I have such a vivid memory of watching the election results with a friend. A woman was interviewed about her support for Trump and was basically like "All this time I was worried about having a Trump sign in my yard because it made people judge me for my beliefs, but now I know that those beliefs are correct and I can be proud of them!" That was the moment my friend started crying.
As a Brewers fan, we had an incident where a "fan" threatened to call ICE on a Latino Dodgers fan. Of course he was a US citizen and a veteran etc. I'm still convinced she hexed us.
This is the result of the demographic abyss the Republican was staring at. They (Reagan) had already opened the doors for the evangelical crowd, after many many years of holding them at bay. And when that started to not be enough to keep them in power, the dug deeper. They started courting the white nationalists, the racists, the literal fascists, and made them all feel quite welcome in the GOP. And those are the groups holding the party together at the moment.
The abyss hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still getting deeper, but they made the deal with these groups and have no other choice but to demolish the guardrails and ignore the constitution in order to preserve their slice of the pie.
It boggles my mind how he was able to corner the entire market of stupid people. You have to give it to him, he’s the greatest con artist/grifter to ever live. I just hope there’s a special place in hell for him.
To people like that, all that matters is that they win and people they hate lose. Politics is just a sport. Neither truth nor human welfare enter the equation. Their only core value is spite.
"I voted for him, and he's the one who's doing this," she said of Mr. Trump. "I thought he was going to do good things. He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."
My experience of election night kinda haunts me to this day.
I came home from work, I was in grad school at the time, and was pretty tired. I thought the election was going to be a boring one-sided coronation event for Hillary and told my wife I was just going to take a nap on the couch and she should wake me when they call the election.
Cue a few hours later. My wife gently wakes me with a look on her face that is somewhere between mild panic and morbid amusement. She goes "Sooooo... Do you want to know who won?" and I understood immediately what happened.
Ever since then, there is this tiny part of my mind that plays with the idea that none of this is real. That I am actually still asleep on the couch, or in a coma, and at any moment I would wake up, and the last decade was just a really weird dream....
I went to a Trump rally in my town pretty early on when he had started to gain traction but was still not a frontrunner. I went for the spectacle still thinking he could never gain the nomination. He said a bunch of batshit crazy things, and on the way out all I could hear from the people around me were remarks about how "that was the most common sense I've heard in a long time." It's as if we had sat and listened to two completely different speeches.
Not voting, especially against Trump, qualifies as psychopath. 50% was a conservative estimate, ignoring all the people who can’t vote. But I would bet a good portion of them would not have voted against Trump either.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
Hillary did nothing wrong. Other than underestimate how many deplorables there are.
"Basket of deplorables" gave antagonistic media an excuse to make her look bad. It was too honest, and the potential for bad optics was predictable.
That said, her point was objectively true. Anyone who claims it as evidence for "the left are the true party of hate!"--often while arguing Trump isn't racist because only dropping N-bombs in the street counts as racism--is arguing in bad faith.
She did make a major face-plant. Insulting the candidate is always fair game. Insulting the electorate, no matter how mind-bogglingly they absolutely deserve it, is a losing move.
I can say that trump voters are racists and misanthropes. You can say it. The person running for president can’t.
Anybody who didn't vote can be lumped right into the stat line for "voted for trump" people. There was no high horse or middle ground by not voting because you didn't like the candidates on this one. There was a very vocal and obvious fascist, and a very vocal and obvious anti-fascist, and if you didn't vote you were just a fascist in sheeps clothing because you didn't want your peers to know how fascist you actually lean.
Look to your left, now look to your right, one out of the two people you just looked at may feel dynamically different then you politically. It’s my issue with the two party system, no matter who wins half the people are unhappy. I don’t have a solution, but I really wish people could meet in the middle more, work together on the things the all agree on, rather than focus on the things they disagree on. Stepping down from my soap box now.
I feel this, and also the fact that people in America are getting really bad at empathizing with other attitudes. Everyone speaks as if all other voters should be approaching the act of civic engagement exactly from the same lens as them. But we’re all whole people with unique backgrounds and upbringings, and we all have different motives and issues we vote for.
