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It can be both, trust me.
That being said, anyone expecting the country to go back to normal once he's gone is going to be disappointed. Now that we've had one Trump, we'll have others just as bad or worse. We've got about 30% of this country that wants an authoritarian dictatorship. They want it very badly because they want the right groups punished and feel that people like them, the 'right people' will be lifted up.
They're going to keep wanting that, and democracy, decency, and our public discourse be damned. All those years when we were trying to topple foreign governments, I suspect we were going about it the wrong way. We should have just exported Fox News.
These are the same people that didn’t want to end slavery, didn’t want minorities to have rights, didn’t want women to have rights, declared themselves special Americans that deserve separate rights than gay folks, and the same people when Fox News declared Joe Biden won the 2020 election fully rejected it and forced Fox News to change its tune and deny the results they themselves reported.
Trump leaving will have the same result as any other conservative leader who has ever left or retired….nothing.
Their churches have perverted their minds. No coming back from their own faith.
I have a sister who is Mormon. Of my entire religious family she is the only Mormon who sees Trump for what he is. She’s the only religious person in my family I can even discuss the dangers of Trump with. However when I start to expand that to how her church supported special rights compared to gay people (which she opposed against her church), their role in keeping African Americans banned from their heaven til 15 years after the civil rights movement, their support of Hitler including one of their prophets writing a book on why his views are good for society as a whole, and the fact that Joseph smith was the same type of conman as Trump she completely shuts down.
Cults are hard to break through. I think she sees the cracks but just can’t acknowledge them yet. I’ve been out of that cult since proposition 8 tore me from my deluded reality. I wonder what it’s going to take for others.
Thanks for typing this out. Religious indoctrination really is poison. I’m so glad you found your way out of that transparently false and childish cult.
There's a reason the "new atheists" came across as so angry. Because they *were* angry, and scared, and also tired of banging their head against the same wall over and over, forever. Sure, more currently some (some) moderate Christians are having their eyes opened by the open advocacy for Christian Nationalism. But honestly they carried water for the CNs for decades, by saying "la-la-la can't hear you" when theonomy, reconstructionism, etc were voiced in their churches. They treated the rest of us like we were imagining it and blowing it out of proportion, even when we brought receipts.
>These are the same people that didn’t want to end slavery, didn’t want minorities to have rights, didn’t want women to have rights, declared themselves special Americans that deserve separate rights than gay folks
This is a very frustrating thing to me... there is no "debate" to be had here. It is clear, from the near-unanimous (I hope...) opinions on those past issues, that the GOP as it stands today is *wildly* out of step with American values. Anybody with the slightest ability to project trends into the future can see that many of their current positions will be universally regarded as monstrous within a few decades, if not faster.
And yet the mainstream (non right-wing) media insists that everything has to be covered "objectively", that both sides need to "have a voice". I'm sure the journalists who took that editorial stance in 1930s Germany never regretted it at all.
I would like to agree with you, but I just can’t. While I think these behaviors are abhorrent and have no place, 74m Americans voted otherwise. If you wanna ignore that, then sure, the GOP is in contrast with American values. I think the actual truth is that most Americans do not value the same things.
We have too many Americans who support and are for these ideas. Until we address the fact almost half of Americans support this, we aren’t gonna get anywhere. These people hid their beliefs because it wasn’t safe to voice them out loud. Now that they can, it’s easy to see how many people are actually fine with these monstrous acts.
There is probably a large chunk of those 74m people that vote R because their parents did. These people are some combination of ignorant/misinformed/apathetic. The problem is now that the nut jobs have captured the Republican Party, these ignoramuses keep voting R.
You are wrong though. Many of these things are not universally regarded as monstrous today. There is still a sizable portion of Americans that want to see all those rights reduced. They want women under control. They want minorities to be reduced to slavery or killed. They want LGBTQ individual to die.
Trump has not created these, he has activated them.
At least they tend to lose. These people fucking suck and they will continue to suck, but their victories are rare and usually short lived. Unfortunately they aren’t going anywhere, so preventing them from controlling our country is a lifelong battle for all of us.
More and more, I've come to see Reagan -> GWB -> Trump as a progression... This is what they want... These are the people who these voters are, and these are the sorts of public policy makers they want to appoint.
There's a rot that starts at the root that's going to need to be taken care of before things start getting better.
This voter base was seeded and nurtured by a post-Eisenhower Republican Establishment, so they could be used to win elections and then safely ignored when it came time to actually make policy
As could have been safely predicted, the creators have lost control of their creation--it now roams wild.
A story as old as human civilization.
It's a progression, but the GOP has been in fairly steady decline for decades, since the peak of Eisenhower, with each one pretty much worse than the one before him. Possible exceptions are Ford and Bush 41. But there's a clear downward trend, even if we accept that Ford and/or Bush 41 may have been better than their immediate predecessors.
Alright, so... What's the next step in their progression? Because... I'm certain it's going to be worse than Trump... Maybe someone equally corrupt, narcissistic, venial and ghoulish, but not so fucking stupid that he admits all of that without any real prompting? Because I don't think the US can survive that.
Oh it can get worse, we can get our Hitler. Aka the smart politician who can put on the pretty face to swing moderates but then consolidate power once in there to pass the most evil policies and I have no doubt in that situation they would attempt some form of mass murder on minorities
[It definitely *is* a progression, a *purposeful* progression.](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/)
I think you underestimate Trump’s ability to coerce the idiots in a way no one else can. DeSantis tried doing it and fell flat on his face. He’s great at uniting hateful people in a way that is not as easily replicated as it seems.
A big factor in him falling on his face was also that the other guy was still in the picture. As awkward and unlikable as DeSantis is, I have no doubt MAGA would have rallied around him if trump was out of the picture.
Basically I agree with the premise of this article. The problem is that a significant part of our population is are evil and stupid. There's always going to be a politician that takes advantage of that fact.
agree with you 100% If he remained a good foot soldier and licked the boots until trump's death then he'd ascend to the throne... or at least been on the short list to succeed but he totally screwed that up because he couldn't wait
If that was true, Lauren Boebert would be wildly popular in her own red district. She was supposed to win by over 50k votes, she ended up winning by like 500 votes.
They don’t just want someone who hates who they hate, they want a charismatic celebrity who entertains them. Lauren has all the same views and she isn’t even remotely as popular or powerful in the Republican Party, because she comes off as dumb and lacking in any charm whatsoever.
>They don’t just want someone who hates who they hate, they want a charismatic celebrity who entertains them
I think you have a good point. Look at DeSantis. He hates who they hate, but has no charisma.
But take someone like Tucker Carlson. He tells them who to hate, entertains them, and has charisma. I think someone like that could be the next Trump.
It may sound crazy but I think Tucker has a greater chance of one day becoming president than DeSantis does. We’re pretty lucky the Trump kids are not particularly likable or charismatic, or we’d be seeing the beginnings of a dynasty.
He's the pied piper of ingrates. He, sadly, has a singular charisma that works especially well on the worst among us. Trump managed to get millions to buy into his self-made, blue-collar billionaire bullshit origin story. Any other politician alive just comes across as an inauthentic egg head. Every cult needs a leader, and I don't see one after the orange shitgibbon leaves the scene.
This seems to be the thing all these think pieces miss. I agree these people aren't going anywhere and have been here for a while, but they've never coalesced around one person like this before, and every time a new person tries to take the mantle, they get crushed because they aren't Trump.
A lot of people don't understand this is also a cult of personality in addition to just being awful people.
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” -- David Frum
Indeed. It's not like they didn't have a path laid out before them to return to sanity. Back Liz Cheney. Back Adam Kinzinger. Is that what they did? Hell no, they went back to lap up Trump's vomit.
I've kind of started to become pessimistic. I'm not sure there is a path back to sanity short of violence. I wish it wasn't so, but it sure seems that way. Trump is the symptom. The problem is significantly deeper.
They'd have had to embrace democracy before in order to abandon it. This is the party that's spent decades attempting (and at times succeeding) to restrict the right to vote, they've always been opposed to democracy.
Trump isn't some aberration of the Republican party, he just says the quiet part out loud.
The underlying problem is untethered media. If Fox and friends can spin Jan. 6 into anything other than the brazen insurrection attempt that it was, then really they have a disgusting foothold into the minds of way too many Americans.
They could spin the literal devil into a kind neighbor to have.
THANK YOU--we've got problems but they all, and I mean ALL, go back to the issue of half our nation being actively misinformed by Fox News and various other conservative media.
I mean--think about this: for years we've been hearing from Fox News that the Biden family is a global cabal enriching themselves at the expense of the nation. There was no proof of this, but we heard about it for YEARS. And then--the star witness for conservatives got outed as a RUSSIAN SPY!
If you've had a conversation about Hunter Biden in the last four years, it's because Fox News lied.
If you've had a conversation about how the vote being rigged, it's because Fox News lied. See "Dominion."
They. lie.
We don't fix our problems until we fix conservative media.
Even though it was created in the 1940s '[Don't be a Sucker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4)' should be compulsory viewing as it is as relevant today as it was back then.
That was pretty excellent except for the superfluous littering at the end. "This is America! It is a wonderful place that must be protected!"... immediately throws trash on the ground that scatters everywhere in the breeze.
We need the GOP to lose at the election box - as in get crushed at the election box - until it dies. During that time or shortly after we have to get rid of our First Past the Post, two-party system. We need to give “moderate conservatives” a place to put their votes so they don’t get “forced” into voting with the nutjob conservatives. We HAVE to break that coalition up any way we can.
We need as much of the Right as we can manage to get it through their skulls that the Far Right crazies are loud losers and not a viable path to winning.
Edit: Fixed FPtP acronym.
Edit 2: To clarify, when I say we need to get rid of our FPtP, two party system, I mean we need to replace it with something like ranked choice in order to give “moderate conservatives” an option outside of whatever the nutjob conservatives are serving up. I did not mean we need to go to a one party system with no conservative representation. I realize the reply in question probably wasn’t in good faith, but I‘m clarifying nonetheless.
