Them in 2016: “He’s not LITERALLY a fascist”
Them in 2024: “Okay he’s openly announcing his intent to be a dictator and get rid of the ‘others’ who are ‘poisoning our blood’, but unless it’s from the Bavarian area of Germany, it’s just sparkling authoritarianism. Besides, Biden is just as bad!”
The Bavarian area of Germany?
Hitler was Austrian and at least in Germany people use this saying with Italian Mussolini style fascism or even just German
I know it started in Munich but calling it Bavarian in origin is a bit unusual
It’s just a skooch of humor, not an academic treatise.
Oh, I see you’re in Germany. Well, that probably didn’t come across the same as it did here. Sorry - carry on.
I remember once of my coworkers saying, “I hear what you’re saying about Trump having issues, but I feel like we need to try something different, and the president doesn’t really have that much power anyway, so there’s not much he can do.”
Now he passionately hates Trump and tries to avoid any conversation about Trump voters because he was one.
Honestly, I thought trump running for president was the funniest thing ever. There was no way the idiot would win and at least the political season would have a clown to laugh at. I could not have been so wrong by Nov. I mean he made his announcement for candidacy descending a golden fucking escalator. From there he never stopped being a beyond parody asshole born from corporate America…and to this day I cannot really grasp how he became that popular. Although, I have strong feelings that much of it is born out of reaction to Obama’s presidency
I’m so completely with you. I was maybe a tiny bit less surprised because I have a coworker why travels a lot across middle America and he said he heard a lot of people talking about needing a change and Trump being a “man of the people” (which is objectively insane to say). I agree with you, though: a lot was in reaction to Obama, especially to having a black president.
It being immediately post-Obama and Trump being the only candidate willing to be insanely overly racist basically sealed him in as the Republican candidate. There is a large portion of white America that could not cope with a black man being president, much less for two terms. They had basically a decade where they were getting more and more riled up by every right wing talk show can you can imagine. Satan himself would have been elected if he dropped a hard R n-bomb on TV.
As someone from and currently still living in middle America, Trump winning wasn’t surprising in the least. Part of me still blames the Democrats and “coastal left” in general for not paying enough attention to what has been going on here over the last thirty years. There was a time when these states could have become a bulwark for leftism with the right campaigning and political tactics, but by ignoring and culturally minimizing them it guaranteed that Christo-fascism would take hold. Ultimately though, people’s choices are their own, it’s just not worth it anymore and my husband and I are moving to New England in August and never looking back.
You really shouldn’t discount the role of russian propagandists and hackers. They were synchronized at the perfect moment in time when the boomers lost they damned minds and started posting insane screeds on the interwebs.
The democrats did this themselves too. How delusional do you have to be to go all in with HRC. Bernie would have won and that scared the Neolibs and the DNC too much
I keep reading comments from people who cannot grasp how he became popular, so I keep flogging this article: What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain It’s not precisely on-point, but it’s the only one I’ve seen in the popular media to even start to address the issue.
TL;DR: It’s not a conscious, rational decision to support him. It’s a hijacking of the fight-or-flight reaction to fear and resist facts.
At least he is sane enough to regret it, unlike massive swaths of dimwits across the country.
Eight years of Obama telling everyone his hands were tied because of Congress and the Courts and the states and public opinion and the need to win the next election cycle.
Trump comes in like a wrecking ball, giving his goon squad cover to do anything they pleased. And after four years of that, we were convinced Presidents are powerful after all.
Then Biden steps into office and the President can’t do anything again.
Right, because Republicans only care about getting their way and Democrats try to play by the rules and tradition. It gets pretty frustrating.
If they have no problems with impropriety, blatantly breaking established norms and laws, and getting impeached a couple times, a President can do quite a bit!
Someone I know who voted for McCain because she said “liberals don’t care enough about individual rights” went psychotic on her Republican friends when he was elected. I asked her if she understood if voting for Sarah Palin laid the ground work for this and she unfriended me.
He has my respect. It takes a lot of courage and humility to recognize that you were completely wrong and stand in opposition.
He shouldn’t about conversations about Trump voters. He should be proud he isn’t one any longer.
It does take a lot of stupid to ever vote for a clearly destructive president and it just should be a permanent stain on your soul if you do that to others
I don’t disagree, but recognizing your mistakes and trying to undo them is admirable. What is better, to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature?
He can never undo voting for Trump and it sounds like it still haunts him today. He recognizes he was an idiot for doing so though and wants to fix it. What more can you ask of someone who has already made a mistake?
