I don't agree that a total collapse of the nations is either needed or is likely. What is needed is better education. — Relativist
Trump is an opportunist, and the opportunity he takes advantage of is the disconnect between detailed policy and political rhetoric. Candidates can't win an election by presenting detailed policies; they need to dumb it down into slogans and soundbites. So the vast majority makes their decision on these soundbites, not by carefully examining the pros/cons of competing detailed policy positions. In many cases with Trump, he just has the soundbites that appeal to many - with little or no details. — Relativist
This will be a learning opportunity for the American public. — Relativist
If our society collapsed, I doubt the population would be any better at examining and judging the individual pieces than they are at choosing leaders today. I'd expect that the situation would be more likely than ever to search for simple solutions to the complex problems.The system is so fundamentally broken that it needs to collapse so that all can examine the individual pieces, throw away the bad and rebuild with the working parts. — Christoffer
US democracy has been eroding for a long time now. — Christoffer
If democrats are so sure that Trump and modern republicans have been infiltrated by fascists and that democracy is threatened, that the constitution is threatened. Then what exactly are they doing about it? — Christoffer
Even when someone like Trump do things that in any other previous political era would lead to almost political and societal ostracism, it just makes him stronger — Christoffer
If our society collapsed, I doubt the population would be any better at examining and judging the individual pieces than they are at choosing leaders today. I'd expect that the situation would be more likely than ever to search for simple solutions to the complex problems. — Relativist
There is much anti-American sentiment, on the streets and on this forum. I don't buy that 'it's all f***ed anyway, no point in either party, they're all equally bad.' The anti-democratic forces feed on that sentiment. — Wayfarer
They're fighting like hell. They're trying desperately to do everything possible to prevent it. — Wayfarer
Which is why I said in an earlier post that I think he really is actually evil. He's become like a window through which a great number of social evils are manifesting. I don't know if you heard the racist crap that was being spouted at his NY convention the other night, but he's creating a permission structure, an 'Overton window', to enable millions of people to indulge in their darkest instincts. One of the contributors on the old forum said it best: Trump is the manifestation of the American Id.
It's very clear: this election is hope vs hate.
Let's hope. — Wayfarer
Why is it even possible in the first place? — Christoffer
If you mean, why is it possible that Donald Trump has come to dominate American politics, f***ed if I know. It makes zero sense. — Wayfarer
The problem isn't Trump, it's a badly patched system that enables Trump to happen. — Christoffer
I don't agree with that. Trump is someone who is an absolute expert at exploiting democratic systems and also financial systems for his own advantage. If there is a fault, it's that a satisfactory anti-Trump hasn't emerged - someone who is also charismatic, bombastic, and telegenic, but who has at least a core of common decency which has long died inside DJT. — Wayfarer
Trump is just a populist in the purest sense of the word. Populism is a reaction to a failed political establishment. — Tzeentch
It's that people absolutely despise the Bluegeoisie and the destruction they've wrought on society.
They destroy livelihoods and lives, destroy bonds between family and friends, destroy any and every institution they govern.
They're tone policing, cry-bullying, joy-killing, emotionally incontinent hacks, whose attempts at imposing their "Progressive" theocracy onto the rest of us has created a society in which we're more lonely, loveless, depressed and stupid than ever, and in which our youth are more lost and hopeless than ever.
All this, while maintaining 100% confidence in their intellectual and moral supremacy over everyone else.
The support for Trump extends far beyond the man himself—it's that people want to see a peevish, arrogant, and nakedly contemptuous pseudo-aristocracy punished for its abuses, and re-electing the Orange Man is clearly THE most effective way to do it. — Chisholm
The support for Trump extends far beyond the man himself—it's that people want to see a peevish, arrogant, and nakedly contemptuous pseudo-aristocracy punished for its abuses, and re-electing the Orange Man is clearly THE most effective way to do it. — Chisholm
people want to see a peevish, arrogant, and nakedly contemptuous pseudo-aristocracy punished for its abuses — Chisholm
How is it so hard to draw the line? Are people so morally illiterate to not be able to judge if Trump is suitable as a presidential candidate or not? — Christoffer
They're tone policing, cry-bullying, joy-killing, emotionally incontinent hacks, whose attempts at imposing their "Progressive" theocracy onto the rest of us has created a society in which we're more lonely, loveless, depressed and stupid than ever, and in which our youth are more lost and hopeless than ever. — Chisholm
It doesn’t matter if you want to call it a hate rally or a Nazi rally or an authoritarian Lollapalooza. Doesn’t matter if you want to call the speakers unhinged or ill-mannered or fascistic. I don’t care what you call the Trumpian spectacle that unfolded at Madison Square Garden last weekend.
In this, the blessedly final week of the 2024 presidential campaign, that rally was only the latest s--t stain in a decade-long political career rooted in scapegoating and fear-mongering. After a decade of stoking fear and hatred, we have now reached Peak MAGA.
What started in the tacky atrium of Trump Tower with a rant about Spanish-speaking immigrants ends with a lame joke by a s--tty comic about Spanish-speaking Americans, with another speaker calling Donald Trump’s political opponent “the antichrist.” We’re ten years into the Trump Era, a decade marked by racist scandal upon sex scandal upon financial scandal upon criminal scandal.
To say that we’re numb to it all would be an understatement. Another woman came forward last week to allege sexual abuse by Trump (with a cameo by Jeffrey Epstein) this week and it barely got covered. She is the 27th woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault. Nobody cared. We expect these Trump scandals. Worse, too many Americans crave them.