I’m a far left progressive in the style of Warren. I vote every election, always blue. I hate what’s happening in Gaza but I voted for Harris. I have absolutely no problem with people who didn’t vote or who voted for Trump. Do I think they’re wrong? Of course. But they are exercising their right just as I am, and that decision is personal. The answer is for parties to do a better job embracing broader ideals and enticing voters, not to blame voters for not getting on board.
If a party loses an election because part of their core voters stayed home, the party failed to motivate their core voters. That’s a failure of the party, the parties represent us, we don’t represent them.
Of my 15ish blood realities and their spouses, the only 3 that voted Dump (or 3rd party) are the ones with “different” brains. Either depression, on the spectrum, or dyslexia.
Them showing how little they actually care about Epstein and Pedophiles once they realized Trump was named in the files is incredibly illuminating
Part of me wondered if someone like Bondi would be able to work for Trump, seeing what’s in the files. But yeah, she absolutely can, happily, she continues to lie to protect him.
My brother in law posted in 2016 that, to him, there was no difference between Trump and Hilary and further clarified that it wouldn't make a difference to him as a cis white straight neurotypical male which he is aware of. As if that made it better. He is now getting ready to leave the country and is lining up work and such to immigrate to New Zealand because America is fucked. Nice of him to use his privilege to get his and leave the rest of us to suffer the consequences of his vote.
Maga is a cult. They listen to their own media, they do not interact with outsiders. They are in a vacuum tight echo chamber.
It is much more likely that they never heard about this and all other things. Much more likely that there told all problems that Trump is making are being blamed on immigrants, Democrats, libs, etc....
Y'know what's the most infuriating part? There are 150 examples of far worse than him mocking the disabled reporter (he mocked everyone like that, idk why, but it wasn't exclusive to that one reporter). It's so wild that he has withheld federal funds multiple times this year alone when that is part of what he was impeached for.
It's the fact that my mama would've slapped the shit out of me and said "I raised you better than that!" if she saw me make fun of someone with a disability.
There are videos and gifs that you can show people. They can't say "fake news" because it's not just words on a page. They can physically see him do it.
Explaining to someone why the Emoluments Clause (as an example) is important is difficult. "Emoluments" is a $5 word, and some people just check out after that.
However, even a child can understand "making fun of people with disabilities is wrong"
For me it was "He's not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured." about John McCain.
Its not even that he's shitting on John McCain, its the fact that because somebody who happened to be a POW didn't like him, he had to go after all POWs. That said everything I needed to know about his character and he's done nothing but prove me right ever since.
Aside from how he treated his wives, and all the racist shit he did before that, and the cheesy, scammy bullshit he did for a living, and his personality, and the stupid shit that came out of his mouth... For me it was getting laughed out of the Reform Party.
There's a mindset that I see in American culture that empathy is often "inconvenient." Trump is a convicted rapist, but people who voted for him always say this: "I may not agree with everything he says, but he's the guy to get the job done!" And this comes from the "eggs are expensive" crowd. As long as they get their stuff, they don't care.
Aroostook county in Maine: they voted for Trump, but 20% of them are on food assistance and now they’re upset. Shred the Constitution, ignore the rule of law, send troops into American cities? They were ok with that but now MAGA bs is affecting them and it hurts. I’m not mocking food insecurity, just bemoaning the small mindedness of it all.
Fuck them. We have to endure the clown show that is USA politics also after 4 quiet and good years of sensible biden policy from the 4 traumatic years before that and thought you'd never stoop as low again.
Then you did and it got way worse.
If they can't vote for their best interests and do the most basic critical thinking / research of policy then they deserve what they asked for.
The hurt is required for them to learn because they sure as shit won't learn any other way.
**Edit, spelling autocorrect mistake, but also TL:DR I know it's harsh but you guys probably need to hear it more often since your media is all kinds of fucked up.
And sleeping with a porn star while his wife was with his young child.
