The amount of corruption and incompetence ignored by his base is staggering. This is all because they don’t like immigration?
Canadian elections show that people can change their mind overnight, but unfortunately some of the changes that happened in the US institutions and the global relations will take decades to reverse (if ever).
Bullshit. America is the richest country on earth. Your unemployment is remarkably low. Your disposable income is relatively high. And all the issues you complain about, like housing, are worse outside the US than in the US.
Moreover, a lot of the MAGA people are NOT working class struggling families. There are a lot of middle class middle aged low digit millionaires who are certainly not hurting for anything, but for some reason really love Trump.
Also from polling the ones who did not vote were also leaning towards Trump. So participation was not the issue.
That's only true for an incredibly expansive definition of geriatric: Teddy Roosevelt was 42, Kennedy 43, Obama and Grant 46, etc. By a commom conventional standard of "geriatric” in general use (65+), only Buchanan, Harrison, Reagan, Trump, and Biden qualify at the start of their first term, and only 16 total would at the end of their last term.
> So, when compared with the younger black/indian woman
Harris was closer to (but still older than) both the mean and median age at start of term for a President than Trump was (even if you compared her in 2024 to Trump when elected in 2016). Gender and age, sure, but the whole geriatric thing as a long-term bias evident across the whole list of Presidents is unjustified (there's probably a decent argument that the current electorate has a geriatric bias, but its not a long-term historical one.)
That’s not even true within my lifetime, let alone historically. People freaked the fuck out because Reagan was going to be all of 70 when he took office in 1982. That’s nothing compared to the fossils that they’re propping up in front of a microphone these days. 70 year olds in Congress these days are nicknamed “The Kid”.
They love him because he's as degenerate as they are, and makes it cool to be white. Or so I'm told.
Not that I believe any of that, just going by what Trump supporters tell me.
But history has showed (with NSDAP and others) that it is not.
You see, you lost a good chunk of voters there.
Many are just voting for their candidate to hurt other people whom they don't like.
Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go).
Edit: it’s abundantly clear that Trump is also highly corrupt. A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption (not to mention the felt need to pick a side)
Who was president in 2020? Who did the first round of stimulus?
I think that's fair, Covid was completely insane. Personally the part of the US response I disliked the most was the closing of schools. Like, in Ireland the pubs were closed for basically 2 years, but we kept the schools open for most of it, which I think was the right call. Difficult situation though, and the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission).
> Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided,
I really don't see that. Like, Russia basically invaded as soon as (like that week) Nordstream 2 was finished (which unlike Nordstream 1 didn't pass through Ukraine). I think it's arguable that the US didn't need to be as involved (although if they hadn't been, then the EU-US break would have happened much, much sooner).
> which could have been spent here,
Like, for the avoidance of doubt, sending old weapons to Ukraine doesn't actually cost the US as much as they claimed. Ye'd have had to decommission them anyway. (This is a surprisingly large pattern in US aid to other countries).
> A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption
Yeah, that's fair.
The data are known to show that the primary effect was in reducing the risk of hospitalization, severe disease, and mortality. Why, then should the lack of effect on transmission be the end-point that determines the appropriateness of mass immunization?
And I say this as someone who thinks Biden was a pretty good President.
The idea that Biden was taking food out of our mouths to send to Ukraine was pushed by the very people that approved that budget because it was easy to do. And Americans know this, they really do, they just forget it because they've had this narrative yelled at them so many times.
And even given that, we were very shrewd. We sent old weapons that were going to be decommissioned, so I would hardly say we sent a bunch of money to Ukraine. More like we goosed our weapon production.
Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.
Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.
This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".
Fertile ground for a fascist conman.
There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.
It’s not solely Trump’s identity that makes that distinction; it’s the haphazard, uninformed, and ruinous adventures in poor decision-making in economics and otherwise that characterize the difference. Biden was ineffective and a poor choice, but utterly benign in comparison to his mendacious, unskilled successor.
It's a complex web of alienations.
You could spend an entire college semester discussing how and why. Immigration is the current scapegoat for the effects of a hollowed out middle class, though.
hahaha
rattling off a bunch of people who haven't been criminally charged in response to a party whose leader quite literally HAS been charged with fraud is the point.
how many indictments were passed down during the Obama admin vs Trump admin vs Bush admin and so on. Republican admins are notorious for being criminals.
A elite that fights social welfare as socialism, while at the same time removing the middle class and handing the lower classes infinite competition. Nobody cares about who the elite pretends to care for, nobody cares about corruption, they want to see that house burn down, like theirs was torched. The sounds of humanism the enemy makes, are irrelevant, as the sound of compassion made while doing nothing.
Joe’s brother has also made a lot of money off of questionable government contracts.
He was convicted of several crimes…
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco-weiss/pr/robert-hunter-...
Like, yes, please, investigate all of them.
Republicans sort-of tried with Hunter, but kept balking at public hearings because they knew a bunch of the stuff they were claiming when they went on Fox was made-up, so it better served their propaganda purposes to avoid pursuing it. If there was actually anything to it, I hope and assume they would have gone ahead.
Which brings up the credibility problem with these claims from Republicans: "There's fraud in government! We found tons of it!" cool, that's a crime, where are the indictments? Oh, there aren't any, because you're full of shit. "Massive election fraud!" cool, that's a serious crime, you're in power now, a bunch of your AGs launched high-profile investigations, where are the indictments? You snagged a half-dozen cases, all mundane shit like someone with two houses voting in both states in two different elections because they forgot about it or didn't realize it was illegal? Where is the massive, organized fraud? Oh, you were just lying. Again. (They've been fucking that particular chicken for nearly two damn decades and somehow still have nothing to show for it, the democracy-undermining pricks). Months and months and all those hours of interviews for the Benghazi "investigations", and what? Nothing again. It's tedious. Shit or get off the pot, go after crime but stop lying about it.
Hunter Biden blatantly and corruptly sold his father’s influence. There’s even evidence that Joe got his “10% for the big guy” on these dealings. It’s a massive disgusting scandal.
For the record I can’t stand when either side pulls this crap. The whole narrative that my side’s politicians are less corrupt than yours needs to end. They’re dividing us into tribes and playing us for fools while the political class robs us blind.
Hunter Biden, as far as the country has been made aware, never requested an TS-SCI clearance, as Jared Kushner did. Jared Kushner was given one via overrule from the 45th administration when the FBI and CIA said there's no way in hell he should be given access to any state secrets due to his background.
For the record, fuck Hunter Biden for anything he might have done. But don't equate selling access to demanding the highest levels of access to our nation's most closely held secrets.
> Jared Kushner is just as much a “private citizen” as Hunter Biden is.
Feel free to start the ball rolling