There might have been a brief period when the conservative, Rupert Murdoch-owned cable news network earned a sliver of respect from competitors over its coverage of Trump — most notably when it refused to retract its Arizona call for Biden, even after coming under pressure.
But it appears nature is healing. Fox News is back to its Obama-era fixations on tan suit-variety non scandals.
QAnon is Not a ‘Conspiracy Theory’
As the QAnon phenomenon becomes more central to critical political and public safety questions, I realize we need a new vocabulary to describe this and similar phenomena. Q is not a “conspiracy theory”. The faked moon landing was a conspiracy theory. Perhaps birtherism was a conspiracy theory, though one with similarities to QAnon because of its strong ideological valence. But Q is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a fascistic political movement which predicts and advocates mass violence against liberals (and everyone else outside its definition of true Americans) in an imminent apocalyptic political reckoning. What we call the ‘conspiracy theories’ are simply the storylines and claims that justify that outcome. They could easily be replaced by others which serve the same purpose.
In other words – and this is still a very basic confusion – the Q phenomenon is not a factual misunderstanding that more credible news sources or prevalent fact-check columns would deflate and tame. You can even see this play out in real time in what we might call Q ‘man on the street’ interviews in which a reporter dissects or debunks some claim the Q supporter believes. The response is invariably something like, “Well, there are a bunch of other bad things I heard they did.”
Where Things Stand: Mask Optics
Without naming the former President, the Biden administration has been intentional from the start about being everything the Trump White House was not. Especially on COVID-19.
From TPM Reader HW …
I came from a very abusive household. My mother has the same cluster personality disorders as Trump and I was the focus of her physical and emotional assault. Where that helped me with Trump, is my years of therapy allowed me to see all of the patterns. It was all there and in some ways, it helped me recognize that my childhood experience was very real even as many tried over the years to normalize it or minimize it. I think that the Trump children are horrifying individuals, but I still have some bit of empathy for them. Not everyone can pull themselves out of the hell that is a crazy parent. I have a good life and a great family. My brother, however, is a financially insolvent drug addict who is repeating all the cycles with his kids.
From TPM Reader WH …
I was going to hold off on replying to your call for De-Trumpifying stories, but the response from reader BW really hit home and heartened me to share this.
I can vividly remember tuning in to the first GOP debate in 2015 and having my schadenfreude boomerang right back at me as soon as it became clear that none of the candidates or moderators knew how to respond to Trump’s bullying and buffoonery (or the audience’s enthusiasm for it). It immediately took me back to my stepdad—the easily disprovable lies about his own accomplishments and equally outrageous fabrications to disparage others, someone who rarely brought in any sort of income but spent freely on things ordered off late-night TV, a man who used his height and baggy clothes to hide flab and exude dominance. My stepdad even had a very weird combover system going on, except for days when he opted for a “NO SPIN ZONE” hat. So a lot of overlap.
From TPM Reader HS …
My De-Trumping is all about gaining historical perspective on how we got to the present moment and what the Democratic Party has to do to both move the country forward AND win the 2022 elections. And there is no better way to do that than dive into Rick Perlstein’s four volume masterpiece of our nation’s political and social history from Goldwater to Reagan. I lived through this period (born in 1950) and was reading progressive journalism that whole time (my lefty parents subscribed to The Nation, The New Republic, Ramparts, I.F.Stone’s Weekly, etc.), but wow, the stuff Perlstein digs up that you didn’t know about at the time it was happening is astonishing!
From TPM Reader JO …
All my life, during good presidencies and bad, the imagery of Washington has always meant something to me. Whether actually visiting, walking down the mall and gazing at the familiar buildings with a stirring of childhood patriotism, or seeing the famous façades in news photographs or paintings or movies, I’ve always responded emotionally. Not Bush, nor Reagan, nor even Nixon could besmirch the basic positive meaning of Washington, for me — I was a small child when Nixon resigned but it always seemed like, as bad as he was, the Presidency itself, on the most symbolic visual level, remained somehow untouched.