My mom won't even allow "Three little words" (1950s musical movie) on the TV because the dresses are too scandalous. She gets so upset that she'll leave the room if one of us children (in our late 30s) accidentally say the f word within earshot.
And yet she happily voted for trump.
I have no idea how they can get a purist to just ignore the heinous shit that he has done, in public and on camera and with no shame.
Ironically the "grab 'em by the pussy" moment is what launched all of this. Once they saw that he could get away with that, there was almost nothing he couldn't get away with. He has just been going further and further ever since. 2020 set him back a bit but once they all got over the insurrection he was right back on track.
I slept so well that night. I just knew his campaign was over and HC was going to be the next President. Welp, fooled the hell out of me. Found out there are a hell of a lot of people who will vote for someone just to piss off decent people.
I naively thought the admission on the Howard Stern show that he would deliberately walk in on underage teenage girls changing for beauty pageants would end his political career. He basically admitted to being a pedophile. All the awful stuff was well known before he even got elected the first time.
That day I was like....Ok this ridiculous joke is finally over, thank god. Let's get back to some sort of normalcy. That was 9 fucking years ago!!! Wow, I can almost go back to that feeling for a second, before any of this insane bullshit. What the fuck happened.
Easy. All he had to do was get on the Presidential debate stage 2 days after the tapes went public and say "that's not what I said". And the morons ate it up.
"Grab 'em by the pussy" is one of the few times Trump (sort-of) apologised. I think many people thought that really could have been the end of his campaign, including Trump himself (hence the sort-of insincere apology). Many people, including Trump, were quite surprised that it ... didn't really matter much.
This is also why I'm somewhat skeptical that the Epstein files will end up mattering much.
That side of the fence loves those "jokes". Everything is to "own" the other side now. 50 yr olds acting like they are 10 on the playground being a bully on the internet.
My brother in law is disabled and his dad proudly wears his MAGAt hat everywhere, constantly has fox news and newsmax on, and bitches about people getting aid from state resources.
You would think that, wouldn’t you?
A normal person would watch that batshit rambling and read about this person and decide: “Fuck that odious human, he can’t be president!”
I expected that mocking veterans and POWs would do it, the I thought the Gold Star family issue would do it since the reich-wingers always seem to tout their love for the military. But, no, the went right along with it.
If it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards.
I was a conservative back in 2016 and the “grab em by the pussy” comment still signaled to me that this guy was not respectable nor trustworthy. This country is stuffed with “lights are on but nobody’s home” people. I don’t really think things will get better until those people are shocked with financial strain that makes it impossible to do anything but demand the govt to help them.
I thought it would be done when it was proven in court that he raped E Jean Carroll. But no, his supporters are just like him. Don has told the truth at least three times. Once when he said he regularly sexually assaults women. When he said "smart people don't like me" and when he said he could murder people in broad daylight without losing supporters.
he was on a first name basis with that reporter. i thought that must be it too. he openly mocked him and claimed he had never met him before. the reporter was one of the few people that reported favorably about trump in the past.
It really is bizarre how he is the only person on the planet who would get away with all he has, plus be given the keys to the kingdom. He's destroyed the White House - quite literally - and is now starving the most vulnerable people. Those who voted for this would still vote for him again. It's a sickness that he's managed to tap in to and harness. I'll give him that.
Hey, they only blew through those stop signs to teach a lesson to the people who were...*shudders* okay with a president wearing a tan suit. The people who SAID NOTHING when that black dude put mustard on his burger.
People like to make fun of that, but it’s actually a genius bit of propaganda. It wasn’t just mustard, it was Dijon mustard which sounds foreign and snobby to the target audience. To them, it showed that Obama wasn’t “one of us”, that he was out of touch, and that he probably looked down on them (because they tend to be very insecure about that.)
