Even in 2016 it was clear he was a con artist. He literally said in one of the debates that he wouldn’t accept the results of the election if he lost.
Cue 2020: shocked Pikachu face
I think everyone expected him to cry fowl when he lost in 2020. I think being a little surprised that he’d go so far as to stage a violent coup is probably understandable.
If you cry fowl you probably need to see a doctor to get your tear ducts checked out.
tear *ducks. Fixed that for you
I can’t believe I missed it.
Figuratively, though. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine Trump squawking like a chicken and flapping his arms while turning in a tight circle when something truly upsetting to him occurred.
Or get busy making the next pollos hermanos
*Tear ducks
I’m sure Dick Cheney will be able to get that sorted out for you.
Why are we acting like Jan 6th was the only logical reason to be against him by that point?
Have we just forgotten his presidency? There was already no excuses going into 2020, especially with the COVID deaths.
We aren’t. The context was “he said he wouldn’t accept the election results” not “why should nobody vote for a fascist”.
He’s easily the most corrupt president in US history. From start to finish it was just a long game of him trying to figure out how he could bilk more money out of his supporters, the united states, foreign powers, etc. And since his supporters are a bunch of racist nazis, he put corrupt racist nazis in charge of nearly every executive branch position.
Anyone voting for Trump is a terrible person.
Since Trump supporters won’t defend their own ideas I will emulate one for you right now.
“Trump rightfully won the election and Biden is an illegitimate president.” Uhm, not sure if they actually believe this… I guess they said it once?
“Trumps plan to destroy the deep state will save the country.” Is that something they say?
Honestly guys I can’t. They are all batshit and I don’t think they believe anything.
I can say that it was not the only reason. (After all, he did lose the 2020 election) In 2016, I voted for Trump. This was because my friends did too. I thought he was going to drain the swamp so to speak. He had very good slogans and populist policies that appealed to the masses. He made you feel seen.
This changed when he kept on with his attempted Muslim ban, rhetoric to lock people up, and name calling throughout the first three years. There were some bright spots, such as better finding to CBP and policy changes to alleviate our court system (still not perfect as one needs more resources in the court system too) The Trump administration actually engaged over in Central Asia which had a noticeable impact over there. My dad had pointed out that the Government was doing some good work not quite making it to the mainstream media. I noticed Britain leave the EU for questionable reasons because of the same forces. I read the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 election (and barely remember it four years later)
I thought that it was likely that the Russians colluded with the Republicans, but it could not be proven. And it could have remained that way if not for Trump’s first impeachment. Trump withheld aid to Ukraine in return for finding dirt on his political rival Joe Biden as well as trying to pin the election interference on Ukraine. This impeachment had a man I highly respect break from his own party and vote to convict for abuse of power. But he was the only one who would stand against the tide.
Three years in, I could be counted as a swing voter, favoring neither party. I had seen the Republican party pay lip service to Christian values and yet fail to have integrity. I had a mild dislike of Trump and was starting to think his policies were not implemented correctly. Then Covid happened
I lost my job, was chronically online, and listened to a lot of podcasts. Trump had a really bad messaging problem then. I thought he needed to throw his phone in the toilet and stay off of Twitter. He recommended hydroxycloroquine as a treatment which was kind of dumb. He didn’t support his governors when they would lock down states for public health and instead would berate my own governor for trying to save lives. The more extreme Michigan Republicans would compare her to Hitler (Godwin’s law at work) and Trump would engage with that. This mostly made me appreciate Governor Whitmer more as she was making good policy decisions.
A couple months go by and George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. This was murder. People would be protesting the police brutality that pervades police departments everywhere. The police unions that let problematic officers go from one police department to another and spread their often racist policies. There were protests everywhere from DC to Seattle. While many conservatives will focus on the shit show that was CHAZ, I saw the one in DC. Especially on one morning when security services cleared the park for Donald J Trump to go across the street for a photo op. This photo op was front of a church where he held a Bible upside down. And in that moment, I saw the Trump presidency as a fake Christian presidency. It didn’t matter how pro-life he was or how many pastors endorsed him anymore. That ruined it forever for me.
