I do not think they would comprehend these things, and I also rest on the fact that both your position on theirs is probably not accurate. — AmadeusD

It was, in fact, the indictment you seem to be avoiding, of his followers ;) — AmadeusD

Please clarify both these statements. I have no idea what you're saying.

1. The first half is relevant to the below - the latter half is my saying I don't think either your position, or theirs, is accurate to the actual state of affairs; and
2. I was making fun of Trump's supporters - I do not think they would comprehend what's at hand

Good information. Thanks for the article.

1. The first half is relevant to the below - the latter half is my saying I don't think either your position, or theirs, is accurate to the actual state of affairs — AmadeusD

Still not clear, but I'd like to understand what you believe I'm getting wrong.

2. I was making fun of Trump's supporters - I do not think they would comprehend what's at hand

I'm an optimist. I like to think that there are some Trump supporters who could grasp why some would be pleased with Biden's accomplishments- even though they disagree.

Still not clear, but I'd like to understand what you believe I'm getting wrong. — Relativist

Well, both sides seems to think their guy is the guy, and the other guys is baffling inept. I happen to think both are. So, I could take any 'view' from either side and say i think it's inaccurate. Its not a particularly important point.

I like to think that there are some Trump supporters who could grasp why some would be pleased with Biden's accomplishments — Relativist

Do you think the same is true in reverse? Are you able to grasp Trump's accomplishments?

Do you think the same is true in reverse? Are you able to grasp Trump's accomplishments? — AmadeusD

Let me first clarify what I meant. I think intelligent Trump supporters could potentially grasp that certain things that Biden's done would be considered positive accomplishments by Biden supporters (or by liberals). That doesn't mean these Trump supporters would agree these are positive accomplishments.

And indeed, in reverse,I have some understanding of Trump deeds that would please Trump supporters. First and foremost: his judicial appointments -particularly SCOTUS, which resulted in the Dodd decision.

It's a very different question regarding what I regard as a positive accomplishment of Trump's, or Trump supporter's view of Biden's. But I'll bite on Trump: 1.USMCA improved upon NAFTA. 2. He forced the exit from Afghanistan. That's all that comes to mind, but there could be more, but the damage he did is (IMO) overwhelming.

He was, and the funny thing is that I think alot of the current polls show a generic democrat leading by the same amount that Biden did in 2020. — Mr Bee

Don't envy the Americans when they are having to choose between Trump and Biden... and an option of a middle finger vote with voting somebody else.

Well, a generic democrat would have done better against Trump than Hillary Clinton. But the democrats simply ignored how annoying and hated Hillary was among the Republicans. And how disliked the Clintons in general were.

Wasn't it then finally her time, right?

I’d agree and you’ve satisfied my question very well :)

Well, a generic democrat would have done better against Trump than Hillary Clinton. But the democrats simply ignored how annoying and hated Hillary was among the Republicans. And how disliked the Clintons in general were. — ssu

Yeah that seems to be the problem with the Democrats which is that they seem to love to ignore their base of supporters. The GOP have the opposite problem which is that they let the MAGA supporters dictate everything. And that is why we have Trump v. Biden again.

The GOP have the opposite problem which is that they let the MAGA supporters dictate everything. And that is why we have Trump v. Biden again. — Mr Bee

Basically Trumpism saved in a way the Republican party: it reinforced the idea that somehow the two political parties themselves can be changed through the primaries. The leadership didn't want Trump, but he was elected. So hooray for democracy!

As I said (perhaps on another thread), there indeed are many traditional conservatives in the GOP, but Trumpism simply silences these voices.

That's the problem with populism: it can take over a traditional political actually both either on the left of on the right.

One could argue that Boris Johnson was a somewhat similar populist politician that overtook a traditional party, even if Johnson is quite different from Trump. Yet we see now just how the Conservative party in the UK has changed.

He announced his campaign months before the first indictment — NOS4A2

True, but he knew there were choppy waters ahead for him legally. Some of that stuff had been swirling around for years... Paying hush money to Stormy Daniels using campaign funds... Property devaluation fraud in NY... The fall out and discovery from the 2020 election tampering and January 6th attack wasn't going away.. and he'd retained classified documents after repeatedly being asked to return them. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they do turn...