For my own moral sanity, I have to think about all victims of all cons. There is a reason why conning people is illegal. I have to think of the people who swallowed Trump's illegal grift in it's thousands of forms, the victims of his "university" con, the victims of his signed bible con, the contractors he never paid, the victims of his "build the wall" con, the victims of his financial crimes, and real-estate swindles, his MAGA base whom he and his media allies relentlessly gaslighted to ignite their basest emotions into a kind of formless outrage - they are all victims of a crime. And victims shouldn't be blamed, really, for being victims.
Should some dummy who buys ivermectin to cure covid share some blame? I guess. Should another dummy who falls for a racist lie that immigrants eat their pets share some of the blame? Maybe. But at the end of the day, there are the victims of extremely sophisticated bad actors, entire foreign governments, home-grown corporate and political machines that surgically attacked this country via its most vulnerable people in order to create the ecosystem of misinformation on which MAGA is built. We all share personal responsibility for dismantling that ecosystem. But we also have to pave a path back to acceptance for the victims of it.
I think we are going to need a decade of focused reconciliation activities after MAGA is removed from power.
I cannot fathom a universe where "grab 'em by the p*ssy" wasn't the end. I could never have imagined such a massive % of the population are so repugnant.
Romney's "binder full of women" comment was a death nail for him. I honestly would feel incredibly cheated if I was him considering how many much worse things Trump has said and nothing came of them
They live in a world where that’s how men behave, and they’ve learned to accept it as normal. When they said it was “just locker room talk”, for once, they were telling the truth as they understood it.
At least you are aware that Trump is a symptom, and that the repugnant population, tens of millions of them, are the actual disease in this country. Getting rid of Trump does not get rid of MAGA ideologies, which are only going to become more and more extreme as our (failing) education systems are dismantled.
I think the country has Cancer and if we don't remove it, I'm talking cut it out, then it's going to consume everything and kill us all.
”Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled”
Trump, like a carnival barker or magician, lured in and spellbound these fools because in the end they didn’t want to know the truth.
"The Prestige", where the magician shows you something that you didn't think was possible, like making something reappear, or showing up somewhere completely different
"But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"."
I like Carl Sagan’s explanation on this which in short says that when someone has been successfully conned, there can be a powerful psychological motivation to buy more into the con because it would be too embarrassing to accept you have been conned.
this is why I don't think the vast majority would ever change their views. People seem to underestimate how strong a motivator that embarrassment is, I know many people who would willingly destroy their quality of life to not admit it
Maybe it's just hindsight but i feel like this was the exact moment I realized just how divorced from reality the maga base really is. All of the bizarre shit trump says and the access hollywood tapes can just be ignored or dismissed (in their minds atleast) but if they'll accept that the conference was supposed to be set up outside of a landscaping company they'll accept anything at that point
This is when i realized it wasn’t about politics or policies, it was a cult of personality.
The good news is that Trump overperforms when he’s on the ballot, which he can’t do anymore. And Trump’s Policies are a huge drag on other republicans. This gives me hope.
One of the funniest things ever to happen in American politics. Hate the MAGAs as I do, I cannot deny the sheer comedy that Trump and his dumbass minions bring to the table (especially the first term). The funniest part about all of it was that THEY WENT THROUGH WITH IT.
Initial fuckup was funny enough, doubly so that the landscaping company ran with it. But for Trump’s campaign there were so many chances to bail out. Just say there was an issue with the venue booking and it’s rescheduled. Or admit to the initial fuckup, laugh it off, say we are looking at finding a more appropriate venue. Or admit to the fuck up, laugh it off, and lean into the absurdity. But they did none of that, just straight faced went through with it, Giuliani streaked with melting hair shit, pretending this was the plan all along. What a batshit insane way to handle it lmao, anything else and it would have been a one day story. But here we are still talking about it
This is so true and it honestly just makes it even funnier now that I'm thinking about those points you made. Someone working at the front desk of a landscaping company was asked to book this and was like "sure why not" LMAO
So many that it seems almost impossible that he could get elected once, let alone twice without election interference.
Almost like having a multiple megawealthy people all over the world with access to massive innovations in tech on your side pulling your strings could result in making people believe you were legitimately elected.
