Former President Donald Trump said in an interview that he received counsel from numerous people shortly after the 2020 election but that it was his decision to push the false claim he won the election and try to overturn the results.
There it is, plain as day. He literally just admitted to his crimes.
You can't be a republican without being some combination of stupid or evil.
And I don't just mean stupid colloquially as "people I don't like" but more specifically as "incapable of looking at facts and drawing reasonable conclusions from them."
It's weirder than that. I know people who are generally very good at reasoning based on facts except with Donnie they don't. When caught out in a lie, he explains it with an even more unbelievable lie and they just repeat it.
It’s really just as simple as tribalistic zero sum game politics. They want to damage the other side at whatever cost. It’s fueled by hate whipped into a frenzy by social media because it makes a lot money for social media companies to have people so engaged in hating others.
I used to be a republican, back before GW Bush & Cheney sent me off to Iraq to go look for yellowcake lol. I also have never used Facebook, Instagram or any other social media platforms outside of Lemmy (formerly Reddit). All of that said, the transformation of the R party into what it is today has been pretty disturbing for me. Frankly it reminds me of the fanatic suicide bomber Islamic extremism you see in the Middle East and elsewhere.