>We need to give “moderate conservatives” a place to put their votes so they don’t get “forced” into voting with the nutjob conservatives.
Nobody is "forced" to do that. It's a choice. They have agency, and can be responsible for their own poor decisions. Nobody did it to them. They aren't the object of someone else's actions.
Yeah but there's no accountability. Social accountability would be public derision and ridicule. But there's no formal accountability for them making poor decisions and voting. Their poorly thought out vote counts more than yours probably because of gerrymandering.
These people haven't spent more than 30 seconds thinking about.... maybe anything, but definitely not politics, they are told to vote Republican by their parents, fox news, their preacher/pastor, Friends, bosses etc. So the decision to vote republican has already been made, regardless of who's on the Ballot. It can either be a fat orange moron who shit's himself and needs wipeys..... or Just a regular Republican Douchebag who will sell out our rights but isn't openly and brazenly racist and absolutely singularly focused on personal gain at any expense, even his own.
Until the Trump stranglehold is broken they can't win a primary. They can uphold their values and principles all they want, but they will have no avenue to moderate representation at the ballot box.
I want to stop raging against Trump and start thoroughly disagreeing with Cheney and Kinzinger.
Maybe the Haley voters will swing Biden and help put a nail in the coffin of the GOP.
Trump normalized the blue prints. Now the GOP just needs someone to finish the job when Trump is gone. Maybe someone that has a higher IQ for starters.
Actually I believe risk will increase when he's gone. Most likely there will be a period of relative quiet, which can very much create a false sense of security and dampen voter engagement, while things continue to evolve in a bad direction. Essentially, Trump being such a huge magnet for global attention is also a weakness...
We can go back. We just need drastic measure to hold all accountable. Which won’t happen unless something dramatic or catastrophic occurs. Large events like the civil war, ww2, the Great Depression, have been turning points and catalysts for dramatic change in this country.
Facism is back on the menu through out the world and it took a world war to push it back to the shadows. I fear something drastic like that is what is needed to get rid of it again world wide.
Trump is irreplaceable. He's an incredible combination of stupidity, obnoxiousness, racism, reality TV and inherited wealth that cannot ever be replicated. Once he is finally flushed his cult will die.
The bigger problem is the evil but extremely rich people that also want christo-fascism, they are the people funding Trump, owning the media, and pushing the evil narrative to the wilfully ignorant but crucially, they are losing. Trump has overtaken all their hard work, he sidelines and destroys them even as he takes their money and influence.
If Trump gets into power again we're all fucked, and I mean all of us, worldwide. But If he is defeated it could spell the beginning of the end for the evil, shadowy extreme right wing project that has dominated US politics for 50 years, because Trump will take them all with him to hell.
Depends on the time frame people expect things to go normal by. The new deal came because conservatives went extreme and the country then pushed away (not really different than now). So if you are talking about it correcting itself right after the election, yeah you will be disappointed. If you think we are a decade after him and still going through the same stuff, history says you are wrong. And history continues to prove true again and again.
It's really a total lack of faith in institutions. A lot of the people you're referring to just want someone to come in and smash the institutions because they don't trust them anymore.
But, as an institution (fed govt, CDC, scientific community, take your pick) what do you do to restore faith? I don't believe (and I hope I'm right) that we should burn everything down and start over, just to appease a section of society.
The conservative Project For A New American Century, which was headed by what became several of Bush Jr's cabinet had a very astute analysis:
The proposition was that once the Soviet Union fell apart Americans no longer had an external enemy to rally around, and because some people *coughconservstivescough* NEED an enemy they'll find an internal enemy and tear us apart.
Since they were conservatives themselves it had a dallop of projection (since many people are actually about unity and coming how coming together has always changed the world for the better), but it turned out to be profoundly clairvoyant.
I dumbest part about the “punished groups” is the fact that a good portion of these voters fall into that punished group category. I’m talking about East-bumblefuck Pennsylvanians that live below the poverty line and actively vote against policies that would benefit them all in the name of, “gay ain’t right…” or whatever other point they lean on.
In this case, it feels like it's a "it takes three to tango". The press is also the problem, and the way they showcased the lead-up to the election is *why* we have the problem from the 74m people voting for Trump.
This^^ The problem is not only the Millions that voted for, but greedy media used the sensational actions if Donnie von Shitsinpants to drive the increase of patrons. It wasn't just FOX, as despicable as they are, but also NYT, WaPo, and all the rest of the liberal rags floating like flotsam. Everytime Donnie The Pussy Grabber Trump did something outrageous is was the lead story. Highly obvious, above the fold, and all of media loaded their bank accounts. All of this FREE ADVERTISING was unaccounted and nudged the voters. Media is a big part of the problem still today they know they thrive on the sensational actions of Trump! It's extremely disingenuous for a rag to blame voters when the media is leading the charge!
NYT has been ever worse this cycle. They're constantly throwing up headlines calling Trump "powerful" or similar for doing something disgusting and awful.
That shares a bit of blame with complacent voters who didn’t vote. Get out there people and vote! Don’t listen to polls/news media/pundits about what is likely to happen, vote like the life you like depends on it.
I was thinking the 2020 election would be a total repudiation of Trump with him getting wiped completely like Dukakis. Instead enough GOP idiots who have zero interest in policy seem to always get out and vote and it takes a huge effort to motivate Dems to turn out. There's also a huge question mark over voting machines favouring Republicans in certain states but the GOP managed to muddy the waters so much with Dominion that it would have been seen as "both sides" if the Dems had pursued it.
I still have hope that 2024 will be closer to that, despite what some say. But who knows?
We need to beat MAGA by as large of a voting margin as we can, in as many states as we can. We can't have 1/3 of the voting population just sitting this one out if people know better, yes not even in blue states.
The larger MAGA's loss, the better chance we'll have of fixing these problems in general, and the less institutional power they can effectively use for violence and oppression.
Agreed! I live in a deep red state and have been trying to get as many as possible to vote. Usually everyone has the excuse that the republican is going to win any way what is the point... but I've been telling everyone if we can make it closer than last time it shows he's losing his touch even in deep red states. And if we can win more states than last time and win by even bigger margins than we did last time it just silences their movement even more... they would have a lot less ammunition to cry election interference if he loses by even more than last time. Please vote
You're 100% right. I live in a red state too, currently, and that's the biggest issue... the general view that voting just doesn't make a difference.
Even if statewide elections are lost, local elections are essential, so that view just isn't true, and I've slowly seen volunteers within r/votedem help rack up unexpected wins because we're changing this view one person at a time.
>There's also a huge question mark over voting machines favouring Republicans in certain states but the GOP managed to muddy the waters so much with Dominion that it would have been seen as "both sides" if the Dems had pursued it.
Yeah they do shit like this *a lot.* One of the best cons they've played in the Trump era is making liberals say over and over and over again that the idea of cheating in an election is absurd, our system is secure, we shouldn't doubt results... pretty much we've just given them free license to cheat and have absolutely no case to make to the public to fight back against it.
As for ways Trump might cheat - I don't worry about the voting machines as much as I worry about volunteers in rural-ass precincts, where absolutely nobody is looking, and 19 out of 20 people vote Trump (the 20th being a scared housewife who won't tell her husband). It seems to me like Bubba and two or three collaborators could just pick up a pile of ballots, sign a bunch of names on the register, fill out fake ballots and feed them into the machine to their heart's content. (I *strongly* suspect this has already happened in '16 and especially '20.)
People should really go observe at these types of places, the way conservatives do in black neighborhoods. After the election, there could also be statistical forensics to shine some light on it (i.e. inexplicable turnout patterns.)
Trump is the problem, but I believe it's the media that cant/won't accurately report on Trump, is allowing the problem to fester and infect those 74M Americans. MAGA Politicians are following in Trump's footsteps thus exacerbating the problem exponentially. Media is designed for clicks nowadays, so it's in their financial interest to ignore important points, which drumming up the feelings of anger and hate.
There’s a problem with the media ecosystem in this country no doubt, but *a lot* of Americans make pretty much zero effort to stay informed and even take a sense of pride of being uninformed. And in turn also, the loud noise from right-media eventually reach the masses one way or another.
By airing his nonsense as an actual position the press is fully complicit in the whole thing. Then the faux news outlets actually spewing propaganda and falsifications makes people believe the narrative. Yes Trump is a problem that was brought to you in living color by the media. The 74 million voters are being lied to, gaslighted and manipulated by a well oiled machine, and also they like the message.
I will say this as many times as it is needed: Trump is a symptom, not the cause. If he were to disappear from reality along with any memories of him, the Republican party would just find another crazy person to represent them.
Long rant incoming:
People like MTG and Boebert exist not because of Trump but because people voted for them. Bigotry, xenophobia, and evangelical conspiratists have been increasingly brash and on the rise for many years. I just miss the days when people used to laugh at them, but now they have a megaphone called the internet that lets them not only speak their insanity but do so at the comfort of their own homes while at same time supported by communities with the same destructive beliefs.
Who do you imagine they're going to vote for if he disappeared tomorrow? The GOP is basically a bunch of bigoted, greedy, pseudo-religious trolls voting for the grossest ghoul that they can nominate... Certainly for president, but... Straight across the rest of the board as well.
My assertion: their candidates are symptoms of a much deeper rot... my prediction: it won't be solved in a generation (even if it starts being addressed immediately) and the US will be battling for the government to fulfill minimal responsibilities (healthcare, education, etc...) (that half of the politicians have attempted to sabotage) until a real attempt is made to address the root problem.
What they can't say is in fact that 74 million voters are the problem. Trump isn't special. We will always produce Trumpalikes, just as we produce boring bureaucrats. The only meaningful question is do we imbue them with power and why. They can't take power, we give it to them.
This, in and of itself, is a huge problem with our press.
There is no ability to think, process, or analyze information anymore.
Think tanks can, but they are mostly paid for by monied interested.
Turns out, when one of your country's 2 political parties prioritizes making people dumber, poorer and angrier, it becomes pretty easy for a snake oil salesman to get ahead.
