Comment by baby_souffle
9 hours ago
Trump, yes. The millions of people that voted for him multiple times despite no shortage of reports and credible allegations that he was a scumbag... Will not.
Trump isn't the problem, he's a symptom.
9 hours ago
Trump, yes. The millions of people that voted for him multiple times despite no shortage of reports and credible allegations that he was a scumbag... Will not.
Trump isn't the problem, he's a symptom.
What you're missing is that America was always like that. And it's been extremely successful. For sure there have been some changes in social dynamics, not just in the US, but worldwide. But the recipe that made the US successful has not changed much. Market economy, geography, attracting talent, innovation, freedom.
>Market economy
The recent massive increase in the US governments direct and indirect involvement in business decisions changes things.
Trump is pushing/forcing countries and companies to invest in the US. He's added more restrictions on who they can sell their products. New significant widespread tariffs also exist that forces businesses to decide on how they can handle it while being pressured not to raise prices.
Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices and businesses and consumers make the decisions on their respective side.
There's also background pressure on businesses to avoid angering Trump and this affects their decision making process.
>attracting talent, innovation,
Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other. He also is removing legal status from many groups.
His inflammatory rhetoric and actions have harmed the international reputation of the US. There's also a prevalent anti-immigrant mood in the US and a much smaller
This decreases the pool of people who can choose to come here and for that smaller amount it increases the probability that smart and innovative people may look elsewhere to either study or start a company.
There are also those that had legal status, lost it, and must leave. These are another set of groups that could have contained some talented and innovative people.
Talented immigrants have done so much for our economy and standing in the world. ----
He cut government funding for many scientific research endeavors and government programs. These may or may not be replaced by private industry. It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.
----
I'm sure you can point to similar actions in the past but I believe the quantity, speed, and intensity are significantly different than in recent times.
I'm also not arguing that some changes weren't justified. I just believe it's a clear change in the ingredients for the worse.
The rest of the Republican Party is completely devoid of charisma, especially the kind that drew so many voters to Trump. There is no drop-in replacement.
Lots of money will be spent trying to manufacture a replacement, though. That will be fun to watch. If you thought the last-minute rally around Kamala was tough to watch…
Isn’t the VP generally the shoe-in nominee? Vance lacks charisma and gravitas, but he only has to be better than the Democratic candidate. For every Bill and Barack, the Democrats have also given us a Kamala, Hillary, and Al. Never underestimate their ability to pick a loser.
But what the republican party has, is a lot of isolationist voters who cannot be moved by appeals to markets or international trade. They don’t care about that stuff.
Sure, the republicans will look hilarious trying to replace Trump for a while … but those Americans aren’t going anywhere and will gladly vote for the next Trump whenever they show up, same as they voted for Reagan and Bush II.
The American attitude driving this current period is much deeper and wider than one man, and people thinking it will all go away when one old man steps down are going to be “surprised” when we’re dealing with this again in ten years or twenty years or three years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to jump up and say there’s a deep cultural rot in America that, if it weren’t for the fortune of incredible financial success, would have us be seen as a hellhole of antisocial maniacs.
That being said, I just don’t buy into the notion that the strategy of the party from 2016-2024 (maybe 100 Trump rallies per year?) can carry over into the late 2020s / early 2030s.
If anything, this is me saying everyone is aware that the current window for reactionary politics in America is closing as Trump loses his vigor and gets closer to being too old to do what he did between 2014 and 2024. The reactionaries in the government and behind the scenes may make one last desperate grab at maintaining power.
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Can't all that be solved by posting ICE guards around all polling stations?
There's no law of nature that proves democracy can't be overthrown, but ICE is currently struggling against popular resistance to merely enforce immigration law in a single medium-sized city. Right now there's not much indication they have either the desire or operational capacity to pull off nationwide voter suppression. (And a number of special elections over the past year have defeated regime-backed candidates without ICE involvement.)
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I think JD Vance has plenty of charisma.
Wait. Do you really think that or are you being sarcastic?
Definitely an odd duck out in the context of Trump, Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush, Reagan.
