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Comment by evantbyrne | Hacker News Reader

Matter-of-fact discussion of the economy didn't cause people to vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants. The messaging could be better but don't gaslight us. Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans.

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I think it is actually 3 things, but you can't do much about two of them:

-1/3 economic/voters: we need better/different economics/policy

-1/3 cultists/far right christians/nationalists: trump is how we finally rise to power/right the nation

-1/3 lolz/nihilists: i hate everything; burn it all down

2 and 3 are the same group. Accelerationists and white Christian nationalists are just rebranded white nationalists, so there is nothing surprising there. Hard to say what the distribution of purely economic voters is given how illogical that is. I'm hesitant to believe the excuses people have given how extreme of the rest of the campaign was and its parallels to a particular historical figure, going to the point of nearly plagiarizing quotes from the man.

> vote for a serial sex offender promising to execute his political rivals and purge America of immigrants

> Something is very wrong with the calculus being used by a great number of Americans

I'm sure a lot of people, especially independents who could have swung either way, voted for Trump precisely because they were sick of this attitude.

People are free to make partisan judgments against Trump or any other politician, but they will also suffer electoral consequences if those judgments are for the most part fact-free, as in your case.

You can repeat that quip three times in the mirror and it still won't change how plainly ugly his campaign and personal actions have been. Nor have you served me, nor liberals in general, any consequences that won't also impact Trump's base to an equal or greater extent.

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