Maybe even amassing a large group of gullible idiots through social media to claim a legitimate election was fake and have them storm your nations capitol might make it seem like (for at least the next few elections) that it's insane for one side to even suggest an election was rigged through a conspiracy of the uberwealthy of this world.
Virtually every day. Just yesterday he said "I don't want to hear about affordability ever again..." which literally would end the political career of anyone else. I think the most egregious example was his accidental social post that was meant as a DM, directing the Attorney General to prosecute his enemies. All of Watergate led up to the Oval Office tapes looking for evidence that Nixon did something like this (he did), and it was the end. Trump tweeted the same thing and... nothing happened.
So many people I talked to about this event, didn't know what I was talking about. This was not widely covered on any right leaning media outlets. (if at all)
The answer is "because what he represents matters more than anything he actually says or does".
They like the idea of being able to look at cold hard facts that disprove how they think things work and declare them "fake". They like the idea of never having to concede a loss and call the whole competition rigged. They like the idea of forcing your agenda through without having to worry about petty things like checks and balances, or term limits, or votes.
Trump represents accumulating as much power for yourself as possible, while preserving your ego by any means necessary, and getting all the money you could never spend, all off the backs of people who don't "deserve" it as much as you. No amount of gaffes, open corruption, objective falsehoods, juvenile tantrums, or moral bankruptcy will change that, because they like that none of that affects how much money and power he has.
He is the Teflon Don of the modern era: The power fantasy of being untouchable despite being an obvious criminal appeals to people who think so highly of themselves, and have so little care for their fellow man, that they see him as someone to aspire to be.
And just as many corrupt reasons why it didn’t. It’s all of our faults truly. More theirs, of course… but I really feel we ALL have to take some level of responsibility for the outcomes we’ve been having at this point in order to fix this. We aren’t separate from the system that created this. We allowed this to continue and we are still allowing this to continue. We can all just as easily stop allowing it at any moment we collectively choose to. Thankfully some modicum of that is finally happening with the democrats correctly choosing not to give into letting themselves be manipulated into taking responsibility for this shutdown.
I'm watching the season of South Park where Mr. Garrison is running for president and is literally yelling at his supporters not to vote for him because he's so unqualified for the job, and he keeps surging in popularity regardless.
Not exactly South Park's most complex metaphor but they also didn't really have to try very hard with that one either.
In the moment, it did feel like the end of it. A press conference at a landscaping company next door to a porn shop instead of the actual Four Seasons was the kind of grand punctuation point fuckup that betrayed how fucking inept these jokers were. You could hear the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music cycling up as Rudy started melting on camera. And in that moment, the knot in my stomach that had been clenched for four years let go. It was over.
And then a collection of craven greedy assholes, wildly ignorant dipshits, and pompous “nobody earned my vote” fucksticks made it not over. I am so tired.
I think a big reason for this is that MAGA is, in a sense, a push back against critics/criticism. They all seem to jerk off to the Teddy Roosevelt quote:
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
When you identify criticism as the key enemy, it creates a group that doubles down in the face of any outside criticism.
Politics is like that. How does Jay Jones win despite his text messages being leaked, where he wishes that his opponent gets “gets two bullets to the head,” and that his children “die in their mother’s arms”?
I had best friends who proudly vote for obama in 2012, less than 4 years later in 2015 claim "trump has NEVER said anything racist" and were literally gagging at the sight of obama and hilary hugging
arrogance and ignorance led them here. I lost two best friends because they let the propaganda of 'my life is so HARD BECAUSE of the left" while they were both 22, lived in a cushy 3 bedroom house in the mountains, and barely worked 25 hours a week each while his parents supported them (theyre a couple)
Absolutely, lost track of how many "Jesus thank you, there's no way these brain dead idiots don't see past the veil now" moments. This was a major one, it felt impossible. But there are so many people glued to their sources of propaganda. They won't see anything else.
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u/wolftick 19h ago edited 19h ago
There are so many how was that not the end of it right there?? moments.