Yeah. My co-worker pissed his vote away on johnson because he bought into the Clinton derangement propaganda. Still hated trump, but ensured trump would win. He doesn’t like to talk about it either for some reason.
he bought into the Clinton derangement propaganda
Clinton was a bad candidate. Her time at Sec State gave us a slew of foreign policy bungles. Her time in the Senate under Bush Jr was even worse.
That’s why she got upset by Obama in 2008. People rightfully didn’t trust her to run the country, even from within her own party. She was so unpopular that she nearly lost to a socialist junior senator from Vermont in her second attempt.
If we could have just left the office vacant from 2016 to 2020, that might have been a better move for the country.
At least she wouldn’t have tipped SCOTUS into the favor of the anti-abortionists.
A heartfelt “fuck you” to everyone who told me I was overreacting in July of 2016.
I actually blame myself for all of this, after Barry(who is still pretty problematic) got reelected in 2012 I kinda figured that eventually all the bullshit would work itself out and stopped paying too much attention to politics. Then the history major in me woke up in that July and now realize I must be forever vigilant
I’ve gone back and forth on this for a decade in my head, I’m more or less convinced a schism is coming in the form of asymmetrical civil conflict. I pray that it won’t ever come to that because it would be the most deadly conflict in the history of humanity once other powerful countries become involved and it escalates to WW3.
The unfortunate truth one learns when studying history is that no one in a position of has ever learned a positive lesson from our past and take the action to avoid the mistakes the next time around
Messaging to help people who will never grasp sarcasm, or two step instructions, stop falling for talking points you disagree with by feeding them talking points you agree with. There aren’t any billionaires paying to make large font easily digested liberal talking points and talking head blather that presents a liberal view, because they disagree, so the counter balance dosen’t exist.
My god when Trump did his presidential announcement way back when, I was thinking this is going to be a weird few months while he does this publicity thing and then doesn’t get elected and we’ll never talk about him again until his next weird announcement. Here we are 8 years later. What a ride it’s been. I literally don’t think we could have come up with this in 2012. We wouldn’t have been creative enough.
I loved the interview when he was like ‘‘mexicans, man fuck all of them racially’’ and the wet nossle shit stick interviewing him is all ‘‘oh that sounds quite racist… try saying hispanic or Latino people and say it’s only the illegal ones you hate, it sounds less openly racist’’
Like, good job asshole, you just helped him convince the stupidest non racists around that he’s not openly racist. We really needed that to happen. His constant grooming to say shit that ment what he still always ment but wasn’t just unbelievably blatant really pissed me off. How about DON’T help him, ask questions like ‘what IS wrong with the blacks’ and let him speak his mind. Why are you fucking helping him!!
But you know. Ratings were so good…
you just helped him convince the stupidest non racists around that he’s not openly racist.
I think you greatly underestimate the amount of racism in the U.S. and the amount of people who will tolerate a racist even if they don’t really have any racist feelings themselves if they think it will get them some sort of benefit.
Trump appealed to both.
I don’t think anyone was under any illusion that the “when Mexico sends its people, its not sending its best” speech was anything but racist.
I don’t disagree with whare you’re saying, but I’ve talked to a lot of people that didn’t understand it was deeply racist, but also these are people I know have been consuming ‘‘illegals’’ are the root of all problems media, so I’m not sure they care at all about not being racist, I’d generally say they weren’t racist in action or speech, but these are people who have a severe disinterest in anything past the surface thinking. For context I live in a rural area, I’m Hispanic, and pretty sensitive to the blatant racism against Hispanics in the Republican party from Bob Dole on.
Yeah, when he entered the race, it was hilarious. You were able to distance yourself from the hilarious things and the horrible things he’d say about Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz, or JEB! (please clap) Bush, because he’d never win. But as he crept closer to the nomination, it got less funny and more horrifying every day.
When he actually got elected i thought it’s gonna take a few month and then even gis fanclub realizes that he’s not a president, smart, or hardly a human being. Then it’s gonna drag on, he’s not gonna get re elected and even the people who voted for him go: yeah, i don’t know who voted for him, that was crazy, right?
But now the brain-dead pedophile convicted criminal rapist is apparently still the best they have to offer.
Dude I remember seeing the first debate before going on a backpacking trip with my parents.
My parents at the time I considered Republican, but not conservative. When they saw the debate they laughed and made jokes that the dude will never win.
Then when I came closer to the election, they turned around. Thinking he was awesome and the answer to the “government” problem.
Now, they aren’t hard-line Trump supporters, but their views have definitely changed towards being a lot more conservative. I’ve seen their stances change quite a bit since then.
I’ll admit that for a week I said, “he won, let’s see what he can do” and quickly learned that he was absolutely the douche everyone was saying he would be.