this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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This is why I don't understand why people say that Trump winning again is the end of democracy.
Trump's behavior is not "weird"; it's standard American politics.
The only way to beat it is to offer real democracy, real economic change, and to take people unhappy with the current system seriously instead of dismissing them as "weird" or "deplorables".
see worse is, surprisingly for some, worse than bad and then, this is pretty advanced now, even worse is worse than worse. its trippy.
Has Trump put the lives of innocent American hostages at risk for his political gain?
Note that I'm not saying that he wouldn't, just that he hasn't yet to my knowledge.
I would say that Reagan's treasonous acts were in fact even worse than Trump's, considering that Trump's impeachment treason was to put a foreign country at risk.
Note that that isn't to say that Ukrainian lives matter less than American hostages or that what Trump did wasn't bad, just that putting Americans at risk is "worse" on a scale of treasonous actions.
Another way that things are in fact getting better is that unlike Reagan, Trump actually got impeached (even if the conviction failed at the end).
Do you remember how Trump chose not to address COVID for political gains when it looked like it was hitting primarily democratic cities? I've seen some calculations that half a million more Americans died from COVID because of his reaction to it. That's treason on a level nobody has reached
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/01/03/trump-to-be-sentenced-jan-10-as-judge-upholds-hush-money-conviction/?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)00804-3/fulltext
I read another recently but can't find it. Any search with the words Trump and COVID is a tricky proposition.
After thinking about these a bit more, especially The Lancet article, I have a hypothesis.
For wealthy neoliberal elites, COVID was babby's first trauma, so they overestimate how badly it impacted the average worker. It was so much worse than anything that had happened in their privileged lives up to that point that by comparison it was a world-altering traumatic event that changed everything.
Working people are used to surviving hardships (especially medical hardships) while those in power ignore them. COVID and the Trump administration's lack of response was just business as usual. Compared to other widespread diseases that get routinely ignored and for which poor people routinely get denied care, COVID was minor (albeit more infectious) and easily forgettable.
That's my best guess for why the libshits can't grok why the little people reacted with such indifference while they lost their fucking minds.
That is part of it, but there is also a long-running thread of medical denialism in society. People want to believe their home remedies, homeopathic cures, chiropractic adjustments, or bleach enemas can cure things just as well or better than certified doctors can. To be fair to them, it has only been about 130 years since doctors learned they should wash their hands before surgery. The average person isn't educated enough to understand how safe, effective, and trustworthy vaccines are.
The other part of it is explained by the lottery. Millions and millions of people play the lottery regularly even though the odds of them winning are about the same as getting struck by lightning while getting bitten by a shark. The average person is shit at understanding odds. They think that they will be lucky enough to beat the odds.
That applies for avoiding Covid. They don't understand that being harmed by the vaccine is far fat less likely than being harmed by the disease. They think they can beat the odds by not getting the disease and still avoid Covid. Some won, but most lost.
Yeah. Medical and science denialism is a big problem. It gets fed when medicine and science are presented as absolutes with no room for debate or discussion, just blind fealty to experts. As a trained scientist who has worked professionally as a scientist for 12 years, I don't trust several disciplines because they project this attitude. I don't blame anyone for being skeptical of those who ask for blind trust in authority.
I'm a former scientist in the environmental field and we deal with similar denialism for similar reasons. As science and technology get more complex, the average person simply doesn't have the background to understand the problem, let alone possible solutions. A certain amount of trust in authority is necessary unfortunately.
I have to disagree.
If you tell people to trust authorities about climate change instead of fostering critical thought and understanding, who is to say that their authorities will align with yours?
Your assertion is a recipe for pushing people to believe misinformation because they feel that they can trust their pastor or their employer or the guy on the news more than some nerd.
I get your point but there is a middle ground. You can apply critical thought to the selection of authorities you can trust. You wouldn't trust an auto mechanic to tell you if your mole was cancerous even though you do trust them with your transmission, right? We need to teach people to recognize areas of expertise a person might have and reject opinions outside that area.
I'd still want the auto mechanic to tell me what's wrong with the transmission and how they diagnosed it. It's true that I'd expect them to know what tests to run for the diagnosis due to their experience/training, but I still want to know what they discovered and how in order to better understand what's going on with the vehicle and whether they are giving me a fair price for the repair.
Sure, but the explanation might be something like the conch spring isn't meshing with the radial flange of the Jefferson gear. That might not make sense to you while still being the correct answer. At some point you have to admit that you don't know enough to make an educated judgement and you just have to trust the expert.
