Hacker News Reader

Comment by leptons | Hacker News Reader

>and US citizens don't seem to care

I think maybe you haven't been paying attention.

Most of us do care. Trump's approval rating is pretty low at 36%, and his disapproval rating is high. Just because he's still causing chaos doesn't mean the majority of us don't care about it. There's just no legal way to remove him, and his cronies simply won't do it - there's not enough votes in congress or he would have been gone after his first or second impeachment.

https://www.npr.org/2026/06/20/nx-s1-5861764/trumps-job-appr...

View on HN

I understand your point, however I don’t buy „there's just no legal way to remove him“. With so low ratings where are the daily protests against such type of government? Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.

Don’t get me wrong, I know the thousands reasons why you won’t join a protest, I’m „guilty“ myself. I just want to argue against your argument that I quoted because this puts all of us in an unhelpful victim mentality.

Then again, nationwide daily protests would give the Trump administration an excuse to send ICE / the army / whoever else they can send to the cities where the protests take place (I guess they would be mostly blue-leaning ones) to "restore order", and at the same time lay the groundwork for influencing the November elections.

But the turnout at the periodic nationwide "No Kings" protests has been very good, and they have fortunately stayed peaceful.

You'd think a "no oligarchs" protest would be a little more useful given that we aren't likely to revert to a monarchy any time soon.

checks notes what's this? The protests were organized by oligarchic lackeys? Hmm

> Surely, nationwide daily protests would make elected officials reconsider their positions, given an upcoming midterm election, while there still is one.

Hah. When was the last time a non-violent protest yielded some kind of result by itself? Certainly never in american history.

Anyway, there are daily protests. They just aren't covered by the media. Hell, the protests for palestine never stopped... the media just never wanted to cover them.

Women's suffrage was relatively nonviolent.

As was the civil rights era. The people who chose to be violent made it take longer, actually.

I don't think that's really accurate. Without the perceived threat from the militant factions, the peaceful protesters wouldn't necessarily have had political backing and support. Peaceful movements had been suppressed until that point, after all.

I think it is. Change happened because a majority of reasonable people wanted it to change.

Terrorist attacks, kidnappings, etc made that change take longer. What made MLK Jr so unique was that he carried a message of peace, not a message of war.

The militant factions never had any real power and would have never been close to powerful enough to overthrow the government, and if they’d been more successful, would have swayed the masses’ opinions in the wrong direction.

Although 36% is low, it's not that low. The US's two-party system means that ~40-50% are aligned with either party and approve/disapprove on GP. The real number to pay attention to is the change over time in the approval rating: https://www.cnn.com/polling/approval/trump-cnn-poll-of-polls

Trump's highest rating was ~47% when he came into office, but he was pretty stably in the low 40s until the new war. The actual drop is somewhere from ~40-42 to ~36-38 - about 10% of his base. Significant, but probably not enough to actually matter unless it drops further.

Largest protests in US history in the past year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_and_demonstra...

This isn't about Trump. No 4th amendment rights at the border has been an issue for at least 20 years, but US citizens don't care because it doesn't affect citizens.

Yep, this was an issue long before Trump. They’ve just amped up the scale and stopped bothering with the deceit that they know doesn’t bother Americans.

A 36% approval rating is sky-high for a president that started a pointless immensely costly war after getting elected on a platform of "no more costly wars" and is in the process of negotiating an immensely unfavorable deal with Iran after getting elected on a platform of "Obama's deal with Iran was terrible, I could do much better".

By contrast, Biden at the same point in his term was hovering around 39%, for the heinous crime of... rebuilding the US economy? Including some woke riders in his infrastructure bill?

At this point, a fair assessment of US citizens is that on average, they seem to consider that being a right-wing autocrat wannabe, threatening to invade allied countries "as a negotiating tactic", being a climate change denier, starting a humiliating failed war, trying to blackmail the press into compliance, etc, are about 3% worse than being a cringe center-left bureaucrat.

"US citizens don't seem to care" is an apt hyperbole.

It doesn't help that many of those "center-left" democrats (whatever that refers to) seem to be criticizing trump for letting iran off too easy, not you know starting a stupid war nobody in their right might would want, bombing a school, wasting american lives, driving up prices, risking the global economy, throwing lebanon under the bus... nope, he let iran off too easy. Cf cory booker

When the parties are both fucking stupid when it comes to issues that matter, the entire right/left spectrum goes out the window.

NPR as your source isn't exactly a compelling argument tbh

Whenever I ask people to explain their issues with NPR it’s some cherry-picked news articles here and there that were somewhat biased. In my experience NPR often tries to be incredibly neutral, almost comically so, when criticizing any administration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com