Also remember it’s not just being charismatic, but charismatic enough to keep people distracted from increasingly unpopular reactionary politics that defy even conservative beliefs (e.g. gun control, speech policing, deficit spending, plenary executive).
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No, Trump getting elected twice is the exact reason Fox News and the like were created.
Trump is president because:
- the absolute failure of the left and the press to address Biden’s cognitive decline.
- Democrats deciding to die on the “trans women are women” hill.
The marginal Trump voter did not very much care for Trump.
No, it's because Obama disillusioned the left, and Biden just hammered it home. Those who thought the Democrats could actually represent the "big tent" have all been disappointed over and over again by sheepdogging and ignoring popular issues with bipartisan support in favor of corporate interests with only an occasional performative nod towards liberal ideals. That's why the right showed up to vote and the left stayed home.
Biden was by far the most effective and most progressive Democratic president of the post-WWII era.
What "hammered home" the disillusionment was not Biden's actions*, but rather the media narrative built around him, particularly by the newspaper most identified with the Democratic Party: the New York Times. They were angry that he didn't give them deference early on, and that, combined with the desire of their wealthy Republican owner to push his politics, led to the constant drumbeat of stories about Biden's supposed "cognitive decline", when he's still much sharper than Trump.
ETA: ...not to mention totally ignoring all his very real accomplishments, like forgiving the student debt of millions of people (yes, despite not getting as many as he wanted, he really did achieve that) and the infrastructure bill.
* His inaction, particularly on prosecuting Trump, was a separate matter.
I agree that the Democratic party has fumbled the ball (over and over) and deserves a lot of blame for where we are now, but all of the trans talk in 2024 was driven entirely by the right.
The Democratic party wasn't talking about trans people in 2024 (if anything the Democratic campaign was conspicuously avoiding the conversation entirely). The trans "debate" that people remember from that time period was driven entirely by right-wing ads and social media.
Obviously this is a pretty successful strategy considering how many people falsely remember who was actually talking about this.
2024 Democratic platform [1] word counts:
They slit their own throats by ignoring half of the voting population.
[1] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
It's true, the Democratic party found themselves in a bit of a pickle during the 2024 election. But it's because the party has been obsessed with the trans culture war for over a decade, culminating in the Biden admin's demands that all womens' spaces be opened up to men who self-identify as women. Prisons, college dorms, sports teams, school locker and shower rooms... there is no place or program that a male wouldn't be able to access the instant he said he was a woman. These principles of self-identification and gender identity as a protected characteristic were being enshrined in government rules and regs at all levels, from Title IX, HUD, Department of Corrections, to countless state and local rules.
Remember Kamala telling the ACLU in that she would provide taxpayer-funded gender affirming surgeries to illegal immigrants if elected president?
If Democrats really didn't want to have that debate you mention, why do they lean so heavily into the trans stuff to begin with?
They talked about it because they knew the median voter disagreed with the Democrats.
Yes, and also pushing identity politics down voters’ throats, selecting an inept candidate without a primary, their desperate attempts to buy votes with debt forgiveness, and opening the border, which escalated to a full-blown crisis leading into election season.
If we extrapolate Trump’s health today compared to where he was at just a year or two ago, I think Republicans will face the same dilemma the Democrats did soon. It will be interesting to see how they handle it.
But cares about something that has zero effect on them? Trans? How many of them know a single trans person?
Like somehow that's a huge thing for Trump voters but a crashing economy is not?
Lots of people know trans people (by which I mean people that have decided to take some visible action to transition) by now - the people in the boonies and flyover states have access to the same internet as everyone else, so a lot of people outside the most progressive cities have transitioned. You have to remember that trans had been at the front of the culture for 10 years (since Caitlyn Jenner) by the time of the 2024 election.
The stocks didn't really go down yet and their media sources are distraction agents.
Crashing the economy? In the past year the S&P 500 rose 14%, unemployment is at 4.4%, and inflation is around 2.7%. There are many things to criticize Trump for but the economy has not actually crashed.
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