With today's news of us divorcing the WHO in the middle of a global pandemic, gonna re-up this thread. Trump remains in power because he's a bull in a host of different china shops that key GOP constituencies wanted to destroy for decades. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1185626165379137536?s=20

Wall Street bankers probably have no beef with the WHO and perhaps even wince when they see the president do this, but he's a bull in their china shop of choice--the SEC, CFPB, etc.--and so they'll live with it.

Something that serves as a key glue in Trump's coalition is a deep, existential hatred for one or more dimensions of the US federal government. This hatred of the US government is a key theme in the history of American conservatism from the New Deal to the present.

This is just one of many ways in which Trump is not some black swan event....rather, he's like a more condensed and unsubtle version of a political stew that's been simmering a long time.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that it was Lincoln's GOP that saved the union from destruction by strengthening the federal government in unprecedented ways. Now his GOP successor is doing everything he can to rip that union apart by destroying key pieces of our government.