Washington Post: Trump Indictment Yields Radically Different Reactions In Divided America

Republicans are winning married men by 20 points, married women by 14 points, and unmarried men by 7 points. So who is keeping Democrats competitive?

Answer: Single women are single-handedly saving the Democratic Party by a 37-point margin (68% to 31%).https://t.co/8RuR25nu4l

— i/o (@monitoringbias) August 3, 2023

Jenny Peterson represents the other pole in American politics: the White college educated suburban mom who suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome and who is addicted to CNN and MSNBC and who has one of those stupid “In This House We Believe” yard signs in her yard.

Washington Post:

MARIETTA, Ga. — Hours after former president Donald Trump was indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, Jenny Peterson was heading off to pick up Mexican food for her family. She’d tried to cut back on listening to the news in the car in favor of soul music. Politics left her too angry and agitated.

But on this night, the news was too big to ignore.

Peterson, 55, listened to NPR and flipped over to Fox News on her satellite radio to see what the other side was saying. She believed that so many of America’s core institutions were failing under the pressure of the former president and his followers. Convicting Trump wouldn’t fix those problems. But it was an essential first step.

“It’s important to me as a mom that my 16 and 14-year-old will see this one thing happen,” Peterson said. “Things will be improved when someone who has committed crimes in plain sight is held accountable.” …

If anything, it felt as though the two sides — those appalled by Trump and those who adore him — were growing ever more suspicious of each other. The divisions were reflected in opinion polls, which showed that Americans held diametrically opposite views of whether Trump should face criminal charges for his role in the attack on the Capitol. And they were reflected in the lives of Peterson and Ramsey. …

The poles of American politics were on a collision course. …

This is an insightful article.

These are the people, not us, who are pushing the system to its breaking point.

Peterson was defrosting some fish for her family’s dinner when a text message from her niece in D.C. appeared on the phone. She had been standing with the crowd outside the courthouse where Trump had been arraigned hours earlier.“

Did you see the big orange pumpkin?” Peterson asked her.“

No,” she replied. “Too many vehicles.”

Hillary Clinton has a big new article in The Atlantic whining about how misinformation on the internet caused her defeat in 2016.

The Atlantic:

The question that preoccupied me and many others over much of the past eight years is how our democracy became so susceptible to a would-be strongman and demagogue. The question that keeps me up at night now—with increasing urgency as 2024 approaches—is whether we have done enough to rebuild our defenses or whether our democracy is still highly vulnerable to attack and subversion.

There’s reason for concern: the influence of dark money and corporate power, right-wing propaganda and misinformation, malign foreign interference in our elections, and the vociferous backlash against social progress. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” has been of compelling interest to me for many years. But I’ve long thought something important was missing from our national conversation about threats to our democracy. Now recent findings from a perhaps unexpected source—America’s top doctor—offer a new perspective on our problems and valuable insights into how we can begin healing our ailing nation. …

Suppose at some point in the near future probably after the 2024 election that the polarization gets so bad that the system can no longer handle it and breaks down. Imagine either Republicans completely give up on believing that elections are fair or real or Democrats succumb to mass hysteria about fascism. The official victor is no longer recognized as legitimate by the official loser.

Do college educated suburban White women with professional class jobs take up arms against a Trump restoration? Do they go to war for abortion rights or to save Our Democracy?