As a Trump supporter, you really should consider how much of this Trump brought on himself. How much of this could have been easily avoided? Seriously, ask yourself that before jumping to the conclusion that he's being politically persecuted. He could have paid Stormy Daniels with cash from his own personal account. He could have given identical property valuations to the banks and the government. He could have conceded the 2020 election after his lawsuits failed, and not told his followers that the election was stolen and not invite them to a "Stop the Steal" rally on 1/6/2021. He could have given back all of the classified documents he took to Mar-A-Lago when he was first asked for them.

Don't envy the Americans when they are having to choose between Trump and Biden... and an option of a middle finger vote with voting somebody else. — ssu

The vast majority will have no problem making a choice between these two. A small percent will be disenchanted and either cast a vote for a non-viable candidate or not vote.

It’s just not the case that he brought it on himself. Many of the people indicting him campaigned on doing so. They brought it on him, and not because they were searching for justice or any nonsense like that, but because he decided to run again. He’s being sued in civil cases for alleged crimes from the 90’s and 2000’s. It’s just a shame that the flimsiness, novelty, and unprecedented status of all their cases only attests to the grasping nature of their efforts, and finally how desperate they all are.

Observe the case of Charles Littlejohn, who was just convicted of stealing Trump’s taxes and leaking them to the press. Apparently he started his job for the sole purpose of stealing and leaking Trump’s taxes. I wonder who convinced him to do that? These kinds of people are not above violating the law, human rights, nor any notion of justice because they believe they are stopping some existential threat. They are trapped in a moral panic, like Pizzagate, but far more prevalent, far-reaching, and consequential. They are the existential threat. They are threatening democracy.

But to those of us who remain unconvinced, their schemes continue to read like the conspiracy theories of the same people who believed he was a Russian spy, or that a 3-hour riot was a violent insurrection and worse than Pearl Harbor. You can actually trace the word “insurrection” from Joe Biden all the way down, just as you can the Russian hoax from the Clinton campaign.

They are trapped in a moral panic, like Pizzagate, but far more prevalent, far-reaching, and consequential. They are the existential threat. They are threatening democracy. — NOS4A2

How are they threatening democracy exactly?

Removing their opponents from the ballot, indicting their opponents during an election, altering voting laws beneath the noses of the voter, flooding the country with illegals, criminalizing the ability to contest an election, for example.

Right. I thought you were arguing that releasing someone's (actual) tax return was a danger to democracy. Which would be weird because whatever else it is, it is truthful information.

Stealing someone’s taxes and releasing it to a partisan press is a huge violation of privacy. Thankfully the charade dispelled a host of myths that were regnant at the time.

The vast majority will have no problem making a choice between these two. A small percent will be disenchanted and either cast a vote for a non-viable candidate or not vote. — Relativist

If 60% is high, then OK.

Of course, there's still time to go.

Trump on Friday appeared to confuse Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi during a speech in New Hampshire, accusing Ms. Haley of failing to provide adequate security during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol and connecting her to the House committee that investigated it.

Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the United Nations, has never served in Congress and was working in the private sector during the Capitol riot. ....

Mr. Trump... repeated his frequent claim that the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack — including Mr. Trump’s actions that day — “destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence.”

Then, he claimed that Ms. Haley was in charge of security that day, and that she and others had turned down his offer to send troops to the Capitol.

“Nikki Haley was in charge of security,” he said. (She was not - at the time, she was a State Governor and not even in Washington.) “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”

Mr. Trump, 77, often attacks President Biden, 81, over his age and suggests that Mr. Biden is mentally unfit for office. “He can’t put two sentences together,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “Can’t put two sentences together. He needs a teleprompter.” — NY Times

Excellent. The next candidate that's demented. Americans can choose between shit or crap. Such a leading example for democracy - offer people no choice and then still call it democracy.

How anyone thinks that the guy behind this outrage is a fit and proper person for the candidacy beggars belief. — Wayfarer

Not at all. It's plebeian mentality.