The following months would only serve to cement that opinion as I saw him lay the groundwork for denying the election by discrediting mail in voting, especially as there was much more need of it than previous elections. I thought this was a stupid move as he would be undermining Democratic legitimacy. Little did I know, that was the point. We all know what happens next though. The election happens, Trump is defeated, launches over 50 lawsuits, wins one, and changes zero districts. He incites a riot at the Capitol. He spreads conspiracy theories. He blackmails a secretary of state. He gets impeached again and gets acquitted again.
But you know that part of the story
go so far as to stage a violent coup
…apparently as a distraction while he worked with Lawyers to setup fake faithless electors to invalidate the results of states he lost.
*con man. Con Artists have an actual skill.
Oh, and men don’t?? You’ve now begun your tour of my victim complex.
or the “russia, if you’re listening…”
Or in Helsinki when he said that he believed Putin over his own intelligence officers.
He didn’t respect the results when he won. He saw that he lost the popular vote and cried about it for ages.
He physically mocked a disabled news reporter during his campaign.
He openly said the way to get women is to grab them by the pussy during his campaign.
He openly admitted to being a racist dumbass with the whole “build the wall” during his campaign.
Yeah I’d say it was pretty cut and dry that he was a special kind of dog shit from the beginning.
The OP is proof of how much Trump has stretched the overton window, to the point that you can find liberals saying that 2016 Trump might have had a pass for some.
Yeah Trump has been openly fascist since long before he became president. Anyone with two ears and a functional brain could see that.
Yup we have a presumed presidential candidate openly talking about how he going to be a dictator
Exactly. And all of these commenters saying “Yes, well what if the person we’re talking about is just media illiterate and doesn’t pay attention to politics or has been incredibly successfully hiding under a rock for the last 8 years”… literally all someone has to do to determine that Trump is a horrible excuse for a human being is to read anything he’s ever said or watch any of his appearances on camera. Any of them. Take your pick. If you can’t clock that he’s a fucking monster within 5 minutes of whatever clip he’s in, then either you have no understanding of the difference between right and wrong, or you’re dumb as hell. And if you do clock that he’s a shithead and vote for him anyway, that makes you as bad as he is.
And hey, I get it. There are some incredibly stupid people in this world. But, like, 73.5 million people voted for that fat orange idiot in 2020. So it seems statistically unlikely that all of those people would fall into that category. For all, or even the majority of Trump’s voters to not be shit human beings would be a statistical wonder.
Not to rest from your overall message, but I have the one single clip where Trump is unironically saying something positive. Of course, this speaks more about how deranged a significant portion of the GOP is than about Trump.
Ok, fair enough. I stand corrected. I suppose it is possible that someone out there could have missed every other thing Trump has said and done except for this clip and gotten a favorable impression of him. I will try to not be so narrow-minded going forward.
Don’t worry, I somehow doubt that hypothetical person exists lmao
Bible belt thinks he’s the anti-christ and wants him to ruin the world so they can have their rapture.
Worse, if he’s the antichrist, they’re the choades who were suckered into believing him. They talk about how he’s picked by Jesus. Some pastors have given sermons about how he is an “imperfect vessel”. But I’ve never heard any say he’s the antichrist, not even close.
Not so sure about that.
Trump is openly saying that he’s going to be a dictator. Trump is the Republican election pick. If you vote Republican, you vote for Trump, you’re a shit bag faschie voting for fascism. Full stop.
I have long said the KKK traded their white hoods for red caps. Fuck the GOP.
I actually threw away my red Nike hat just to avoid the confusion. Fuck trump.
As an Angels fan I feel this so much 😭
I threw away my yellow shirts not to be confused with a Piss Boy.
He’s fighting in court claiming absolute immunity. He’s never going to stop committing crimes. Today he was in a courtroom for a defamation case while simultaneously defaming the sexual assault victim who’s suing him. They’re all fucking degenerates, every last one of them.
That’s why SCOTUS has put off all requests for hearings in regards to Trump - They need him to win the election before they rule that presidents have total immunity so he can “Day One Dictator.”
Trump’s team is doing everything they can to delay his court cases past the election, I’d put up $50 saying SCOTUS will take the cases they’re denying as soon as he’s the president elect or whatevs.