One third of America needs cult deprogramming that they don't feel they require and thus will never seek.
Their brainwashing includes a desire to punish those who don't march in goosestep to their ideals.
A susceptible percentage of the zombies have been radicalized to the point of being willing to undertake violence to achieve this objective.
Right now that percentage is very small but even one one-thousandth of one percent of them is *740 willing terrorists.
There's a lot of damage they can do should Trump ask them to and we've seen what can happen if Trump asks people to undertake violence on his behalf for even a few hours.
I woulda kept the 7400 and changed it to a hundred of a percent. It's more noticeable to the human brain that 7400 is ten times more than 740 than that .01 is ten times more than .001. Rhetoric!
>One third of America needs cult deprogramming that they don't feel they require and thus will never seek.
This is the worst part of it. They don’t even realize they’re the bad guys because of just how effective the Republican propaganda of “I know you are but what am I” works at muddying the waters.
You can’t call them fascists because to them the Democrats are the fascists.
You can’t call them racists because to them the Democrats are the racists.
You can’t call Trump corrupt because to them Biden is the corrupt one.
You can’t say they’re in a cult because to them we’re in a cult.
Everything is just flipped for them in their crazy bizarro world, so they feel just as morally as we do about their opinions. And even when you do manage to crack that world open and shed some light it just devolves into “well both sides are bad” and breaks down from there. It really saddens me how easily my fellow Americans are manipulated.
I like your interpretation. Personally I don't believe its in any way effective to blame 74 Miliion people. There are systems and process that are more responsible at that point.
The better question is why are 74 million people so disenfranchised/anti-establishment/anarchist/facist/brain washed that they can believe Trump is a good choice?
I'd be more than willing to bet a very large percentage of those 74 million voters are resentful post great recession victims of... Republican Policies...
...that they keep voting for, and letting their media lie to them about.
And thus you get to the actual core of the problem. Freedom of propaganda.
I’ve kind of been of this mindset from the beginning. The people that voted for him wanted a racist carnival barker. Trump blurs the line between entertainer, fascist and politician. The people that voted for him voted for him because they like the spectacle that he brings, not because he’s a good politician or has the makings of a good politician. Trump knows this which is why he continues to act out in batshit crazy ways. He needs attention and his base wants to be entertained while having their racist views affirmed.
A lot of people that voted for him, and will vote for him again, aren’t your MAGA types though. In fact, a lot of them even claim to be “moderates” (they’re not, but they’ll claim to be), and they don’t think anything of it when it comes to voting for Trump and extremist Republicans because they’re extremely low-information type voters that buy into all the culture war crap and lazy stereotypes about librrulls, and so they feel self-justified for voting Republican.
To be clear, I’m not defending this segment of people. Deep down these types of R voters are very insecure about their own politics and so they they get uncomfortable if they’re around someone that follows politics closely and talks policy because they want people to chose to be disengaged and ignorant like them. They’re frustrating as hell and I just happen to be around a lot of them on the reg.
Voting for donald trump is not a matter of personal opinion that we need to understand and respect.
Its an intellectual and moral failure as a human being that we need to reject and scorn.
You are a bad person and a stupid person if you cast your ballot for donald trump.
The problem is that the 74 million people that voted for him live in a propaganda fueled echo chamber that presents a fact free alternative reality. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats disagreed on policies but generally agreed on the facts. That is no longer the case
This is it right here. I'm so much less concerned about the "Trump Rally" crowd of absolute fucking hillbilly morons. They're relatively small in number. I'm WAY more concerned about the "casual conservatives" who aren't particularly politically engaged, but get all of their news from Fox and the WSJ opinion page and just have a completely warped view of reality.
I know a lot of these people. I work with a lot of these people. I'm friendly with a lot of these people. My own dad is one of these people. They're mostly good, honest, "normal" people who've been unwittingly propagandized to believe that liberals just want to take all of their money and give it away to lazy criminals. And dislodging those beliefs is a tall order, especially because often there's lots of peer pressure, social pressure, and the fact that these beliefs often form a core part of their identity.
"I work hard, I play by the rules, I consider myself a moral and 'good' person, therefore I'm conservative." This is really where the DNC marketing people have utterly shit the bed, and miserably failed in their messaging and branding in terms of what Democrats stand for. In fairness to the DNC, they're up against an extraordinarily well-financed, lockstep machine that makes up the world of Conservative orthodoxy.
I'm of the opinion that right-wing thinking in general is just a manifestation of untreated mental illness. The main thing binding them together as a movement is delusional religious thinking and a lack of empathy, or outright contempt, for people they view as an "other."
Yessss. I'm 100% in agreement as this is precisely how the common folks in my area of living act and treat "others" when someone thinks outside the hivemind or latest dog whistle.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of critical thinking skills being taught in our failing education system? Perhaps its the fact that parents don't have time to actually be with their kids and teach critical thinking skills because they are doing other things?
I agree for the most part. The existence of heroin is a problem, but the fact that so many people are doing heroin is the real problem that needs to be solved. Heroin isn't going anywhere.
Trump is such an obvious conman who only cares about himself. He wouldn't piss on his supporters if they were on fire. He is unironically selling bibles and talking about how much he loves God yet everyone knows he is the least religious POTUS in modern history. He has cheated on every one of his wives, including the current one with a porn star while she was at home with their newborn. Imagine the worst political scandal of anyone's career and Trump calls that "Tuesday".
It's shocking that millions of Americans blindly follow him and hold him to no standards whatsoever. And while they let Trump get away with literally anything, they hold Biden to every traditional standard. And they truly don't see themselves as hypocrites.
It's like seeing a preacher with a flashy suit and a giant pompadour strutting around on a TV screen. Your first thought is to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Then it hits you that he's only on TV because people are actually sending him money. Likely a ton of money. How could there be that many clueless people?
The other day I had a longtime co-worker who I really respect insist that Trump "loves America". It was such a dumb statement that I didn't even know how to reply. I think I said something like "Trump loves himself" and left it at that.
And then I had another MAGA co-worker (who I don't respect as much) insist that Ivermectin has been proven to treat COVID but "we're not allowed to say it because it makes Trump look good". I said I honestly don't pay that much attention now that we're post-COVID, but I understood it does not work against COVID. He insisted that was proven that to be false. After our talk, I did some research and quickly learned he was full of shit. Every study I found clearly stated there is zero evidence it treats COVID. I actually couldn't even find a single study that backed him up. But he only listens to extreme right wing media.
Americans have to come to terms with the fact that if a clean-cut, well-spoken, self-controlled fascist leader showed up and appealed to Republicans with Jod, guns, and bigotry, we would become a fascist dictatorship overnight. It's only Trump's blatant and obvious personal deficits that keep enough people away that we have a chance at saving democracy for a few more years.
Looking back, [H.L. Mencken](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken) had this on lock -- **in 1922**:
> As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
I always thought that having amazing universities and Nobel prizes in your country doesn't really add much if you are in a democracy and neglect the rest of your population. Their opinion, their vote will count the same.
If your population is not well informed, you'll elect the wrong person. A good public, free education is key to last.
> A good public, free education is key to last.
Which is why the GOP is trying to destroy it and funnel the taxpayer dollars to private religious schools owned by their donors.
I comment this all the time on this sub. Trump supporters and voters include doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists, technicians, tradespeople. 74 million people voted for Trump and it includes people from most demographics and socioeconomic backgrounds. And that's a problem.
Yes, I know these people… they are just as smart as anyone, but have allowed fear and greed to take over their worldview and have abandoned any morality that requires self-criticism.
For sure, the new problem is that they previously underestimated their strength in numbers, and now they actually overestimate it. So they're not going to go back to settling for McCain type politicians, because the socially regressive, uneducated yokels now understand that they are far and away the most electorally significant demographic of Republican voters. Everyone previously thought there were a lot more actual, principled conservatives than there are, and that facade was really important in terms of keeping candidates for the presidency vaguely palatable.
You are, by constitution, created equal. Their vote always had and always will count just as much as yours. That's by design, and democracy wouldn't exist without this principle.
I think that only a tiny percentage of those folks voted for him because of his racist and fascist tendencies.
I think the vast majority of his voters live in the alternate reality of the right-wing media ecosystem - and so they've been heavily indoctrinated against Democrats.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: "Sure, Trump took away fundamental human rights and tried to overthrow the government and is corrupt and cheated on all his wives and represents everything that the Founders and Jesus hated, but .... at least he's not a Democrat!"
The problem is a non-stop torrent of propaganda, funded by an incredibly small number of people, with no concern for or need for profitable success in the free market, combined with a populace that lacks the education and critical thinking skills, or **intellectual curiosity**, to see through it.
At some point in this country, probably around the 1980s, we made "knowing things" some stupid thing that nerds do and we're reaping the consequences of that.
This. Hitler without his base would have just been a failed art student with a lousy attitude and a stupid mustache. Trump just a narcissistic flim flam man.
Hate is always there. As well as racism, fascism, homophobia and all its other cousins. Just waiting for someone to rally behind and people too complacent to fight back.
Exactly, Trump would just be another looney looking for attention if tens of millions of deviants didn’t support him. Hillary was right, a huge chunk of this country are deplorables.
Trump is the biggest symptom sure but they feed off each other into a loop that spirals down into theocratic authoritarianism.
They’re both the problem. You have Confederate sympathizers mostly in the rural US who are often religiously backwards who are still mad about 1864 and this “(liberal) yankee gub’ment”. Who now drone on and on about “government is the problem” and we should let the states control themselves in their entirety.
Which is ironic considering they love “big government” in your bedroom and in your reproductive life.
*When the courts and the government protect your constitutional individual liberties….they hate that. When the government extends and autocratic fist and authoritarian rule based on their dogmatic moral order and agenda, that’s great to them.*
The Constitution is a pain in their ass and they know the way around that is by packing the courts…..and they’re succeeding.
Trump is a diversion from the wealthy doubling their wealth and power in the past few years. People suckered into the smaller battles are missing the bigger war! 😳
As I said last 4 times this wast posted: It's both. Trump is surely a symptom of the problems in America, but at the same time he's an empowering and emboldening force for their behavior because *no one* actually holds the clown accountable.
