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Comment by manyaoman | Hacker News Reader

The thing is that back in 2024 Kamala didn't exactly come across as a much better option, although in hindsight she likely would have been.

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> in hindsight she likely would have been

It took you hindsight? I could've told you that in 2024 with regular sight.

You don't have primaries to pick sensible candidates to begin with? In either party, of course.

Kamala was always obviously a better option than Trump. Let's not pretend people didn't know who and what Trump was, or that his behavior after 2024 came as a shock to anyone.

A majority thought differently. They knew who Trump was and who Kamala was, and they voted for Trump. That's how it goes in a democracy... Anyways, they're getting what they voted for

Nit: a plurality, not a majority.

I'm not so sure that's true. Trump is making very different decisions in this term than his first term. I think a lot of his voters thought, "Everything was fine in his first term while all the liberals were crying all the time, I'd like more of that". This time around, things are not fine and we're seeing the regret show up in the polling numbers.

I think most people expected Trump Two to be a similar shit show to Trump One. I was no fan, but he was generally popular on the issue of the economy during his first term, and I think a lot of people had the economy as their primary consideration in 2024. Flooding the zone works, they tuned out all the rhetoric as partisan noise.

> I think most people expected Trump Two to be a similar shit show to Trump One

While they were being warned that his team spent 4 years planning on how to get rid of anyone who pushed back, and he wouldn't be hamstrung this time.

The people who thought 2.0 would be like 1.0 were simply choosing to beleive it despite all of the evidence suggesting otherwise.

How is 2.0 not like 1.0?

Impounding government funds, check.

Using CBP (ICE) against US citizens, check.

Assassinating Iranian officials, check.

Tariffs, check.

It's like all of this but punched up to 10. We're dumping metric shitloads of money into ICE and basically turning them into a domestic military. We weren't doing that before. The tariffs, too, reached levels never before seen.

The thing is, it was really bad the first time. We got through in spite of the incredibly dogshit fiscal policy and foreign affairs. So, if you do that again but go 10x further... will we make it through? Dunno.

If anything, the first Trump term proved to me the resiliency of the US political and economic structures. Even in the face of an absolute lunatic with an almost religious drive to destroy everything, we prevailed. Of course, little did we know that was just the beginning. Do we have the endurance? We'll see!

> We're dumping metric shitloads of money into ICE and basically turning them into a domestic military. We weren't doing that before.

CBP was already removing protesters and putting them into unmarked vans during 1.0. Pretty famously trump held a bible upside down after CBP removed them.

I think the thing missed is Trump didn't come from nowhere. You don't actually want to go back to the Obama years where he inflated the price of housing so the bubble didn't have to pop. Or where he was drone striking the middle east instead of withdrawing troops. Or sending "Unlawful combatants" to Guantanamo instead of closing it down and following international law. Or where he continued to cover up for Epstein ...

Not a big fan of "you have to have Hoover before FDR" but you don't want to go back to the way things were. You want to go forward to FDR 2.0.

Nonetheless all the people in the Democratic party who could obviously see what a disaster Trump would be weren't willing to compromise on any of their insane policy positions or run someone more than a midwit in order to avoid a Trump victory.

All they had to do to avoid this obvious disaster was moderate some of their extreme positions and run someone who could speak coherently and yet they couldn't do it.

So is the conclusion that it wasn't so obvious or something else?

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