But that’s what they want… They want a dictator because they don’t want the president who can’t do anything because his hands are tied by complicated political checks and balances. They want a president that doesn’t care about the courts or the legislation that they disagree with. They want the president who pushes authoritative action through the bureaucracy. Unfortunately they don’t understand that those actions will never be to aid them but only aid himself.
Well if Trump tries the dictator thing we can always try out that 2nd Amendment thing.
I’d like to remind everyone that some of us are shit people but haven’t and still don’t support Trump.
“Look, I might be a shit person, but even I have standards.”
Don’t you dare excuse the 2020 voters. That man’s platform was standing on top of the corpses of thousands of people dead because of his active undermining of efforts to handle the pandemic.
Stop trying to retroactively make this shit reasonable. It was outrageous and unforgivable long, long before now.
Almost all of my coworkers are Trumpers, can confirm, they are all shit people.
Centrists: It’s not all Republicans that support extremist candidates, there’s still lots of non-extremists in the party!
Iowa caucus: Trump 51.0% DeSantis 21.2% Haley 19.1% Ramaswamy 7.7%
Leaving 1.0% or less that don’t support an extremist candidate
At 1% or less, you can assume we’re talking about people who signed up for the wrong caucus by accident or something.
*of the ones voted in the extreme weather
Mmm. And what’s going to be the excuse after the New Hampshire primary next week?
I read on here a few days ago about Haley being representative of the LEAST extreme. That many of her voters would just end up voting Biden, even though they don’t agree with most of the politics.
I could almost give them benefit of the doubt. Anyone ignorant enough to call Biden socialist though is immediately not worth talking to
Haley? As in Nikki “slavery wasn’t a cause of the Civil War” Haley? Nikki “six week abortion ban” Haley? Nikki “withdraw the US from the Human Rights Council because of its ‘chronic bias against Israel’” Haley?
Nikki “saying everything she thinks GOP wants to hear to get elected” Haley, yes.
I think Republicans are all selfish assholes, but the ones who are willing to avoid having trump as president can at least read
Something like 14% of Iowan voters actually turned out. So 51% of that. It’s still not ideal of course 🤷
I don’t think the Iowa caucuses are like normal voting. It’s more like an event:
I don’t think a single person under 40 was in that room, so these numbers and results track.
I mean, 75,000 less people voted overall than in the 2016 caucus. Granted most of those probably died of covid or just didn’t want to go in the cold, but still…
I’m kinda baffled that we’re a decade deep into this and people are still hung up on the fact that despite knowing their figurehead is an asshat, genuinely good people can have the level of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously support what they believe he represents, while also ignoring his actions.
There are societal divisions to the very bedrock of the USA - Trump is a symptom, not the condition.
I agree to an extent but there’s a certain point where cognitive dissonance can’t be the excuse. We’re long past that. There have been countless wake-up calls, off-ramps, breaking points, etc. if absolutely none of them, not one, has made you stop and reconsider after all this time, then what will?
Frankly, if you’re so ethically and mentally shattered as a human being that cognitive dissonance is enough to make you support a man that has done every possible thing under the sun over the course of 8 years to illustrate what a walking cancer he is on society, then there’s no fundamental difference between you and the actual goose-stepping supporters, because you will ultimately behave exactly the same regardless. There’s nothing anyone can say or do to help you, so why should anyone waste their time concerning themselves with whether or not you’re a true asshole or just mislead.
I always wonder how many people would have to openly say they are part of a new “American White Nationalism group” before it hits critical mass and most of the other white people cower with their tails between their legs and go over to join them? I think the percent is lower than it should be, I really think the threat would only need to look credible to hit that point. So what 30%? Who knows maybe even 25 or 20%.
At the beginning of 2016 maybe you could say that. By late 2016 it was obvious what kind of person he was. Nobody after that gets a pass.
Indeed. “Grab them by the pussy” and his mocking of a disabled person all made it very clear. Anyone still on board with him after that was a certified asshole.
Most Trump supporters just believe every negative story about him is a government conspiracy created to try to keep him out of power.
The lawsuits, the criminal charges, the COVID deaths… They think they’re all lies of the liberal media.
How do you fight that?
Offer them something better. They support Trump because he makes them feel:
- Smart for cutting through all the lies to get to the truth.
- Part of something bigger than themselves.
- Victimized/marginalized (few things are more empowering than being wronged).