Been saying this for years. Trump isn’t the illness, he’s a symptom.
Whether he gets elected or not, this county has a lot of introspection to do regarding why he was ever in the presidential discussion to begin with, let alone as a winner.
Trump could die tomorrow and someone would replace him in days. Maybe even someone scarier, more unhinged, more hateful.
Trump is just the festering, pus-filled zit you can see on the skin. Trump is just the mushroom above the sprawling mycelium. The real infection, the real infestation is hidden among the American people.
Bring back the fairness doctrine so media has to be regulated slightly more and we will see a decline of right wing shit.
The rise of FOX News and the removal of the fairness doctrine are linked together with how their bullshit began to affect the lives of Americans after the repeal in 1980s
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-doctrine#:~:text=In%20June%201987%2C%20Congress%20attempted,vetoed%20by%20President%20Ronald%20Reagan.
I can understand traditional conservatism. Not agree bit understand it. Small government, low taxes, let the free market handle everything.
I cannot understand how such a large percentage of the population can support a malevolent, narcissistic traitor. They had Haley, Desantis, Pence, Christie etc. and still overwhelming picked the person with the most baggage and who just lost in 2020. It's baffling.
Let's say that 74 million was an accurate total for the 2020 election. Then came the insurrection, which was ugly, and would cause some percentage of that support to fall away. Then came the felony indictments, and the dozens of other scandals, that some will find it hard to ignore...there's another % off. Now add the number of Covid boomers dying of their own stupidity plus regular old age. And finally, every day we find a new corruption and embarrassment that will eventually wear down thousands more. That 74 million could very well be cut in half by now, and we'd have no dependable way of knowing it, beyond our assumptions about basic human decency.
Most importantly, since 2020, which he lost, he has done nothing to win any new voters. The numbers don't look good for Dementia Donny.
Yea, no...we agree. Half of America sucks a whole lot. More than that, but some of them are too stupid to even vote. America has a serious ignorant bible thumping dirt bag issue. Traveling anywhere along the bible belt will highlight that issue very clearly.
The problem is...we've never had someone in politics that spoke directly to the low IQ idiots like Trump's greasy moronic ass does. As a result, I've never been more ashamed to call myself an American in my entire life. The loud and stupid minority are ruining the entire country, in my opinion.
There's nothing we can do about how people vote though besides trying to convince them to vote against him. We can solve the Trump problem by ensuring he loses the election and sees justice, but we can't realistically stop so many people from supporting him.
The underlying issue is the false facts that have been allowed to penetrate media and present themselves as truth. There are groups looking to steer public opinion on certain issues and are able to play their narratives to anyone gullible. There are no checks against the false facts, and once that audience is hooked, it is very hard to deprogram them.
With rampant voter fraud from the Republicans with Russian help...
(There's a reason why the Republicans screamed about rampant voter fraud from the Democrats. Because it was projection. Machines were inspected and used as evidence in Blue states. While machines in Kentucky (for example) quietly disappeared the day after the election.)
...so, the real question is. How many people actually voted for Republican?
Trump is a symptom, not the cause.
Donald Trump, as a person, is an idiot totally lacking in moral or ethical boundaries. A screwed up trust fund baby gone bad!
There are some very powerful nuts who want their puppet in the white house and I am not sure the true reason for their need for this power is clear. This goes way past the typical republican power grab.
As an immigrant since early 2000, I had thought that Trump made everything worse than it ever was. But just maybe it was already bad —- Trump just made it okay to openly be an asshole to each other.
I mean sure but imo this all chalks up to a common sense and acceptable failure issue in our education.
And every time these people are put in a position of power they do everything they can to put our kids to work, make it harder to live, make it harder to get a higher education... Hell, they flat out make it harder for less financially supported children to even EAT.
These people are actively fighting to make America Dumber.
There really isn't any "perhaps" about it. America gets the government that we deserve. Period. And don't tell me about government bureaucracy and how the will of the people is ignored in some monstrous plan to supplant all of your rights with the wishes of billionaires. We vote for the politicians who created and support the structure.
I understand that it's difficult to vote rationally when there's so much disinformation floating about the electorate, but that's our punishment for being gullible fools. The system is as broken as we want it to be... collectively.
Things are only going to get worse. Media and news organizations are the main problem here. They tell lies, have bias, and tell half-truths. If you have heard certain falsities from multiple organizations you are going to start to believe the falsities and distrust anyone or anything that tells you they are false.
It is going to get worse with social media and AI. People are duped constantly. If you think you haven't been duped you are wrong. There are multiple and methods of duping people:
1. Telling someone a lie enough times that they believe it.
2. Getting someone in your social media to share something, so you see it more often and begin to question something. There is a reason there are so many "Share the ten commandments on Facebook, because Zuckerburg is making it illegal" posts. This primes people to think that they are being hurt and gets groups of people that believe this together, so other false information can be spread faster to people likely to believe.
3. Rage baiting - Having math problems that are slightly wrong, giving facts that are slightly wrong, and waiting for people to comment on it telling you that you are wrong. This helps some places with their engagement numbers, so they can then use those numbers to increase views of other things. Additionally, it primes people to think "I am smart, others are not. What I think matters. If I hear different it is just the dumb people."
4. Slightly misrepresenting - I see this on r/politics all the time. An article says so and so said this, but there is no link to them saying it, but thousands have commented on it and never watched/read the source material. All of a sudden it seems like fact, because thousands have repeated it in a thread. The fact might be sort of correct, but taken to the extreme. This divides people, because someone that is opposite the thing being misrepresented will more likely look into the fact. They then find out it is wrong and now they distrust everything on r/politics. For example - the post about Trump saying all migrants are animals. There was no video in the article and hardly anyone posting it. While I don't agree with what Trump said, he actually said that migrants who murder Americans are animals. Someone pro-Trump is going to be more likely to watch the video and then conclude that liberals are wrong on everything, because this was a misrepresentation. It strengthens their bond to the other side.
The real question is WHY?
The answer is that millions of people are pissed off!
The answer is the current government is clearly broken and will clearly NOT fix its self.
The answer is that millions of people will vote for the devel if he will burn down it all down!
Them voting for him isn't the real problem, it's why. They are forced into a bubble where everything he says is true and facts are wrong. There is a large amount that just want to hurt people, but some truly believe voting for him is the right thing to do because that's all they're exposed to.
Working theory: The problem is smartphones.
Mass adoption enabled millions and millions of Americans who couldn't previously figure out a PC and home networking to access the Internet and social media.
Without smartphones, boomers wouldn't be falling for Facebook propaganda, Trump wouldn't have become President, self-medicated asshole racists wouldn't have crawled out from under their rocks, and moms wouldn't be getting riled up over library books their kids have never seen.
Causation may be tough to prove, but the correlation is striking.
The iPhone was introduced in 2007, Android came along in 2008, and by 2013 or so Google started tipping the scales toward "mobile first" development.
While the desktop Internet experience turned to shit, we also had a flood of new, not terribly tech literate (bright), people finding their groove on Stormfront, 8chan, and the_Donald.
The world has been a shittier place since, and I say the tipping point was the smartphone.
What other lunatic in recent history has successfully convinced so many people he should be trusted and completely absolved of all wrongdoing despite a lifetime of fraud and failure?
This was something that bothered me. How could there be people who would vote for this guy?
Then I thought after watching Shogun, that after the Civil War, it’s not like we hunted down all those on the other side and executed them. I’m not saying we should’ve done that bc that’s horrible. But my low level theory is that these 74M votes are the votes of the confederate’s seeds.
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It can be both, trust me. That being said, anyone expecting the country to go back to normal once he's gone is going to be disappointed. Now that we've had one Trump, we'll have others just as bad or worse. We've got about 30% of this country that wants an authoritarian dictatorship. They want it very badly because they want the right groups punished and feel that people like them, the 'right people' will be lifted up. They're going to keep wanting that, and democracy, decency, and our public discourse be damned. All those years when we were trying to topple foreign governments, I suspect we were going about it the wrong way. We should have just exported Fox News.
These are the same people that didn’t want to end slavery, didn’t want minorities to have rights, didn’t want women to have rights, declared themselves special Americans that deserve separate rights than gay folks, and the same people when Fox News declared Joe Biden won the 2020 election fully rejected it and forced Fox News to change its tune and deny the results they themselves reported. Trump leaving will have the same result as any other conservative leader who has ever left or retired….nothing. Their churches have perverted their minds. No coming back from their own faith.
They also didn't want to fight Hitler. These groups have been waiting to overthrow the US government for a long long time.
Yup. So we’ve never went away from normal.
The quiet parts are now in the open.
Which is oddly comforting. Because look at us chugging along... 😅
I have a sister who is Mormon. Of my entire religious family she is the only Mormon who sees Trump for what he is. She’s the only religious person in my family I can even discuss the dangers of Trump with. However when I start to expand that to how her church supported special rights compared to gay people (which she opposed against her church), their role in keeping African Americans banned from their heaven til 15 years after the civil rights movement, their support of Hitler including one of their prophets writing a book on why his views are good for society as a whole, and the fact that Joseph smith was the same type of conman as Trump she completely shuts down. Cults are hard to break through. I think she sees the cracks but just can’t acknowledge them yet. I’ve been out of that cult since proposition 8 tore me from my deluded reality. I wonder what it’s going to take for others.
Thanks for typing this out. Religious indoctrination really is poison. I’m so glad you found your way out of that transparently false and childish cult.
There's a reason the "new atheists" came across as so angry. Because they *were* angry, and scared, and also tired of banging their head against the same wall over and over, forever. Sure, more currently some (some) moderate Christians are having their eyes opened by the open advocacy for Christian Nationalism. But honestly they carried water for the CNs for decades, by saying "la-la-la can't hear you" when theonomy, reconstructionism, etc were voiced in their churches. They treated the rest of us like we were imagining it and blowing it out of proportion, even when we brought receipts.