For me, Trump's handling of COVID specifically and the COVID pandemic more generally were such a minor blip in the timeline of horrors and chaos that I witnessed and partook in and only barely escaped from between 2018-2022 that it's hard to register the pandemic as a significant event in that timeline.
I work with elderly people mostly so the absolute terror was probably magnified for me. Regardless of their politics, they knew they were the most vulnerable and it scared the shit out of them.
I was unfortunately very separated from society from 2018-2023, so I'm reliant on written records and memes to understand how others responded to it. As someone who missed it, I really get the impression that it was mostly the wealthy who freaked out, either from trying to process that our society's medical infrastructure is shit, or from being sociopaths who were selfishly upset that their workers wanted time off.
One of the groups that doesn't get talked about often in regards to COVID is the reaction of the gay community, especially the older ones who lived through the worst days of the AIDS epidemic. They took it VERY seriously.
Gay bars are so great. I'm straight but I used to go with several of my gay friends. I've never been hit on by more women than at gay bars lol.
how do you feel about the whole iranian general missile thing. that felt like it could have gone very, very wrong. Keep in mind to that he was largely still using the established beuracracy when he came in and this go round he has a lot more intended people and many military people said they had to keep him in check.
My understanding is that Soleimani was responsible for the deployment of a type of anti-vehicle mine in Iraq that killed hundreds to perhaps in the low thousands of US soldiers. A lot of the military brass wanted him dead for personal reasons and Trump was too weak to resist their urging he be taken out. Trump may have avoided immediate consequences because Soleimani was more useful as a martyr to the Iranian leadership at this point. In the long run it fueled another generation's anti-US animus.
If you're talking about Trump's assassination of Qasem Soleimani, then I have to admit that I'm less familiar with thr details there since it happened while I was out of commission.
From the wiki article, it looks like the root problem was Trump being an idiot and loose cannon by reneging the Iran nuclear deal, leading to a crisis in the Gulf, which he then tried to solve by killing that guy.
Can you expand on the question?
yeah it was a moment when it was like. did he just start ww3. I mean I think everyone was bowled over at how small the response was from iran. it was just a dangerous as fuck thing to do.
Even knowing everything that has come before intimately doesn't make Trumps stuff make any sense. There is a reason all the professional historians, including the ones politically on his side, are up in arms about him and his plans. This is not "business as usual", he is as bad as literally everyone that has any idea about any of this stuff says he is.
He is way too easy to corrupt and sway. He has no idea what he is doing and trusts all the wrong people because they play him so easily. He's a "useful idiot", but useful to people who want to bring America down or just make more money for themselves. He still thinks all of his plans are his own ideas, or at least that he is doing them for his own reasons, but they are just tapping into his overblown self-confidence and ego.
The reason calling him "weird" actually worked is because he knows that word... schoolyard taunts bother him so much more than accurate assessments of the consequences of his actions. If he could follow along with that logic, he wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Deplorables doesn't get to him because he has no idea what that means and refuses to learn. He has an aversion to reading. Yes, that thing that is basically 90% of the presidents job.
This is absolutely business as usual, but Trump as a business man is just more erratic and harder for those with a vested interest in maintaining existing power structures to control.
He's not as bad as Reagan, but he's a loose cannon and I agree that that makes him dangerous.
I'm sorry, what? Did we see the same election results? Publicly dismissing someone for being weird is alienating to large swathes of the country. Many of us take pride in our weirdness.
The commenter you are responding to completely nailed it.
Hah, found the trump voter.
I voted against him because I don't want things like this to keep happening, but I don't delude myself into thinking that it's out of the ordinary.
We all know what the solution is, but no one is willing to do anything to get it.
What do you mean by that?
Real change won’t happen with voting.
It's not. I remember all the presidents since Nixon. The stuff Treason Trump did is an order of magnitude worse than anything that came before.
Funny that you post that in a comment section where the OP is literally about Reagan also committing treason.
Reagan did not try to overthrow democracy. He didn't conspire with Russia against America. He didn't try to blackmail a foreign power into dishonestly interfering with a US election. He didn't retain 60 boxes of classified secrets after leaving office. He didn't sexually assault 26 women. He didn't tell 30000+ lies in 4 years. He didn't say that immigrants were eating our cats and dogs.
And despite not doing any of that he still inflicted massive generational harm to the United States. As bad as Trump? Only time will tell.