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.
Bavaria is the Texas of Germany; the only state most foreigners know of.
Most people know the geography of your home like you know the geography of theirs: not really.
I don’t live in a swing state, my hands were tied.
How’d your downballot do?
Rock solid Democrat state here. Had a few nuts in local elections but kept firmly in check.
I don’t live in a swing state, my hands were tied.
Damn election process in USA is kinky.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the few who have turned on him now prefer the guy who literally had a worm eat part of his brain.
This reality must be satire.
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’m sorry for your loss.
Remember those first 90 days or so when Republicans were dead convinced that Trump was going to pivot at any moment and start acting more presidential?
Yeah, they gave up on that eventually and moved the goalposts, as usual.
Guys! He’s just acting retarded to appeal to us retards! He’ll be presidential once he’s in the white house!
I don’t think they even realized how idiotic they were being.
I just hate how short lived people’s memory is… After W there shouldn’t have been a Republican president for the next 50 years… Yet people forgot after 8…now it seems even worse because you’ve got morons on here already bOtH sIdInG like the fucking orange traitor never happened.
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.
At least he is sane enough to regret it, unlike massive swaths of dimwits across the country.
I agree. I honestly think his demographic was key to Biden winning.
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.
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.
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.
For sure. And that’s after McConnell and the others overtly said they were working hard to block anything he tried to do, to ensure he was a one term president. The number of filibusters was insane. And still he was a well regarded president.
When is Moscow Mitch going to die like zamn
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
Lol yeah no. Bernie didn’t have the numbers. Bernie Bros just only ever speak to other Bernie Bros so they don’t realize that most Dems wanted Hillary. There’s this weird fantasy that Bernie had broad support and he just didn’t.
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.
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.
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!
The right to impropriety, blatantly breaking established norms and violating laws is reserved to state governments under Dem Presidents.
Getting impeached a couple times is still on the table, through.
Right, because Republicans only care about getting their way and Democrats try to play by the rules and tradition. It gets pretty frustrating.
Democrats try to play by the rules
They hide behind the rules, any time their donors don’t want something to happen.
Now imagine the Suer of the United States stepping into office
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?
I am a champion of giving second chances. It’s just so incredibly stupid to vote for a fully realised psychotic narcissist that I get mad when I think about how it even happens
I getcha. That’s how I feel about women who were formerly pro life and now realize the horrors of abortion being bad. I’ll welcome them to their face and say I’m happy they’ve come around.
But privately I’m just seething at them. What the fuck did they think would happen?
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.
Not like she was going to admit fault
No, but I thought she was obnoxious because she used to talk about how it was ok for pharmacies to not dispense birth control because of religious beliefs, and liberals could damn well just go to another pharmacy, so I can’t really say I’m sorry.
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.
That’s assuming she was ever allowed to seat a judge.
An empy seat would have been overwhelmingly less damaging than what we got
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.
As someone who also fell into that boat once upon a time as well, it’s crazy to me that people can look back and say “oh he did a good job, we totally need four more years of that”.
I thought for sure that he could do a terrible enough job that nearly all the average Americans would quickly realize what a piece of shit he was and demand his impeachment.
For me it lasted until the first press conference.
Yeah but watching the President have a twitter spat with Kim Jong Un was pretty funny.
I was about 30% convinced that that Twitter feud was going to lead to North Korea firing nukes at the US. Trump just wouldn’t shut his mouth and I was freaking out.
Agreed. I didn’t find it funny, I found it terrifying. World leaders behaving like literal children.
Crap. You just made me realize that it is kind of a good thing that Trump refuses to antagonize Putin. If he had that kind of spat with Putin, we might have seen nukes exchanged in some proxy country.
Sorry proxy country. Fuck these “strongmen” dictators, and wannabe dictators.
Trump’s a bitchboy but so is Putler. Nothing would have happened.
North Korea firing nukes at the US.
Fair, but also North Korea has demonstrated they can’t even reliably hit Japan (or at least they couldn’t at the time) so I don’t think we had much to worry about.
Did they ever try to hit Japan? Wouldn’t that basically be a declaration of war?
Every one in a while they rattle their sabers and launch a missile at or over Japan. None of them have ever contained a nuke; they’ve just been rocket demonstrations. Most have landed in the Sea of Japan, between North Korea and Japan, either intentionally or unintentionally. A couple have landed within Japan’s territorial waters. Several have landed short of their projected landing zone due to mechanical failure. None have had warheads, and none have actually made landfall in Japan which would be, as you have correctly observed, an immediate shitstorm for N. Korea.