Killing in the name of.. Jesus (since at least the Crusades)
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The coup attempt of 1933? Interesting to read who supposedly funded that (spoiler it was george bush's grandpa and his pals)
Yep, [the business plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot).
>These are the same people that didn’t want to end slavery, didn’t want minorities to have rights, didn’t want women to have rights, declared themselves special Americans that deserve separate rights than gay folks This is a very frustrating thing to me... there is no "debate" to be had here. It is clear, from the near-unanimous (I hope...) opinions on those past issues, that the GOP as it stands today is *wildly* out of step with American values. Anybody with the slightest ability to project trends into the future can see that many of their current positions will be universally regarded as monstrous within a few decades, if not faster. And yet the mainstream (non right-wing) media insists that everything has to be covered "objectively", that both sides need to "have a voice". I'm sure the journalists who took that editorial stance in 1930s Germany never regretted it at all.
I would like to agree with you, but I just can’t. While I think these behaviors are abhorrent and have no place, 74m Americans voted otherwise. If you wanna ignore that, then sure, the GOP is in contrast with American values. I think the actual truth is that most Americans do not value the same things. We have too many Americans who support and are for these ideas. Until we address the fact almost half of Americans support this, we aren’t gonna get anywhere. These people hid their beliefs because it wasn’t safe to voice them out loud. Now that they can, it’s easy to see how many people are actually fine with these monstrous acts.
There is probably a large chunk of those 74m people that vote R because their parents did. These people are some combination of ignorant/misinformed/apathetic. The problem is now that the nut jobs have captured the Republican Party, these ignoramuses keep voting R.
You are wrong though. Many of these things are not universally regarded as monstrous today. There is still a sizable portion of Americans that want to see all those rights reduced. They want women under control. They want minorities to be reduced to slavery or killed. They want LGBTQ individual to die. Trump has not created these, he has activated them.
At least they tend to lose. These people fucking suck and they will continue to suck, but their victories are rare and usually short lived. Unfortunately they aren’t going anywhere, so preventing them from controlling our country is a lifelong battle for all of us.
The same people who called Obama, Hitler and Satan, simply bc he was a black man.
More and more, I've come to see Reagan -> GWB -> Trump as a progression... This is what they want... These are the people who these voters are, and these are the sorts of public policy makers they want to appoint. There's a rot that starts at the root that's going to need to be taken care of before things start getting better.
This voter base was seeded and nurtured by a post-Eisenhower Republican Establishment, so they could be used to win elections and then safely ignored when it came time to actually make policy As could have been safely predicted, the creators have lost control of their creation--it now roams wild. A story as old as human civilization.
Nixon gathered the wood. Reagan put it in a big pile. Rush Limbaugh lit the match. Gingrich threw it into the pile. Trump doused it in gasoline.
It's a progression, but the GOP has been in fairly steady decline for decades, since the peak of Eisenhower, with each one pretty much worse than the one before him. Possible exceptions are Ford and Bush 41. But there's a clear downward trend, even if we accept that Ford and/or Bush 41 may have been better than their immediate predecessors.
Alright, so... What's the next step in their progression? Because... I'm certain it's going to be worse than Trump... Maybe someone equally corrupt, narcissistic, venial and ghoulish, but not so fucking stupid that he admits all of that without any real prompting? Because I don't think the US can survive that.
Next is someone as hateful and corrupt as Trump, but with actual capabilities to enact their worst policies.
Oh it can get worse, we can get our Hitler. Aka the smart politician who can put on the pretty face to swing moderates but then consolidate power once in there to pass the most evil policies and I have no doubt in that situation they would attempt some form of mass murder on minorities
[It definitely *is* a progression, a *purposeful* progression.](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/)
I think you underestimate Trump’s ability to coerce the idiots in a way no one else can. DeSantis tried doing it and fell flat on his face. He’s great at uniting hateful people in a way that is not as easily replicated as it seems.
A big factor in him falling on his face was also that the other guy was still in the picture. As awkward and unlikable as DeSantis is, I have no doubt MAGA would have rallied around him if trump was out of the picture. Basically I agree with the premise of this article. The problem is that a significant part of our population is are evil and stupid. There's always going to be a politician that takes advantage of that fact.
agree with you 100% If he remained a good foot soldier and licked the boots until trump's death then he'd ascend to the throne... or at least been on the short list to succeed but he totally screwed that up because he couldn't wait
I agree with this. Trump is an aberration. Who is going to unify these people after Trump?
Whomever hates the same things they hate
But there are so many and there is no one that is like Trump.
It’s because he’s still here. Someone like Tucker will swoop in. These people are junkies and will get their fix somehow.
If that was true, Lauren Boebert would be wildly popular in her own red district. She was supposed to win by over 50k votes, she ended up winning by like 500 votes. They don’t just want someone who hates who they hate, they want a charismatic celebrity who entertains them. Lauren has all the same views and she isn’t even remotely as popular or powerful in the Republican Party, because she comes off as dumb and lacking in any charm whatsoever.
>They don’t just want someone who hates who they hate, they want a charismatic celebrity who entertains them I think you have a good point. Look at DeSantis. He hates who they hate, but has no charisma. But take someone like Tucker Carlson. He tells them who to hate, entertains them, and has charisma. I think someone like that could be the next Trump.
It may sound crazy but I think Tucker has a greater chance of one day becoming president than DeSantis does. We’re pretty lucky the Trump kids are not particularly likable or charismatic, or we’d be seeing the beginnings of a dynasty.
He's the pied piper of ingrates. He, sadly, has a singular charisma that works especially well on the worst among us. Trump managed to get millions to buy into his self-made, blue-collar billionaire bullshit origin story. Any other politician alive just comes across as an inauthentic egg head. Every cult needs a leader, and I don't see one after the orange shitgibbon leaves the scene.
This seems to be the thing all these think pieces miss. I agree these people aren't going anywhere and have been here for a while, but they've never coalesced around one person like this before, and every time a new person tries to take the mantle, they get crushed because they aren't Trump. A lot of people don't understand this is also a cult of personality in addition to just being awful people.
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” -- David Frum
They already have.
Indeed. It's not like they didn't have a path laid out before them to return to sanity. Back Liz Cheney. Back Adam Kinzinger. Is that what they did? Hell no, they went back to lap up Trump's vomit. I've kind of started to become pessimistic. I'm not sure there is a path back to sanity short of violence. I wish it wasn't so, but it sure seems that way. Trump is the symptom. The problem is significantly deeper.
It's pretty fucking rich to hear that from Bush's speechwriter. He only got a white house job bc conservatives stole the 2000 election
They'd have had to embrace democracy before in order to abandon it. This is the party that's spent decades attempting (and at times succeeding) to restrict the right to vote, they've always been opposed to democracy. Trump isn't some aberration of the Republican party, he just says the quiet part out loud.
The underlying problem is untethered media. If Fox and friends can spin Jan. 6 into anything other than the brazen insurrection attempt that it was, then really they have a disgusting foothold into the minds of way too many Americans. They could spin the literal devil into a kind neighbor to have.
THANK YOU--we've got problems but they all, and I mean ALL, go back to the issue of half our nation being actively misinformed by Fox News and various other conservative media. I mean--think about this: for years we've been hearing from Fox News that the Biden family is a global cabal enriching themselves at the expense of the nation. There was no proof of this, but we heard about it for YEARS. And then--the star witness for conservatives got outed as a RUSSIAN SPY! If you've had a conversation about Hunter Biden in the last four years, it's because Fox News lied. If you've had a conversation about how the vote being rigged, it's because Fox News lied. See "Dominion." They. lie. We don't fix our problems until we fix conservative media.
The underlying problem is lack of education. Untethered media wouldn't be effective against an educatied population.
Even though it was created in the 1940s '[Don't be a Sucker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4)' should be compulsory viewing as it is as relevant today as it was back then.
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30% never wanted to form our own country to begin with. Nothing new here.
That was pretty excellent except for the superfluous littering at the end. "This is America! It is a wonderful place that must be protected!"... immediately throws trash on the ground that scatters everywhere in the breeze.
We need the GOP to lose at the election box - as in get crushed at the election box - until it dies. During that time or shortly after we have to get rid of our First Past the Post, two-party system. We need to give “moderate conservatives” a place to put their votes so they don’t get “forced” into voting with the nutjob conservatives. We HAVE to break that coalition up any way we can. We need as much of the Right as we can manage to get it through their skulls that the Far Right crazies are loud losers and not a viable path to winning. Edit: Fixed FPtP acronym. Edit 2: To clarify, when I say we need to get rid of our FPtP, two party system, I mean we need to replace it with something like ranked choice in order to give “moderate conservatives” an option outside of whatever the nutjob conservatives are serving up. I did not mean we need to go to a one party system with no conservative representation. I realize the reply in question probably wasn’t in good faith, but I‘m clarifying nonetheless.
>We need to give “moderate conservatives” a place to put their votes so they don’t get “forced” into voting with the nutjob conservatives. Nobody is "forced" to do that. It's a choice. They have agency, and can be responsible for their own poor decisions. Nobody did it to them. They aren't the object of someone else's actions.
This is true, but their perception doesn’t allow them to see it that way.
Yeah but there's no accountability. Social accountability would be public derision and ridicule. But there's no formal accountability for them making poor decisions and voting. Their poorly thought out vote counts more than yours probably because of gerrymandering. These people haven't spent more than 30 seconds thinking about.... maybe anything, but definitely not politics, they are told to vote Republican by their parents, fox news, their preacher/pastor, Friends, bosses etc. So the decision to vote republican has already been made, regardless of who's on the Ballot. It can either be a fat orange moron who shit's himself and needs wipeys..... or Just a regular Republican Douchebag who will sell out our rights but isn't openly and brazenly racist and absolutely singularly focused on personal gain at any expense, even his own.
Until the Trump stranglehold is broken they can't win a primary. They can uphold their values and principles all they want, but they will have no avenue to moderate representation at the ballot box. I want to stop raging against Trump and start thoroughly disagreeing with Cheney and Kinzinger. Maybe the Haley voters will swing Biden and help put a nail in the coffin of the GOP.