I'll pick the side that is *not* cheering on a mendacious narcissist wannabe dictator. — Wayfarer

There should be more of a difference between on the one hand, Trump and co., and on the other hand, their critics.

But was there such a behavior though? Weren't there enough good hearted people who cared for all people and wanted to help, just to get a shotgun to the face and screamed to get off their property? That there were enough people who tried to make things better for all, especially low-income low-educated people?

Isn't it the false promises of neoliberal capitalists on the right side of politics who promised these people the garden of eden; only to flush it with factory chemicals, doubt, fear and rage?

And then they turn their backs on- and want to fight those who actually stood on their side, making them suffer and in the end just utter back to them: "ok, then rot in your filth you morons".

We can blame culture, but part of the great irony is that the people in power around Trump, as well as himself, does not care for these people other than to feed their narcissistic blood flow, cash flow and voter booths.

After all this time, how much longer should the people who actually care for these Trump supporters as human beings have to wait for these Trump supporters to realize which side actually fundamentally supports them? Because they get so much hate and so much shit all the time while trying to reach out that at some point... enough is enough.

I'm talking about fence-sitters.
— baker

Anyone who's on the fence towards such a side does not seem to have the capacity to understand reason. So it doesn't matter what you do, they are attracted to the childish bullshit that Trump spews out. It is clear by these recent years that it's a cult behavior; reason doesn't work, facts doesn't work. The only thing that works is if they realize the suffering they stand for, if they see it head on, if it produces a cognitive dissonance; in the same way as cult members realize what state of mind they're in. Listen to cult survivors and how they reason, what made them realize their faulty ways. Someone waking up from the Trump cult will echo the same reasoning.

It's easier on your ego to think that ..
— baker

No, it is true. They follow cult behavior to the letter. Treating anything a leader says as truth, as something to applaud without any attempt to rationally understand what it all meant is part of a cult mentality. Why do all these QAnon and conspiracy people intersect so well into the Maga culture? They follow the same cult mentality; the same psychology.

I don't care about my "ego", I care about making honest observations of what is going on.

Such is democracy.
— baker

Yeah, a sloppy version of it. Democracy needs care and systems to protect it. Because the result of a sloppy democracy is civil war. If someone gets voted in to dismantle a democracy, crowning themselves king; then the other half who didn't want that, will show that they did not want that. So protecting democracy and protecting it from such destructive forces as well as keeping the peace require better care for that democracy.

Democratic tolerance can only function until the intolerant becomes tolerated. After that you don't have any democracy anymore.

The irony is that various right-wing political options have a better understanding of democracy than anyone else. They understand that democracy is a dog-eat-dog fight and they don't pretend it's anything but that.
— baker

You're talking about demagogues, not democratic people. They don't understand democracy, they understand the abuse of democracy by acting as demagogues, that's what a dog-eat-dog concept entails. By any means; fool the people, take the power. And if that power leads to anti-democratic actions, then what democracy really exists in their minds other than autocratic power?

What's even more scary is how sloppy people treat democracy. It's the same as how sloppy they treat freedom of speech. The constant appeal to them in broad, vague and simplified terms as some defense against actions aimed to supersede their actual purpose. And the so called educated just fumble their words trying to point it out to these people, it's absurd.

No, democracy is what it is and that kind of mentality is not democracy at all. That only proves that they do not understand democracy or they do not care and just use the public's low education of what it means in order to take power. — Christoffer

Straight out of a right-winger's playbook. I can turn on our local right-wing tv station or listen to the right-winger opposition in our parliament, and it's the same kind of talk, the same arguments, just the names are different.

Straight out of a right-winger's playbook. I can turn on our local right-wing tv station or listen to the right-winger opposition in our parliament, and it's the same kind of talk, the same arguments, just the names are different. — baker

What are you talking about? How is any of that right-wing? How is caring for democracy against the right-wing manipulation and power plays of demagogues even remotely similar to a right-wing playbook? I would say the same thing about Democrats, but since they've not displayed the same level of total ignorance of facts, knowledge and stability that the Republican party has displayed these recent years; the criticism needs to be aimed where it's currently needed to be aimed. Where's the competency on display in the Republican party? Like, just look at how they treated the house speaker situation last year. They act like spoiled children, constantly just doing whatever they can to keep fucking up things until they become the center of attention. The behavioral rot has spread from Trump and infected the entire party. I could make a long argument against the problems among the Democrats, because they're acting incompetent as well, but the level at which the Republican party operates today is just a laughing stock for all us in more functioning democracies in the world.