When he or his surrogates attack Puerto Ricans or Muslims or Black people or legal Haitian immigrants or people from “s--thole countries;” when Trump sits down for dinner with a Holocaust denier; when he refuses to disavow David Duke’s support or when he elevates the bats--t and antisemitic QAnon movement; when he attacks trans people; when he spends day after day spreading lie after lie, he scrapes away, layer by layer, whatever used to pass for American civility until we are left here, a raw and unnerved people looking at our fellow Americans with suspicion and fear.
He did this.
In 2015, Trump’s initial candidacy was dismissed as the vanity project of a reality television star. That wasn’t an incorrect assessment, but it miscalculated Americans’ appetite for inauthenticity and vulgarity. It wasn’t that Trump was a reality star whose schtick translated to real America, it’s that real America turned out to be more of a reality show than we were willing to admit. The cruelty, interpersonal conflicts, and erratic personalities that fuel our addiction to bad TV has now become central to an entire half of our electorate.
The Madison Square Rally rally this week wasn’t an outlier, only a very special episode of The Trump Show.
It’s been ten f---ing years of this. If, ten years ago, as Trump mulled his candidacy, somebody had sat down to write a satire of what a successful Trump campaign would look like, it would have looked very much like the coverage of the actual event. Consider the following paragraph from the actual New York Times’ coverage: “David Rem, a childhood friend of Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris ‘the devil.’ Grant Cardone, a businessman, declared that the sitting Vice President had ‘pimp handlers.’ Sid Rosenberg denounced Hillary Clinton as a ‘sick son of a bitch’ for linking the Trump rally and a pro-Nazi event at the same arena decades ago.”
That’s not even mentioning the fact that Hulk Hogan tried, and for a time failed, to rip off his shirt, the only Black speaker walking out to the song Dixie, and that the rally started with Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage.
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t read like a bad episode of Veep? (Actually, that sounds like an awesome episode of Veep but only because Veep is making fun of f---ing idiocy!)
I don’t know how many felony convictions the collected speakers had between them, but it was a lot. Why? Because sometimes the crooks win. Sometimes, the worst among us convince the rest of us suckers and losers that we’d be better off with them running the show. When people compare Trumpism to Nazism, it isn’t because we anybody thinks Trump is “literal Hitler” as his supporters like to say.
It’s because Trumpism displays the same hatred and buffoonery of the early Nazis with their bloviating, self-aggrandizing speeches and their cadre of big, dumb goons swinging fists in the streets. It’s because we recognize the same ugly impulses that compelled what was, at first, a minority of Germans to sacrifice their character and morality. It’s because we recognize the fear that caused good Germans to keep their mouths shut and the cold calculations that made powerful German industrialists look the other way at Nazi abuses, and which led them to ultimately collaborate.
It’s because we know that dehumanizing language about people eventually leads to the state dehumanizing people. Can’t happen here? May I refer to you to Trump’s plan to round up millions of people from their homes and put them in detention camps? May I refer you to the fact that a recent poll found that half of all Americans, including a quarter of Democrats, support such a mass deportation? What does that look like, exactly, when the National Guard goes house-to-house in neighborhoods across the country? I’ll tell you what it looks like. It looks like Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.
When I sat down to write this column, I thought I’d try to keep it light. But you know what? This s--t is scary. It’s scary because we’re a week away from the close of this election, but I don’t think there’s an American out there who believes that this election will end quietly.
Drop-off ballot boxes are already exploding. Poll workers are being attacked. After one voter was told she couldn’t wear her MAGA gear into the polling station, she tore off her shirt, pushed the poll worker, and told the worker to “suck her c---.” JD Vance later tweeted about the woman, “what a patriot.”
That’s where we are. That’s who we’ve become over the last ten years. So yeah, it doesn’t matter to me what you want to call Trump’s rally or Trump’s movement. The name doesn’t matter so much as the human rot that feeds it. For decades, we’ve been wondering how much more divisive American politics can become.
Now we know. Hopefully next week’s election pulls us back from the brink. But what if it doesn’t? What if Trump wins? Conversely, what if he loses? What feels like the last straw often turns out to be just another straw. How many more straws before he’s broken America’s back? — Michael Ian Black, The Daily Beast
Trump is a symptom of the righteous distrust common people have of the political elites and rich people. — Benkei
Trump has leveraged the perception that US society is "failing" by permitting things like same-sex marriage, sensitivity to LGBTQ concerns, and ostensibly permitting non-white immigrant to enter the country illegally, "poison our blood", commit crimes, and take jobs.Trump hasn't done shit other than having a perfect sense of the direction in which US democracy is falling. — Benkei
Moral intuitions that are often rooted in ignorance and prejudice.Distrust informed by their moral intuition that something simply isn't right and most things are unfair.
How ironic. Encouraging racism, Christian nationalism, undermining rule of law, and embracing a demagogue isn't likely to "repair" the US government.This will not go away unless the US government repairs and regains trust by - I don't know - actually improving the material conditions of all its citizens instead of those that are already rich enough to lobby for favours.
Amplifying inappropriately worded comments to incite outrage in one's followers doesn't contribute to good voting choices. Truly demonizing "the other side" is more pervasive among the Trump cult.And that distrust is fueled by selfrighteous pricks decrying they are deplorables, garbage or aren't voting in their self-interest, thereby really only affirming that they don't trust "the other side" and therefore aren't to be trusted by "the other side".
And yet, that's exactly what Trump does- and his followers find it appealing. "Are you an Democrat or an American?" was posted on the Trump campaign website, and repeated by many on social media. A person on my neighborhood's facebook page said we need Trump because the Democrats want to "sexualize children". “These are horrible people,” said Trump at a North Carolina rally, referring to Democrats. “Oops, we should get along with everybody. They’re horrible people. Some people you just can’t get along with.”The best way to win someone's trust, after all, has always been to call the other side "dumb shits".
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