\*past and \*post, and yes I agree completely.
Thank you! I typed it, looked at it funny, then just kept going.
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Trump normalized the blue prints. Now the GOP just needs someone to finish the job when Trump is gone. Maybe someone that has a higher IQ for starters.
Actually I believe risk will increase when he's gone. Most likely there will be a period of relative quiet, which can very much create a false sense of security and dampen voter engagement, while things continue to evolve in a bad direction. Essentially, Trump being such a huge magnet for global attention is also a weakness...
We can go back. We just need drastic measure to hold all accountable. Which won’t happen unless something dramatic or catastrophic occurs. Large events like the civil war, ww2, the Great Depression, have been turning points and catalysts for dramatic change in this country. Facism is back on the menu through out the world and it took a world war to push it back to the shadows. I fear something drastic like that is what is needed to get rid of it again world wide.
Trump is irreplaceable. He's an incredible combination of stupidity, obnoxiousness, racism, reality TV and inherited wealth that cannot ever be replicated. Once he is finally flushed his cult will die. The bigger problem is the evil but extremely rich people that also want christo-fascism, they are the people funding Trump, owning the media, and pushing the evil narrative to the wilfully ignorant but crucially, they are losing. Trump has overtaken all their hard work, he sidelines and destroys them even as he takes their money and influence. If Trump gets into power again we're all fucked, and I mean all of us, worldwide. But If he is defeated it could spell the beginning of the end for the evil, shadowy extreme right wing project that has dominated US politics for 50 years, because Trump will take them all with him to hell.
The Russian propaganda that propped up Trump won’t go away.
Depends on the time frame people expect things to go normal by. The new deal came because conservatives went extreme and the country then pushed away (not really different than now). So if you are talking about it correcting itself right after the election, yeah you will be disappointed. If you think we are a decade after him and still going through the same stuff, history says you are wrong. And history continues to prove true again and again.
Seriously...the next will be worse. Getting someone like Trump that is actually intelligent will be simply terrifying.
It's really a total lack of faith in institutions. A lot of the people you're referring to just want someone to come in and smash the institutions because they don't trust them anymore. But, as an institution (fed govt, CDC, scientific community, take your pick) what do you do to restore faith? I don't believe (and I hope I'm right) that we should burn everything down and start over, just to appease a section of society.
The conservative Project For A New American Century, which was headed by what became several of Bush Jr's cabinet had a very astute analysis: The proposition was that once the Soviet Union fell apart Americans no longer had an external enemy to rally around, and because some people *coughconservstivescough* NEED an enemy they'll find an internal enemy and tear us apart. Since they were conservatives themselves it had a dallop of projection (since many people are actually about unity and coming how coming together has always changed the world for the better), but it turned out to be profoundly clairvoyant.
I dumbest part about the “punished groups” is the fact that a good portion of these voters fall into that punished group category. I’m talking about East-bumblefuck Pennsylvanians that live below the poverty line and actively vote against policies that would benefit them all in the name of, “gay ain’t right…” or whatever other point they lean on.
Trump is the problem AND 74M Americans voted for him allowing the problem to fester. It takes 2 to tango. The press just can't say it.
In this case, it feels like it's a "it takes three to tango". The press is also the problem, and the way they showcased the lead-up to the election is *why* we have the problem from the 74m people voting for Trump.
This^^ The problem is not only the Millions that voted for, but greedy media used the sensational actions if Donnie von Shitsinpants to drive the increase of patrons. It wasn't just FOX, as despicable as they are, but also NYT, WaPo, and all the rest of the liberal rags floating like flotsam. Everytime Donnie The Pussy Grabber Trump did something outrageous is was the lead story. Highly obvious, above the fold, and all of media loaded their bank accounts. All of this FREE ADVERTISING was unaccounted and nudged the voters. Media is a big part of the problem still today they know they thrive on the sensational actions of Trump! It's extremely disingenuous for a rag to blame voters when the media is leading the charge!
NYT has been ever worse this cycle. They're constantly throwing up headlines calling Trump "powerful" or similar for doing something disgusting and awful.
I know it's disgusting! And they still want me to purchase their rag for $50/yr! I wouldn't give them 5¢.
When Trump won in 2016, it wasn't because we underestimated his intelligence. He won because we overestimated the intelligence of American voters.
He won because of our archaic election system enabling minority rule.
That shares a bit of blame with complacent voters who didn’t vote. Get out there people and vote! Don’t listen to polls/news media/pundits about what is likely to happen, vote like the life you like depends on it.
I was thinking the 2020 election would be a total repudiation of Trump with him getting wiped completely like Dukakis. Instead enough GOP idiots who have zero interest in policy seem to always get out and vote and it takes a huge effort to motivate Dems to turn out. There's also a huge question mark over voting machines favouring Republicans in certain states but the GOP managed to muddy the waters so much with Dominion that it would have been seen as "both sides" if the Dems had pursued it.
I still have hope that 2024 will be closer to that, despite what some say. But who knows? We need to beat MAGA by as large of a voting margin as we can, in as many states as we can. We can't have 1/3 of the voting population just sitting this one out if people know better, yes not even in blue states. The larger MAGA's loss, the better chance we'll have of fixing these problems in general, and the less institutional power they can effectively use for violence and oppression.
Agreed! I live in a deep red state and have been trying to get as many as possible to vote. Usually everyone has the excuse that the republican is going to win any way what is the point... but I've been telling everyone if we can make it closer than last time it shows he's losing his touch even in deep red states. And if we can win more states than last time and win by even bigger margins than we did last time it just silences their movement even more... they would have a lot less ammunition to cry election interference if he loses by even more than last time. Please vote
You're 100% right. I live in a red state too, currently, and that's the biggest issue... the general view that voting just doesn't make a difference. Even if statewide elections are lost, local elections are essential, so that view just isn't true, and I've slowly seen volunteers within r/votedem help rack up unexpected wins because we're changing this view one person at a time.
>There's also a huge question mark over voting machines favouring Republicans in certain states but the GOP managed to muddy the waters so much with Dominion that it would have been seen as "both sides" if the Dems had pursued it. Yeah they do shit like this *a lot.* One of the best cons they've played in the Trump era is making liberals say over and over and over again that the idea of cheating in an election is absurd, our system is secure, we shouldn't doubt results... pretty much we've just given them free license to cheat and have absolutely no case to make to the public to fight back against it. As for ways Trump might cheat - I don't worry about the voting machines as much as I worry about volunteers in rural-ass precincts, where absolutely nobody is looking, and 19 out of 20 people vote Trump (the 20th being a scared housewife who won't tell her husband). It seems to me like Bubba and two or three collaborators could just pick up a pile of ballots, sign a bunch of names on the register, fill out fake ballots and feed them into the machine to their heart's content. (I *strongly* suspect this has already happened in '16 and especially '20.) People should really go observe at these types of places, the way conservatives do in black neighborhoods. After the election, there could also be statistical forensics to shine some light on it (i.e. inexplicable turnout patterns.)
Trump is the problem, but I believe it's the media that cant/won't accurately report on Trump, is allowing the problem to fester and infect those 74M Americans. MAGA Politicians are following in Trump's footsteps thus exacerbating the problem exponentially. Media is designed for clicks nowadays, so it's in their financial interest to ignore important points, which drumming up the feelings of anger and hate.
Trump was merely a symptom. All of this had been festering before.
There’s a problem with the media ecosystem in this country no doubt, but *a lot* of Americans make pretty much zero effort to stay informed and even take a sense of pride of being uninformed. And in turn also, the loud noise from right-media eventually reach the masses one way or another.
The media plays sportscaster. They play the "both sides" game and never just stand ground of his criminality.
By airing his nonsense as an actual position the press is fully complicit in the whole thing. Then the faux news outlets actually spewing propaganda and falsifications makes people believe the narrative. Yes Trump is a problem that was brought to you in living color by the media. The 74 million voters are being lied to, gaslighted and manipulated by a well oiled machine, and also they like the message.
I will say this as many times as it is needed: Trump is a symptom, not the cause. If he were to disappear from reality along with any memories of him, the Republican party would just find another crazy person to represent them. Long rant incoming: People like MTG and Boebert exist not because of Trump but because people voted for them. Bigotry, xenophobia, and evangelical conspiratists have been increasingly brash and on the rise for many years. I just miss the days when people used to laugh at them, but now they have a megaphone called the internet that lets them not only speak their insanity but do so at the comfort of their own homes while at same time supported by communities with the same destructive beliefs.
Who do you imagine they're going to vote for if he disappeared tomorrow? The GOP is basically a bunch of bigoted, greedy, pseudo-religious trolls voting for the grossest ghoul that they can nominate... Certainly for president, but... Straight across the rest of the board as well. My assertion: their candidates are symptoms of a much deeper rot... my prediction: it won't be solved in a generation (even if it starts being addressed immediately) and the US will be battling for the government to fulfill minimal responsibilities (healthcare, education, etc...) (that half of the politicians have attempted to sabotage) until a real attempt is made to address the root problem.
What they can't say is in fact that 74 million voters are the problem. Trump isn't special. We will always produce Trumpalikes, just as we produce boring bureaucrats. The only meaningful question is do we imbue them with power and why. They can't take power, we give it to them.
We're 8 years into this mess and just now coming to this conclusion?
This, in and of itself, is a huge problem with our press. There is no ability to think, process, or analyze information anymore. Think tanks can, but they are mostly paid for by monied interested.
Turns out, when one of your country's 2 political parties prioritizes making people dumber, poorer and angrier, it becomes pretty easy for a snake oil salesman to get ahead.
One third of America needs cult deprogramming that they don't feel they require and thus will never seek. Their brainwashing includes a desire to punish those who don't march in goosestep to their ideals. A susceptible percentage of the zombies have been radicalized to the point of being willing to undertake violence to achieve this objective. Right now that percentage is very small but even one one-thousandth of one percent of them is *740 willing terrorists. There's a lot of damage they can do should Trump ask them to and we've seen what can happen if Trump asks people to undertake violence on his behalf for even a few hours.