Whenever there's embarrassing turmoil in the Swedish, Nordic or even the EU government and I turn to read up on what's going on in US politics I'm stunned at the differences in competence. We view our politicians as incompetent, but in comparison to the US political scene we're like an utopia compared to a Mad Max film.

Caring for democracy is to get rid of the demagogues and the entire US system is built upon the actions of demagogues. Elections in the US are about appearances, not policies. It's about abstract values like "family" and "God", not philosophically sound moral principles. It's a theatre aimed at fooling the people to believe they have a good father or mother caring for them from their white house throne. It's an autocratic system in which an economic elite make shakespearian power plays for the throne and the servants in congress to play manipulation games while laws are controlled by a supreme court where enough deaths on one side can make the entire foundation of law fundamentally unbalanced.

Anyone who looks at the US system as some pinnacle of democracy needs to get their heads checked.

The investigations into the events of Jan. 6 began in 2021, long before Trump was a presidential candidate. The same is true of Georgia election interference and the classified documents cases. So, the claim that the indictments regarding these cases were/are attempts at 2024 election interference based upon the indictment dates does not square with the facts; that indictments happen after the investigation, and those investigations were under way long before.

Also, Trump struggles to say the word ‘climate’ and reveals he recently took a cognitive test

At a New Hampshire campaign rally, Donald Trump claimed to have “aced” a recent cognitive test and struggled to pronounce the word “climate,” footage from the event shows.

“I don’t know if you saw, but a few months ago, I took a cognitive test my doctor gave me,” Mr Trump told supporters at the Saturday event.

His comments came just after former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley questioned whether the former president was mentally capable of taking office again after he appeared to repeatedly confuse her with former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a campaign speech on Friday.

“I said, ‘give me a cognitive test, just so we can you know,’ because you know what the standards were, and I aced it,” Mr Trump continued.

Dr Jonathan Reiner, a medical analyst for CNN and professor of medicine and surgery at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, called into question why Mr Trump would need multiple cognitive tests, considering he also took a cognitive test while serving as president.

“Why has Trump had multiple cognitive exams? According to the Cleveland Clinic ‘cognitive tests are usually done if there’s a suspicion of mental decline or impairment,’” Dr Reiner posted on X. “Last night we saw the former president mistake Haley for Pelosi. Has he experienced other symptoms?”

In their post on cognitive testing, the Cleveland Clinic also states, “a good score doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no brain impairment.”

“There still could be brain functioning issues,” their website reads.

At the same event, the former President inexplicably referred to the climate as “clime,” appearing to struggle to pronounce the word correctly.

“They don’t go far,” Mr Trump said, referring to electric vehicles. “But it’s certainly not great for your clime. Your clime. They call it climate.”

Trump knows all about clime

Dear lord ... Perhaps he can be disqualified on medical grounds?

Everytime I see a mention of Trump, I am reminded of several Buddhists who are his avid fans. It's a peculiar combination of being fluent in an arcane religion devoted to the complete cessation of suffering, and to do so in an obscure ancient language, and yet be steeped in such populism as Trump's. I can't quite make sense of it.

I don't know how consciously you were using the sources you cited. I was assuming that you were.

I was mostly reacting to cynical amusement about a place where you do not live.

Everytime I see a mention of Trump, I am reminded of several Buddhists who are his avid fans. It's a peculiar combination of being fluent in an arcane religion devoted to the complete cessation of suffering, and to do so in an obscure ancient language, and yet be steeped in such populism as Trump's. I can't quite make sense of it. — baker

Now that is interesting. Do you have any theories why he appeals to them?

I was mostly — Paine

making wild assumptions, counter to that which i've actually stated and proceeding on the same basis a first-year political student who's found Twitter would do. I just can't take that type of snip-ish hang-wringing seriously, sorry.