It it extraordinary watching a small team lead by a convicted felon tear down the US from the inside with seemingly full authority.
10% of the US is still huge in absolute terms, though.
Exactly. 'Proportion' doesn't imply majority, and in a country of about 350M people, that's 35M people that look at what's happening and go "I like this!"
Considering the situation in the US with how political representation is calculated, gerrymandering, non-proportional representation of high and low-population states, that 10% of the population can easily have outsized representative power at the federal and state levels. Which is exactly what we see right now.
Worse in what way exactly?
This kind of statement is a lot like the old "states' rights" pretense where the right in question was slavery -- the dishonesty is clear under even the barest comparative scrutiny.
Reality is there are zero pro-Trump rallies, and plenty of very angry former Trump voters making their rage felt at Town Halls.
This will only get worse over time as cuts to essential services start to bite hard.
I've said all along I think the MAGA cult thing is going to blow up in the faces of the people making this happen.
Anecdotally, only one person I talked to was willing to admit that they would have voted differently if they knew what was actually to come (which they should have given the first take at his presidency.) Also anecdotally, many that do seem to be raging at what's happening at the federal level don't have much concern with their local politicians being cut from more or less the same cloth. Granted the local ones, especially in lower-population areas, know they might actually have to face their constituents in their day-to-day lives, so tend to spout rhetoric without acting much on it, so there's less to rage about at them.
> I've said all along I think the MAGA cult thing is going to blow up in the faces of the people making this happen.
Maybe, but unfortunately we're all in the last radius.
One interesting thing that showed up before the US election in 2008 was the bizarrely small number of people claiming to have voted for Bush. It was a big enough effect that it messed up the polling to some extent. Some unhappy Trump voters are likely claiming not to have voted, now.
Carney is now reviewing Canada's F-35 order. They'd be fools to buy from us.
We'll see how much leverage the defense lobby has, but so far it doesn't seem like they have any sway at all.
We'd be a fool to buy them, but we will be absolutely punished if we don't. Last time this was under question Bombardier -- one of our largest companies, and employers -- started to "suddenly" lose contracts in the US and the Canadian gov't backpedaled (for other reasons as well) and went ahead with the F35. They're worried that will happen again
That and so much money and time have already been invested on this, and the alternatives are not super compelling.
To people who voted for Trump, it expands to "see - he's the victim of partisan/predatory prosecution." Furthermore, it emboldens them to use the courts to advance their own partisan agenda.
It feels like the robe of impartiality has been falling away from the justice system in an alarming way. People look the other way when the lack-of-impartiality leans the direction they want (SCOTUS making up the right to an abortion in Roe v Wade), but it's scary when it goes the other way.
I dislike "convicted felon" as a descriptor for Trump. It serves as a dogwhistle rather than a helpful shorthand. He's an asshat, but he also got charged with a rare felony so his detractors could go around calling him by a name usually reserved for rapists and murderers. It doesn't signal anything meaningful, except that you're in the opposition, and it potentially riles up his adherents to also use the courts for revenge.