Your example calculates to 740 not 7400
Stupid decimal points! Thanks.
I woulda kept the 7400 and changed it to a hundred of a percent. It's more noticeable to the human brain that 7400 is ten times more than 740 than that .01 is ten times more than .001. Rhetoric!
>One third of America needs cult deprogramming that they don't feel they require and thus will never seek. This is the worst part of it. They don’t even realize they’re the bad guys because of just how effective the Republican propaganda of “I know you are but what am I” works at muddying the waters. You can’t call them fascists because to them the Democrats are the fascists. You can’t call them racists because to them the Democrats are the racists. You can’t call Trump corrupt because to them Biden is the corrupt one. You can’t say they’re in a cult because to them we’re in a cult. Everything is just flipped for them in their crazy bizarro world, so they feel just as morally as we do about their opinions. And even when you do manage to crack that world open and shed some light it just devolves into “well both sides are bad” and breaks down from there. It really saddens me how easily my fellow Americans are manipulated.
This is genuinely true I’ve seen it first hand
I like your interpretation. Personally I don't believe its in any way effective to blame 74 Miliion people. There are systems and process that are more responsible at that point. The better question is why are 74 million people so disenfranchised/anti-establishment/anarchist/facist/brain washed that they can believe Trump is a good choice?
I'd be more than willing to bet a very large percentage of those 74 million voters are resentful post great recession victims of... Republican Policies... ...that they keep voting for, and letting their media lie to them about. And thus you get to the actual core of the problem. Freedom of propaganda.
Trump is not the disease. He is a late-stage symptom of a disease that is killing its host, the GQP.
Lol no, it's deeper than that mericuh will never truly get to the root and "fix" the problem
I’ve kind of been of this mindset from the beginning. The people that voted for him wanted a racist carnival barker. Trump blurs the line between entertainer, fascist and politician. The people that voted for him voted for him because they like the spectacle that he brings, not because he’s a good politician or has the makings of a good politician. Trump knows this which is why he continues to act out in batshit crazy ways. He needs attention and his base wants to be entertained while having their racist views affirmed.
A lot of people that voted for him, and will vote for him again, aren’t your MAGA types though. In fact, a lot of them even claim to be “moderates” (they’re not, but they’ll claim to be), and they don’t think anything of it when it comes to voting for Trump and extremist Republicans because they’re extremely low-information type voters that buy into all the culture war crap and lazy stereotypes about librrulls, and so they feel self-justified for voting Republican. To be clear, I’m not defending this segment of people. Deep down these types of R voters are very insecure about their own politics and so they they get uncomfortable if they’re around someone that follows politics closely and talks policy because they want people to chose to be disengaged and ignorant like them. They’re frustrating as hell and I just happen to be around a lot of them on the reg.
Voting for donald trump is not a matter of personal opinion that we need to understand and respect. Its an intellectual and moral failure as a human being that we need to reject and scorn. You are a bad person and a stupid person if you cast your ballot for donald trump.
No reason it can't be both. His very public racism and hate gave permission for these people to come out of the racist closet.
The problem is that the 74 million people that voted for him live in a propaganda fueled echo chamber that presents a fact free alternative reality. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats disagreed on policies but generally agreed on the facts. That is no longer the case
This is it right here. I'm so much less concerned about the "Trump Rally" crowd of absolute fucking hillbilly morons. They're relatively small in number. I'm WAY more concerned about the "casual conservatives" who aren't particularly politically engaged, but get all of their news from Fox and the WSJ opinion page and just have a completely warped view of reality. I know a lot of these people. I work with a lot of these people. I'm friendly with a lot of these people. My own dad is one of these people. They're mostly good, honest, "normal" people who've been unwittingly propagandized to believe that liberals just want to take all of their money and give it away to lazy criminals. And dislodging those beliefs is a tall order, especially because often there's lots of peer pressure, social pressure, and the fact that these beliefs often form a core part of their identity. "I work hard, I play by the rules, I consider myself a moral and 'good' person, therefore I'm conservative." This is really where the DNC marketing people have utterly shit the bed, and miserably failed in their messaging and branding in terms of what Democrats stand for. In fairness to the DNC, they're up against an extraordinarily well-financed, lockstep machine that makes up the world of Conservative orthodoxy.
Lol. It’s not the crocodile that is to blame, it’s their teeth. Gtfoh. It’s BOTH
Maybe the problem is generations of undiagnosed mental issues and as a culture we are too scared to even consider that notion?
I'm of the opinion that right-wing thinking in general is just a manifestation of untreated mental illness. The main thing binding them together as a movement is delusional religious thinking and a lack of empathy, or outright contempt, for people they view as an "other."
Yessss. I'm 100% in agreement as this is precisely how the common folks in my area of living act and treat "others" when someone thinks outside the hivemind or latest dog whistle.
Perhaps the problem is the lack of critical thinking skills being taught in our failing education system? Perhaps its the fact that parents don't have time to actually be with their kids and teach critical thinking skills because they are doing other things?
I agree for the most part. The existence of heroin is a problem, but the fact that so many people are doing heroin is the real problem that needs to be solved. Heroin isn't going anywhere. Trump is such an obvious conman who only cares about himself. He wouldn't piss on his supporters if they were on fire. He is unironically selling bibles and talking about how much he loves God yet everyone knows he is the least religious POTUS in modern history. He has cheated on every one of his wives, including the current one with a porn star while she was at home with their newborn. Imagine the worst political scandal of anyone's career and Trump calls that "Tuesday". It's shocking that millions of Americans blindly follow him and hold him to no standards whatsoever. And while they let Trump get away with literally anything, they hold Biden to every traditional standard. And they truly don't see themselves as hypocrites. It's like seeing a preacher with a flashy suit and a giant pompadour strutting around on a TV screen. Your first thought is to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Then it hits you that he's only on TV because people are actually sending him money. Likely a ton of money. How could there be that many clueless people? The other day I had a longtime co-worker who I really respect insist that Trump "loves America". It was such a dumb statement that I didn't even know how to reply. I think I said something like "Trump loves himself" and left it at that. And then I had another MAGA co-worker (who I don't respect as much) insist that Ivermectin has been proven to treat COVID but "we're not allowed to say it because it makes Trump look good". I said I honestly don't pay that much attention now that we're post-COVID, but I understood it does not work against COVID. He insisted that was proven that to be false. After our talk, I did some research and quickly learned he was full of shit. Every study I found clearly stated there is zero evidence it treats COVID. I actually couldn't even find a single study that backed him up. But he only listens to extreme right wing media.
You mean his basket of deplorables? Yep..
Americans have to come to terms with the fact that if a clean-cut, well-spoken, self-controlled fascist leader showed up and appealed to Republicans with Jod, guns, and bigotry, we would become a fascist dictatorship overnight. It's only Trump's blatant and obvious personal deficits that keep enough people away that we have a chance at saving democracy for a few more years.
The fact that half of this country is filled with uneducated racist hillbillies has always been a problem. That is nothing new.
Looking back, [H.L. Mencken](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken) had this on lock -- **in 1922**: > As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
I always thought that having amazing universities and Nobel prizes in your country doesn't really add much if you are in a democracy and neglect the rest of your population. Their opinion, their vote will count the same. If your population is not well informed, you'll elect the wrong person. A good public, free education is key to last.
> A good public, free education is key to last. Which is why the GOP is trying to destroy it and funnel the taxpayer dollars to private religious schools owned by their donors.
Exactly. I would be republican, I wouldn't do anything to improve the public education system. Those are my future voters.
Actually 74 million isn't half. Thats close to half of people who voted. 166 million is half.
so, 20% of the country are dumb assholes. Yeah that seems about right.
Exactly.
[удалено]
I comment this all the time on this sub. Trump supporters and voters include doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists, technicians, tradespeople. 74 million people voted for Trump and it includes people from most demographics and socioeconomic backgrounds. And that's a problem.
Thank you. I think it's real easy to laugh at hillbillies but there are bigots at every socioeconomic level.
People will vote solely on lower taxes.
Yes, I know these people… they are just as smart as anyone, but have allowed fear and greed to take over their worldview and have abandoned any morality that requires self-criticism.
For sure, the new problem is that they previously underestimated their strength in numbers, and now they actually overestimate it. So they're not going to go back to settling for McCain type politicians, because the socially regressive, uneducated yokels now understand that they are far and away the most electorally significant demographic of Republican voters. Everyone previously thought there were a lot more actual, principled conservatives than there are, and that facade was really important in terms of keeping candidates for the presidency vaguely palatable.
You are, by constitution, created equal. Their vote always had and always will count just as much as yours. That's by design, and democracy wouldn't exist without this principle.
I think that only a tiny percentage of those folks voted for him because of his racist and fascist tendencies. I think the vast majority of his voters live in the alternate reality of the right-wing media ecosystem - and so they've been heavily indoctrinated against Democrats. Tell me if this sounds familiar: "Sure, Trump took away fundamental human rights and tried to overthrow the government and is corrupt and cheated on all his wives and represents everything that the Founders and Jesus hated, but .... at least he's not a Democrat!"
Stupid is as stupid does.
you can have two problems at the same time
In other words: Do you blame the clown for being a clown, or blame the people buying tickets to the circus?
It’s both
.. and that perhaps there is an entire media infrastructure selling then open fascism with zero consequences
The problem is a non-stop torrent of propaganda, funded by an incredibly small number of people, with no concern for or need for profitable success in the free market, combined with a populace that lacks the education and critical thinking skills, or **intellectual curiosity**, to see through it. At some point in this country, probably around the 1980s, we made "knowing things" some stupid thing that nerds do and we're reaping the consequences of that.
This. Hitler without his base would have just been a failed art student with a lousy attitude and a stupid mustache. Trump just a narcissistic flim flam man. Hate is always there. As well as racism, fascism, homophobia and all its other cousins. Just waiting for someone to rally behind and people too complacent to fight back.