The opposition has to overcome these powerful emotions. Currently, they are kinda banking on a decisive victory in court. That might be enough to dispel some of the enchanted, but will only encourage the most fervent. Worse, if it doesn’t get him locked up or disqualify him from running, it’s going to increase his power.
The best way to fight it is with a candidate that can beat him. I hope Biden is capable of pulling it off a second time.
Besides Trump himself, there are systemic issues that we should be fighting over. The electoral collage system is a huge problem that isn’t going away. 2000 and 2016 elections won by candidates with fewer votes.
Gerrymandering is also a big reason why he has as much support as he enjoys. Honestly, I might not care as much if he were president if Congress and State legislatures weren’t so out of wack with our population distributions. Representative government my ass. Land is straight up voting and it should piss us all off way more.
The best way to fight it is with a candidate that can beat him.
In 2016 that candidate was Bernie
True
If only Biden backed out, their win would be guaranteed
Having a functioning brain?
It’s difficult to trust anything when you firmly believe the source of the well is tainted. There’s a religiosity to it.
If there was a grand government conspiracy to keep Trump from power, why didn’t they keep him from power the first time? And why has this conspiracy been so ineffective at disappearing or otherwise fast-tracking a baseless trial against him to convict and imprison him? Why hasn’t the CIA or FBI simply taken him out, given their historic track record of taking out foreign or domestic politically problematic persons?
What conspiracy could be so ineffective as to permit him to not only rise to power, but to attain it for a time, and to try to reclaim it?
I as a Canadian just don’t get the appeal. He’s not handsome by any stretch so there’s no ascetic attraction.
He’s not nearly as wealthy as he claims he is so it can’t be admiration for his success.
He’s got zero charisma so it can’t be his charm.
He’s as dumb as a pile of rocks so it can’t be they admire his intelligence.
He’s got the athletic prowess of a half dead goldfish and the skin tone of one so it can’t be his physical ability.
I honestly just can’t fathom the appeal.
He appeals to the hateful, and the stupid. He wants to hurt the people they want hurt. It’s that simple.
I imagine if you were also as dumb as a pile of rocks you’d think he was perfectly smart.
There is no appeal, they’re just too stupid to understand his flaws.
We are talking about Americans here. They aren’t the brightest people. So to most of these points they think the opposite.
He reminds them of themselves because he has all the same “qualities” as them. He normalizes autocracy, xenophobia, sexism, racism, moral and ethical hypocrisy, and those are standard “qualities” of conservative Americans.
Because legacy, independent, and basement medias are constantly beaming images of Trump at them, and when they’re given no other option of ideas that’s the only one they know. That’s why I find it hard to believe that Trump is a Russian asset, then it would mean the media is also owned by Russians, but they’re not, they’re owned by Western billionaires. Trump has been engineered by the ruling class, and so has his popularity.
You think that Donald Trump won because too many people saw his picture on TV?
I’m going to say he won because he said the quiet part out loud and a good chunk of Americans are just dumb bigoted fucks. Especially now.
Ding!! The ruling class used Trump to weaponize bigotry.
Whats fucked up is as I’ve watched all of this unfold, I can’t help but briefly entertain the idea that those fuckers all decided to do their own version of Richmond Valentine’s Plan from Kingsman:
When you get a virus, you get a fever. That’s the human body raising its core temperature to kill the virus. Planet Earth works the same way: global warming is the fever, mankind is the virus. We’re making our planet sick. A cull is our only hope. If we don’t reduce our population ourselves, there’s only one or two ways this can go: the host kills the virus, or the virus kills the host. Either way…
I think that when a person with a relatively normal level of intelligence hears the word salad that Trump routinely strings together, their response is usually along the lines of: “What the hell is that idiot saying now?”
But when a MAGAT hears him speak, they think: “Well shit. I can’t understand what he’s saying, and I think I’m pretty smart, so he must be a genius!”
A lot of people have explanations based on rational reasoning, like if they see the same facts that we do, but reach different conclusions. But these explanations always come off feeling a bit, I dunno, wobbly. What if it’s not rational at all? What if it’s a form of brainwashing, or something like hypnosis?
What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain
All of his supporters in 2016 were also bad people. They saw the “grab them by the pussy” tape, they saw him make fun of a disabled person, and thought he was still a worthy candidate for their vote.
