It is a cold day in Washington. A crowd is gathering on the National Mall for the swearing-in of the 47th president of the United States. At noon on 20 January 2025, Donald Trump places his hand on a Bible, takes the oath of office and delivers an inaugural address with a simple theme: retribution.
This is the nightmare scenario for millions of Americans – and one that they are increasingly being forced to take seriously. Opinion polls show Trump running away with the Republican presidential nomination and narrowly leading Democrat Joe Biden in a hypothetical match-up. Political pundits can offer plenty of caveats but almost all agree that the race for the White House next year will be very close.
The fact that there is a more than remote chance of the twice impeached, quadruply indicted former US president returning to the Oval Office is ringing alarm bells. “I think it would be the end of our country as we know it,” Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, said on the ABC talkshow The View this week. “And I don’t say that lightly.”
If he wins again then we deserve whatever happens.
Personally I don’t think there’s any way to avoid most of the consequences of him winning even if he loses. We’ll just postpone them a while. The Republican party doesn’t believe in democracy and they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. We will have to face that beast. Whether it’s in 2024, 2028, or later doesn’t make much of a difference.
You think you deserve to lose to trump and a shadow campaign of foreign actions that brainwashed half of your boomers, who were new to social media and whatsapp forwards, into thinking and believing in short incomplex solutions to big and complex topics?
Why do you deserve that? I would say you have a point if you vote for an ass out of free will, but there was a concerted effort by foreign powers that want to see the US on their knees. The PRC assumed that the US would be in shambles by the mid 20s because of culture wars and race wars. They actively amplified this prophecy by sending the right tictocs to the young and the right targeted memes to your uncle. Your uncle is too stupid to come up with funny memes like he is too stupid to grasp complex geopolitical scenarios. He most possibly believed that horse-dewormer and a uv-light torchlight his ass cure CoVID. If it even exists. But all that he learned from foreign misinformation and was amplified by the inept president that needs pictures and sharpies.
There are many stupid people in the world. But there are also guillable people that need only a poke from a foreign power to flip against their own interest if the poke is a meme and the meme is telling him that he is right in being a racist as es is too stupid to spell emphaty.
Mate, it’s a little too easy to just blame foreign agents and idiots for all this mess. The radicalization process of the GOP has been going on for decades, the social divide has been widening and the US media is doing its part to stir the pot. Sure, Russian trolls played a part in whipping up the frenzy, but the main problem is a home made one, of unchecked capitalism without any regard for whom it might hurt. Without it, trolls wouldn’t have anything to feed on. Happy, well educated people don’t fall for that shit.
US have been living on a policy of fuck you, got mine for decades. It’s a political, cultural and economical problem and it wasn’t invented by foreign agents, it’s home made. People are desperate, uneducated and feeling disenfranchised. If you present them an easy answer and act like you hear their problems, they’re gonna love you for it. A president like Trump was just a matter of when, not if. Blaming stupid people and foreigners won’t fix shit.
Also, it’s quite ironic that you have so many spelling mistakes, in a paragraph making fun of people for not being able to spell empathy…
And typically the other party just says they’re the only option to maintain the status quo. Being the lesser of two evils gets some votes, but doesn’t bring an easy win. In general, saying what you’re against doesn’t get much votes compared to saying what you’re for. Although it didn’t help that the last time a guy promised change didn’t change much.
You answered that really well. Everyone wants to simplify the situation so they can end up with something external to blame. That kind of thinking is part of how we ended up here in the first place. The truth is we all play some role in both the problem and the solution. We have to own that if we want to find a way forward.