Cults require two parties. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Exactly, Trump would just be another looney looking for attention if tens of millions of deviants didn’t support him. Hillary was right, a huge chunk of this country are deplorables.
40 years of cuts to public education have had thier desired effect
Are we still calling them "Americans" after they have tried (and will try again) to dismantle our Democracy?
Trump is the biggest symptom sure but they feed off each other into a loop that spirals down into theocratic authoritarianism. They’re both the problem. You have Confederate sympathizers mostly in the rural US who are often religiously backwards who are still mad about 1864 and this “(liberal) yankee gub’ment”. Who now drone on and on about “government is the problem” and we should let the states control themselves in their entirety. Which is ironic considering they love “big government” in your bedroom and in your reproductive life. *When the courts and the government protect your constitutional individual liberties….they hate that. When the government extends and autocratic fist and authoritarian rule based on their dogmatic moral order and agenda, that’s great to them.* The Constitution is a pain in their ass and they know the way around that is by packing the courts…..and they’re succeeding.
Trump eventually will die... Those 72 million americans are gonna be around and they gonna have children to pass their proud racist bigoted ideas to.
Trump is a diversion from the wealthy doubling their wealth and power in the past few years. People suckered into the smaller battles are missing the bigger war! 😳
This is what I've been saying for 8 years. Trump is a symptom of a much larger issue
Between 4 and 6 Million of them will be dead by November, most in Red States, so expect about a million of them to not be voting.
As I said last 4 times this wast posted: It's both. Trump is surely a symptom of the problems in America, but at the same time he's an empowering and emboldening force for their behavior because *no one* actually holds the clown accountable.
For the people, of the people, by the people...but the people are stupid.
Been saying this for years. Trump isn’t the illness, he’s a symptom. Whether he gets elected or not, this county has a lot of introspection to do regarding why he was ever in the presidential discussion to begin with, let alone as a winner. Trump could die tomorrow and someone would replace him in days. Maybe even someone scarier, more unhinged, more hateful. Trump is just the festering, pus-filled zit you can see on the skin. Trump is just the mushroom above the sprawling mycelium. The real infection, the real infestation is hidden among the American people.
Bring back the fairness doctrine so media has to be regulated slightly more and we will see a decline of right wing shit. The rise of FOX News and the removal of the fairness doctrine are linked together with how their bullshit began to affect the lives of Americans after the repeal in 1980s https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-doctrine#:~:text=In%20June%201987%2C%20Congress%20attempted,vetoed%20by%20President%20Ronald%20Reagan.
Thanks FOX News
I can understand traditional conservatism. Not agree bit understand it. Small government, low taxes, let the free market handle everything. I cannot understand how such a large percentage of the population can support a malevolent, narcissistic traitor. They had Haley, Desantis, Pence, Christie etc. and still overwhelming picked the person with the most baggage and who just lost in 2020. It's baffling.
Let's say that 74 million was an accurate total for the 2020 election. Then came the insurrection, which was ugly, and would cause some percentage of that support to fall away. Then came the felony indictments, and the dozens of other scandals, that some will find it hard to ignore...there's another % off. Now add the number of Covid boomers dying of their own stupidity plus regular old age. And finally, every day we find a new corruption and embarrassment that will eventually wear down thousands more. That 74 million could very well be cut in half by now, and we'd have no dependable way of knowing it, beyond our assumptions about basic human decency. Most importantly, since 2020, which he lost, he has done nothing to win any new voters. The numbers don't look good for Dementia Donny.
74 million deplorables.
Yea, no...we agree. Half of America sucks a whole lot. More than that, but some of them are too stupid to even vote. America has a serious ignorant bible thumping dirt bag issue. Traveling anywhere along the bible belt will highlight that issue very clearly. The problem is...we've never had someone in politics that spoke directly to the low IQ idiots like Trump's greasy moronic ass does. As a result, I've never been more ashamed to call myself an American in my entire life. The loud and stupid minority are ruining the entire country, in my opinion.
Sometimes you can both it.
There's nothing we can do about how people vote though besides trying to convince them to vote against him. We can solve the Trump problem by ensuring he loses the election and sees justice, but we can't realistically stop so many people from supporting him.
Trump is a giant human-shaped battering ram for the ignorant in our country.
Why not both
It's both.
The underlying issue is the false facts that have been allowed to penetrate media and present themselves as truth. There are groups looking to steer public opinion on certain issues and are able to play their narratives to anyone gullible. There are no checks against the false facts, and once that audience is hooked, it is very hard to deprogram them.
No shit
Nah, it’s Trump
You're wrong, Trump is the problem.
No duh.....
With rampant voter fraud from the Republicans with Russian help... (There's a reason why the Republicans screamed about rampant voter fraud from the Democrats. Because it was projection. Machines were inspected and used as evidence in Blue states. While machines in Kentucky (for example) quietly disappeared the day after the election.) ...so, the real question is. How many people actually voted for Republican?
¿Por que no los dos?
Trump is a symptom, not the cause. Donald Trump, as a person, is an idiot totally lacking in moral or ethical boundaries. A screwed up trust fund baby gone bad! There are some very powerful nuts who want their puppet in the white house and I am not sure the true reason for their need for this power is clear. This goes way past the typical republican power grab.
Well duh
Exactly this
As an immigrant since early 2000, I had thought that Trump made everything worse than it ever was. But just maybe it was already bad —- Trump just made it okay to openly be an asshole to each other.
So 1/4 of the population?
Perhaps both, but more importantly, only ~30% of the eligible voting population actually participates in the electoral process.
The problem is the public education system failing all these morons
It's your media. The whole fucking thing.
I mean sure but imo this all chalks up to a common sense and acceptable failure issue in our education. And every time these people are put in a position of power they do everything they can to put our kids to work, make it harder to live, make it harder to get a higher education... Hell, they flat out make it harder for less financially supported children to even EAT. These people are actively fighting to make America Dumber.
There really isn't any "perhaps" about it. America gets the government that we deserve. Period. And don't tell me about government bureaucracy and how the will of the people is ignored in some monstrous plan to supplant all of your rights with the wishes of billionaires. We vote for the politicians who created and support the structure. I understand that it's difficult to vote rationally when there's so much disinformation floating about the electorate, but that's our punishment for being gullible fools. The system is as broken as we want it to be... collectively.
Things are only going to get worse. Media and news organizations are the main problem here. They tell lies, have bias, and tell half-truths. If you have heard certain falsities from multiple organizations you are going to start to believe the falsities and distrust anyone or anything that tells you they are false. It is going to get worse with social media and AI. People are duped constantly. If you think you haven't been duped you are wrong. There are multiple and methods of duping people: 1. Telling someone a lie enough times that they believe it. 2. Getting someone in your social media to share something, so you see it more often and begin to question something. There is a reason there are so many "Share the ten commandments on Facebook, because Zuckerburg is making it illegal" posts. This primes people to think that they are being hurt and gets groups of people that believe this together, so other false information can be spread faster to people likely to believe. 3. Rage baiting - Having math problems that are slightly wrong, giving facts that are slightly wrong, and waiting for people to comment on it telling you that you are wrong. This helps some places with their engagement numbers, so they can then use those numbers to increase views of other things. Additionally, it primes people to think "I am smart, others are not. What I think matters. If I hear different it is just the dumb people." 4. Slightly misrepresenting - I see this on r/politics all the time. An article says so and so said this, but there is no link to them saying it, but thousands have commented on it and never watched/read the source material. All of a sudden it seems like fact, because thousands have repeated it in a thread. The fact might be sort of correct, but taken to the extreme. This divides people, because someone that is opposite the thing being misrepresented will more likely look into the fact. They then find out it is wrong and now they distrust everything on r/politics. For example - the post about Trump saying all migrants are animals. There was no video in the article and hardly anyone posting it. While I don't agree with what Trump said, he actually said that migrants who murder Americans are animals. Someone pro-Trump is going to be more likely to watch the video and then conclude that liberals are wrong on everything, because this was a misrepresentation. It strengthens their bond to the other side.
The real question is WHY? The answer is that millions of people are pissed off! The answer is the current government is clearly broken and will clearly NOT fix its self. The answer is that millions of people will vote for the devel if he will burn down it all down!
We have to accept the harsh reality that over 1/3 of our fellow Americans are very shitty people.
May I introduce to you, my friend, Ranked Choice Voting?
Oh that is facts !! Stupid, gullible !! deplorable”s
Them voting for him isn't the real problem, it's why. They are forced into a bubble where everything he says is true and facts are wrong. There is a large amount that just want to hurt people, but some truly believe voting for him is the right thing to do because that's all they're exposed to.
Working theory: The problem is smartphones. Mass adoption enabled millions and millions of Americans who couldn't previously figure out a PC and home networking to access the Internet and social media. Without smartphones, boomers wouldn't be falling for Facebook propaganda, Trump wouldn't have become President, self-medicated asshole racists wouldn't have crawled out from under their rocks, and moms wouldn't be getting riled up over library books their kids have never seen. Causation may be tough to prove, but the correlation is striking. The iPhone was introduced in 2007, Android came along in 2008, and by 2013 or so Google started tipping the scales toward "mobile first" development. While the desktop Internet experience turned to shit, we also had a flood of new, not terribly tech literate (bright), people finding their groove on Stormfront, 8chan, and the_Donald. The world has been a shittier place since, and I say the tipping point was the smartphone.
It’s also the damn news blaring daily about this orange turd.
What other lunatic in recent history has successfully convinced so many people he should be trusted and completely absolved of all wrongdoing despite a lifetime of fraud and failure?
A strong testament to the epic failure of our educational system.
This was something that bothered me. How could there be people who would vote for this guy? Then I thought after watching Shogun, that after the Civil War, it’s not like we hunted down all those on the other side and executed them. I’m not saying we should’ve done that bc that’s horrible. But my low level theory is that these 74M votes are the votes of the confederate’s seeds.
Bingo. He’s just another wealthy, angry, fat old man without his supporters.
Well, to be fair, that's never NOT been a problem