Whenever I brought this up to my Trump-supporting aunt (who lives in the UK) she would just wave it off and say, “Oh that’s fake news.” I genuinely think they’re incapable of even entertaining those facts, let alone seeing them and supporting them as you say. It’s an absurd level of brainwashing.
Oh, I got sick of Trump so quickly that around a year after he got in office I was just catering discussions with “Why would you support a known and admitted rapist?” Doesn’t advance the conversation with those fools, but it certainly ends it.
Belief is social. People struggle to believe things that clash with their in group. They’ll go to great lengths to avoid it.
I don’t think one could make that argument in 2020, though. The man led an insurrection attempt. All questions were answered.
In 2021.
He was calling for it during the campaign. Literally stood on a stage and told the Proud Boys to be ready.
Stop trying to act like this shit wasn’t painfully obvious from the beginning. 2016, you maybe had some excuses, but after all the shit that happened in the 4 years he was in office, there is not a god damn thing anyone can use as an excuse for voting for him a second time. None.
Right, in 2020, it was just extortion for foreign electoral interference, and dismantling the literal machinery of our democracy during a pandemic he made worse.
I mean, the writing was on the wall. Even before the election, he was saying things like: “Oh, they’re gonna rig the election against me, folks”, and his rhetoric was so toxic that at Republican debates, the moderators were asking him things like: “If you lose the election, will you abide by the peaceful transfer of power?” Which, of course, he didn’t agree to.
I mean, yes, he hadn’t actually incited people to try to overthrow the government at that point, but he very much was on record saying that that was his intention.
I could make that argument in 2016
There were thousands dead because of his kneecapping of COVID management. There’s no excuses for 2020. None.
When I actually talk with Trump supporters, it’s very clear to me that many don’t actually support trump. Or, at least, not the trump we see. It’s usually a case of leading a busy life and making the mistake of trusting a news org to tell you the truth of the matter when you have five minutes to catch up. And if you pick one that supports trump …well you see where this goes. It is admittedly clear that people don’t understand the gravity of the situation—but as a result, the ‘crime’ is usually ignorance, not maliciousness. As always, the fact that this is a ‘political’ topic muddies the water, and no one understands what the other side actually wants. We do agree on most things, it’s just silly tribalism that makes us call a large portion of the population a “piece of shit”.
There are always those outliers that are genuinely evil, but I do believe they’re outliers.
I am sure they are out there, but I haven’t actually met an open Trump supporter who isn’t an unhinged lunatic. In a few cases, we have gone a lifetime without their awful politics coming out, until Trump comes up and then they are actually unashamed fascists, Christian nationalists, and conspiracy guzzling assholes.
Personally I don’t care to characterize em as lunatics, because that word really only serves to categorize them into an entirely different realm of brain function, and I feel like that’s counterproductive and misrepresents how fascism works. It’s not that millions of people lose their minds and frothingly support fascism, it’s that fascism is capable of presenting itself as something else, or necessary, to an otherwise normal in-group base using a number of psychological weak points, many of which have been exacerbated in the Internet age with little popular understanding.
To name one example, I think of some folks I knew in my hometown, brilliant engineers, electricians, people with extreme talent in one specific thing, living in places where diversity has been historically squashed so they’ve only known a snow globe’s worth of the world. And, especially among the older generation, they’re simultaneously not very social media savvy but also way too online… Once they’re given a nebulous external force to fear, the final stop of that train should be a surprise to no one.
I don’t say this to absolve fascists of personal blame, because well and truly fuck 'em, they are responsible nonetheless. But fantasizing that their brains are just broken and don’t function like ours is missing the point. Everyone’s susceptible to a grift, social media bubble, or wishful thinking of some kind. And when you factor in trauma as a politically neutral psychological force, human behavior suddenly becomes a lot less “stupid” and a lot more… frustrating. Pretending we’re not weak to analogues of many of the same things is doing ourselves a disservice. We need a better standard than just doing what they do when they talk about trans people like we’re space aliens incapable of reason.
To be fair, that’s likely because the more reasonable ones are smart enough to know it’s stupid to openly proclaim support of trump. It’s likely that outlier group I mentioned that are ‘open trump supporters’
“Be careful to attribute malice to actions taken by ignorance”.