As of 2019 they have the capability to build ballistic missiles with the theoretical range to hit the western US, however I am not enough of an expert to determine if their rickety shit-rockets would be reliable enough to actually survive the journey or land accurately. If they actually did put a nuke on one, it wouldn’t really matter much.
In 2018 and before, however, it was unlikely they had the capability yet to actually hit us.
Lol
He fixed it all when he saluted their soldiers!
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
In a history perspective, how do we get out of this?
Lose a world war.
Against who, though? Europe isn’t going to fight us. Russia is a joke. If China won that war (far from guaranteed), the world order that settled in wouldn’t be any better.
IDK, maybe the penguins and seals of Antarctica might get mad at us for drilling for oil down there or something.
Humans don’t learn shit, so we don’t.
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
The schism is already here. Just look at the reaction to the New York fraud trial verdict. The rest of us are in denial, pretending that it won’t escalate from what is just words now, but that’s the way it always starts, no?
Oh I 100% agree that a worldview schism is already present, in many ways we’re already in the prelude. Robert Evans called this period the Crumbles in the original season of It Could Happen Here, which I think is the most reasonable prediction for how things will unfold
With persistence and vigilance.
Vote, rally, riot, and let no nazi go unpunched.
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.
The worst part is those SAME people are claiming we are overreacting about the real chance he wins again…
Not me. I was a myopic “you are overreacting” person in 2016. I didn’t like Hillary, but I also didn’t think DT would win, and if he did I didn’t think he would be much worse, just bad in different ways.
I admit that I was shortsighted, uninformed, and completely wrong. On the upside, I pay way more attention than I used to, and I have been disabused of my notion that nothing would ever change (for better or worse) as a result of the pendulum of politics.
Imagine getting put into a coma at the end of 2015 and waking up going online. You have to contend with the fact that yes, Trump for president was real, that people voted for him, that he is running for his second term and its an inconsecutive term. And that is all shit related to the elections nothing about 1/6, covid or ukraine.
1/6?
January 6.
Holy shit those pictures just pissed me off again.
Me too. It’s important to remember them though as there is so much propaganda everywhere (“they were just tourists!”). We all saw it happen and it’s not unlikely that they will try this sort of thing again. Stay angry my friend.
Me in 2016: “Weeeeelp I guess we’ll see if these checks and balances work”
Me in 2024: “Somehow I’m still not sure”
Them in 2016: Institutions will save us!
Them in 2021: inchoate screaming
I took election day off and went to see Dr. Strange. I had been waiting 33 years for that movie so it is no surprise that it was a disappointment. Then, to see the exit polling was like a stab to the heart. What a crappy day.
whaaa you didnt like dr strange? its one of my favorites of the mcu
“Mister Doctor!!”
“It’s Strange”
“Maybe. But who am I to judge?”
Such an underutilized character, shame they killed him off.
Does he say maybe or perhaps? I always forget.
I love the movie and I loved the villain. It really is a shame he was just killed.
When he saw the Ancient One and just screamed “Hypocrite!” with absolute venom, I was hooked.
Agreed. Tilda Swinton killed her role but Madds stole the show. Honestly they had such killer talent amongst all the major roles and it really popped off so well.
A heartfelt “fuck you” to everyone.
My face is stuck in a permanent “YOU DENSE MOTHERFUCKER” meme because of these people.
People really enjoy discarding reality to make themselves feel better.
The latest dense motherfucker moment is all people right now who think Trump’s conviction means he will go to prison and they won’t have to worry about voting in November.
I’ve been called a nazi repeatedly for explaining that while the fantasy might make us all feel better, the reality is no judge on EARTH would condemn a geriatric, senile, ex-president to die in prison, to think nothing of the complications of things like Secret Service. “FuCk yOu FaSciSt!” they reply.
A strange day when you get called a fascist for encouraging center and left wing turnout to an election.
This. I felt so betrayed by who was on the ballot that I changed my political party to Green Party, voted for Jill Stein, took a job near a hippy little town in the woods, moved my kids, told them we were cutting off corporate America and changing our diets…only to eventually lose my house in foreclosure after not being able to provide on one income, with an unemployed spouse. I’d like to just say that it’s tough being new in a small town, but that wasn’t it. America f_cked my family over so bad in 2016, and politics/the election were just the tip of the iceberg of it all.
I’m not familiar with (I’m guessing) american politics can someone give me a short summary?
