It is not that incoherent. Trump ran on a populist campaign, remember?

The rise of populism in American politics in the 2010s can be directly traced to the 2008 global financial crisis, during which nine million of American families lost their homes and millions more lost their jobs and their wealth. It was the last straw after decades of de-industrialization.

For an average American who just wants the jobs to come back, there is no difference between Trump and Sanders, if you look past the social progressive policies (and I suspect most American workers don’t give a damn about the terminally online chud stuff at all).

Sanders gave up and has completely assimilated into the DNC establishment, and campaigned for Joe Biden.

Trump won the first election, but regardless of his personal views, is completely unable to re-shore American jobs because the Wall Street financial capital simply won’t allow it. Sanders would have faced the same obstacles too if he were to be elected as president (and at that point, you can be sure that he has been 100% compromised by the establishment).

The point is that left-wing populism is always popular in America, but the material conditions simply aren’t there yet.

Material conditions don’t mean quality of life, as many internet leftists mistakenly think so. It means that a set of conditions determined by material forces will have to be fulfilled first.

For example, labor in modern US society is no longer tied to production, but to debt (the rentier economy), since its transition away from industrial capitalism into hyper-financialized capitalism, much like how a feudal society cannot unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses because labor was still tied to land (hence, land reform being one of the conditions toward socialism).

The big question is how do you re-proletarianize the American working class? It would require an extensive change in the current material conditions, for example, the collapse of Wall Street and the financialized system, the re-shoring of American industries etc. It would require a thorough class analysis into the 21st century American society. The conditions are unique to America - having to also take into account the historical development of its racial discrimination, imperial ambitions, dollar hegemony (financial imperialism) etc. that are very different from other countries.

I honestly don’t see much good quality work being done on this front, so the answers will continue to elude us until the Americans have their own body of analyses like Marx/Lenin/Mao did.

I think they intuitively recognise that something is wrong, that they are being fucked, that the whole establishment is bad. They go for outsiders to it as a result of this.

The problem is that they can’t tell which outsider is lying to them and which outsider is telling them the truth. They just know that the insiders are all “the swamp”.

This is more coherent than it looks (though still not that coherent, to be clear). They both claim to put Americans first. They both look down on liberation movements in the Global South. The American “political spectrum” just isn’t that wide.

advisors deciding it’s because of the “eating with his hands” thing and we start getting political ads with senators eating fistfuls of spaghetti

The “Kubrick Stare” is one of Stanley Kubrick‘s most recognizable directorial techniques, a method of shot composition where a character stares at the camera with a forward tilt, to convey to the audience that the character in question is at the peak of their derangement.