Something like that, I don’t remember the quote correctly.I’d say as a small counter-argument though, the amount of ignorance required to still support Trump is not something simply to hand wave away.
Hanlon’s razor – “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”
Yeah there’s a huge mistake in assuming everyone is some politically engaged online person, most people live their lives and experience politics though media. They saw the media and people freaking out over Trump from the start, yet they experienced little to nothing during his Presidency that negatively impacted their lives in contrast.
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Great way to rephrase my point, a lot more concise XD Sometimes I ramble.
Yess! You are so right and people should hear it!
Also I feel like social media and modern news networks have hugely reinforced this “tribalism”. Unfortunately, negative news always does better than positive news so I can’t see news/social media platforms turning around and trying to slow down this effect.
Glenn Greenwald actually talked about how Trump supporters are famously distrustful of (a) the Security State and (b) corporate media, and so there’s only like two news sources that they show positive numbers for trust in - Fox and Newsmax.
What doesn’t help is that they do lie about Trump, and make him out to be a literal insurrectionist… Think what you want about him in terms of his politics being colored by racism and Islamophobia (his Muslim ban was pretty nuts), but you can’t call the guy an insurrectionist unless you greatly modify what an insurrection is and what it means to insight one. Things like this plus upgrading frivolous financial misdemeanors that megacorporations routinely violate to federal crimes in an effort to remove him from the ballot have a radicalizing effect…
But yeah, IDK, I’d vote for Trump over Biden because he is antiestablishment and his foreign policy is better in the long run.
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Where do you get your definition of insurrection? I’d have thought that attempting to overthrow a democratically elected government to install yourself as dictator meets just about any definition.
That’s a mere interpretation of what happened that would never stand up in a court of law, hence why no formal charges have been brought. It’s completely speculative.
Which is exactly why we can’t remove him from ballots or refer to it as an insurrection.
Remember the Iraq War? We referred to the opposition after Hussein fell as terrorists (not very accurate, very lame Zioconservative take), or as insurgents, which is accurate.
Insurgency implies some long term armed resistance. It can’t refer to some impromptu riot on the police lines.
You didn’t answer my question - where do you get your definition of insurrection?
Trump has already been found to have incited insurrection in court, and was disqualified from the ballot in Colorado for just that reason.
The stacking of the senate, failure of democracy and abandonment of the rule of law makes bringing federal charges pointless (see his multiple impeachments). This is a strange standard to try (and fail) to apply under the circumstances.
I suppose my definition is the one from the Oxford dictionary:
an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence:
J6 cannot meet such a burden since it was not an organized attempt and it certainly wasn’t violent in the way that a real move to overthrow the government would be, only violent in the sense that any disorganized protest can be.
… And while some people can toss around the word insurrection, you notice that there is no serious charge against Trump on this, because there can be no charge, since he said nothing nor does any other evidence exists which show he incited anyone to any illegal act, let alone an attempt to overthrow the government. This is only possible through assumption & interpretation of what happened that it was even an ‘insurrection.’
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Nah, an insurrection is what was happening in Iraq after the 2003 invasion (and happening rightfully so).
If what occurred on J6 was an insurrection, it would have been explicitly violent or had a real organized plan for the literal overthrow of the government.
Even the ridiculous plan organized by the Proud Boys was not really an insurrection even though it involved demanding a re-vote (or a re-vote after a recount) because it ultimately wanted to preserve democratic norms, and the fools who came up with it sincerely believed that democracy was completely undermined by the last election… Which, arguably, it was.
Employing non-lethal means to occupy a place as a protest seems reasonable, doesn’t it? This is what people did after the killing of George Floyd.
all i can do is look at our country and let out a big sigh. what will it take for the US to better itself?
A meteor a big fucking meteor
You watched Don’t Look Up? It will take more than a meteor.
That meteor was pretty fucking effective, though. Not one person on Earth ever voted for Meryl Streep’s character again, I can assure you.
An event that simultaneously eliminates the love affair a majority of Americans have with capitalism followed by sufficient legislative representation to push for changes that benefit individuals and not corporations.
A constitutional convention forced by the military as part of the conclusion of a civil war.
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to borrow an old phrase: “it would take an act of congress”
