most of America

One American in five.

I wish more MCU Democrats and Punisher Skull Republicans would read this.

I might go one further and say “Look, you need to take my platform seriously!” isn’t a winning message when the last guy lied about his platform. Biden took office promising a bunch of BernieBro shit - debt forgiveness, climate change reform, prosecution of corrupt officials from the prior administration, voting reform - and then failed to deliver. Obama ran into the same shit after 2008, tanking his majorities in 2010 and then pulling through despite a negative approval rating in 2012, because he did not deliver the goods.

How did you lose to this with everything on the line?

Its easy to forget that conservatives (particularly the heavy hitters) also have a ton of shit on the line. You’ll notice Wall Street loves a full GOP House/Senate/Presidency and the market is surging. Crypto is surging. Elon Musk and the Winklevoss Twins and the Murdochs and even Bezos are bullish on the next four years. These people had vast fortunes on the line and they acted like it. They turned the country against the Democrats by hook and by crook, through their mass media and their industrial stoogies.

The Democrats needed their old allies in the labor movement to push back. They needed teachers and university students. They needed the urban professional class. But after Biden sold out the rail unions and failed to support service sector or aerospace or even the fucking Postal Service? After he flubbed debt forgiveness for college grads? After he let state governments (in Red and Blue states alike) run roughshod over public education? Who was left?

Dems immolated their own base, chasing the traditionally conservative upper middle class white homeowners. Schumer promised that every blue collar voter who went to Trump would be replaced by two suburban moms. Oops.

Oh yeah, we’re absolutely getting a fucking measles epidemic before the end of his term.

At some point he needs to be able to physically enact proposals. Like, it’s one thing to say “Build a wall” and it’s another to get the land rights, hire the contractors, do the work, maintain it on competition, etc, etc.

You can go down to the border now and you’ll find this rink a dink bullshit that’s falling over in a light breeze. Then you’ve got spools full of razor wire tossed into the steadily shallower Rip Grande. People got paid tens of millions to put that garbage in the ground. And that was under an ostensibly competent administration.

I agree we’re going to get a ton of shit policy. Police violence under Trump is going to skyrocket. Vigilantee violence is going to jump. Border guard violence is going through the roof. But, like, is he going to build anything that can last? Or is he going to get the Americanized version of Neom? A bunch of scammers delivering invisible clothes to prance around in.

I guess we’ll find out.

Between 2017 and 2021, things got pretty bad. Riots, wars, a plague, economic crash, and it ended with a mob breaking into the nation’s capital and trashing the place.

Can’t imagine a repeat will be better.

We have no liberal democracies as we thought of them in the 90s.

No. But that’s largely because we were lied to on the definition.

Best part of all this is there are still probably people who think that leftists are the anti-democratic ones…

Everyone knows that “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” doesn’t mean “Working People control the government”. It means “One Guy In a Hardhat Is The King”. Now lets re-litigate every historical event between 1917 and 1945, while drawing parallels back to the modern moment and insisting tankies stole the election.

we don’t really have any more true democracies

What’s a True Democracy and when did we originally have it?

Is this where we blink past Jim Crow and put blinders on during the Nixon/Reagan years to pretend popular politics was a real thing prior to Clinton?

Or are we going to claim 1976 was the only truly free and fair election in IS history?

Ah yes, I forgot that I personally controlled the nuclear arsenal. Thanks.

You’re not going to like this, but it was the Green Party.

What devil has this guy made a deal with?

He cut a Faustian Bargain with the soul of America. And like Faust, he gets to spend his days capering and clowning about his social superiors, making unholy mischief in a kingdom that is itself revealed to be terminally corrupt and wholely damned.

Trump took the Objectivist philosophy that’s guided this country for a generation and embodied it. He is Reaganism in its manifest state. Just a guy entirely out for himself who has convinced 71M other people to do the same.

The Kenyan Ambassador to the UN once addressed criticism of his country’s relationship with China thusly:

“Every time the English visit Kenya, they bring a lecture. Every time the Chinese visit Kenyan, they build a hospital”

Like… you can either ask for open discussion or you can say, “Everybody shut up and listen to what I have to say, and unless you’re opening your mouth to completely agree with me in every way

There’s a big middle area you’re ignoring.

Sometimes certain subsets of the planet have problems particular to their region, culture, or cohort.

Telling a person wandering through the desert “I also get thirsty” maybe deflects from the issue at hand.

Comic: “I’m here to talk about women.” Heckling ensues

First Comment: “This is exactly what happens to men.” Wall of Upvotes

Proof that you can pull the users out of the Reddit but you can’t pull the Reddit out of the users.

A game with maps that were assembled at random from what some lead/executive thought was the best submissions out of a random assortment of amateur designs sounds like it is going to be crap.

A joke so old it has grandkids.

the legality of his actions was much more easily provable as a crime

Trump was convicted of a full 37 counts in the Stormy Daniels indictment. He’s lost multiple civil cases for defamation, totaling hundred of millions in judgements. Rudy Guliani lost his law license in New York over electoral interference. And 623 of the J6ers have received sentences. The idea that these folks are difficult to prosecute is absurd. But you do need to get them in front of a jury first.

Trump’s case involves not only a lot more possible statutes he could have violated, but also a lot of arbitrary actions that don’t perfectly fall into a rigid box of “this is legal” or “this is illegal.”

You can wave your hands at the legal system and insist “Its too hard!”, as so many in the Democratic Party have already done. But in the few cases where Trump or his minions do actually get in front of a jury, they consistently lose.

Plus, if you have more money to draw out legal fights

OJ’s original criminal legal team bankrupted him. Once he was out of cash, he started losing courtroom fights. He eventually ended up in jail for assaulting a Vegas pawn shop owner over some illegally fenced sports memorabilia.

Trump’s been involved in substantially more criminal activity and could be prosecuted significantly more than The Juice. But cases have to go to trial first. We have 91 indictments, but only one case that’s made it through a full trial, in large part because federal prosecutors are dragging their heels.