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The USA is one of the countries where religion intersects very strongly with politics. His diehard supporters have elevated their support to a level of worship.
Anything he says is true and correct because He said it.
Anything he does is right and proper because He can do no wrong.
I grew up around Republican evangelicals.
I'm a little bit with the dude with the blog post who said that the evangelical Christians should have recognised Trump as obviously the Antichrist. Mr. Trump is practically a physical incarnation of all Seven Deadly Sins. And he's got seven towers, speaks blasphemy, consorts with foreign sex workers, promises greatness, ...
(No links, because that same dude filled that blog post with lots of shitty ads.)
Dude literally lived at 666 park avenue. Christians are stupid
Edit: 5th avenue, thanks blankets
Sauce. It's Fifth Avenue though.
Oh yea my bad
No links needed. Everyone not in a cult sees all of that plain as day. You don't even need to be religious to see it.
I don't think it's "Americans", it's a brainwashed subset of Republicans who have been systematically fed an alternate reality for 30 years all the way back to "Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster!" (investigated by none other than Brett "I like beer, OK?" Kavanaugh) and "Janet Reno is really Chelsea Clinton's father!"
"Americans" also includes the subset that cry "both sides are the same" or are too apathetic to vote. If you don't vote against the Republican party, then you are supporting what is happening.
It appears to be a very large subset that's prepared to vote him in for a second term.
It's smaller than you think... keep in mind, the Republican party has been distilling down to a pure crazy base for years now...
So remember, when you see polls like "70% of registered Republicans think... x", that's what's left after 20 years of rational conservatives leaving the party.
This isn't the party of George Will or William F. Buckly, Jr. The academic conservatives are long gone now.
It sure seems like those objectors leaving the party are good at holding their nose in the voting booth
The other side of that is that lots of us have been calling for him to be held responsible for years. He never has been. Forgive me if I'm less than perfecly hopeful this time.
4 indictments and 91 felonies is farther than we've gotten with any other Republican President in my lifetime.
Nixon - Watergate
Ford - Mostly Harmless
Reagan - October Surprise/Iran-Contra
Bush Sr. - Iran-Contra
Bush Jr. - Abu Ghraib war crimes
So I'll take it!
Ford was the corrupt deal to pardon Nixon, and Nixon also sabotaged the 1968 Paris Peace talks with the help of Henry Kissinger to extend the Vietnam War. The two also bombed Cambodia.
The two of them committed a lot of war crimes.
Nixon also started the war on drugs specifically as a way to harm the anti-war left and black people.
America democracy deserves to be mocked. Only the rich have a voice in government, MIC gets more aid than its own citizens, people are starving in the streets while capitalism feasts.
Nobody is shrugging this off. Those left of center are freaking out while the Nazis on the right are cheering him on.
Nobody is shrugging this off
Nobody is shrugging this off
except the millions upon millions of people who can't even be bothered to vote. I know the systemic vote suppression probably counts for a significant part of it, but honestly most of the rest are skirting their civic duty
Tell people's conservative parents everywhere that. I know for sure mine are shruggers. At this point anything short of "damn it looks like you kids were right, I'm voting Democrat if I have to" is a shrug.
Context matters. When they're in a conversation with another person that they care for and are face-to-face, who is talking about a contrary point of view, logic and thinking is present in some small amount in their brain. They'll actually think about the other person's point, and then make the mental shrug about Trump and his crimes and their effect on his viability/reasonableness as a candidate.
If they're in a group of other supporters, or on the internet, they very quickly do the republican/conservative thing of 'falling in line' and will try to publicly demonstrate (virtue signaling, aye?) how much they are part of the group and follow its standards.
I've had several conversations with my parents. When it is just me and one of them, I get a semi-reasonable conversation, but if another person is present, suddenly it's like having a conversation with a fox news talking-head.
It's baffling how dumb nearly half of the country is. I am definitely not smart but these people must just have nothing left in their skulls if they're wanting to vote for Trump after all this.
When they attack education for decades, you get a fair amount of dumb as a result. They were taught to obey and follow, party over all else.
A good chunk of them are just mean and want liberals to suffer because they find them annoying.
This is the majority of them honestly. They are just straight up fucking mean.
Americans are not shrugging this off. Traitors are.
Sure. But most Americans don't seem to regard Trump as the worst president ever which boggles my mind. This guy was openly trying to overthrow democracy in America and was engaging in organised criminal activities, and you think there were worse presidents? I mean he was literally trying to overthrow your entire constitution and system of government. Can it get worse than that?
Do we really not say Trump is the worst president? If not him then who? Maybe W for destabilizing the Middle East? Still seems like more people think Trump is worse than G. W. Bush though.
It's because conspiracism and anti-democratic sentiments have rooted deeply into the Republican party, and for as long as they remain Trump and candidates like him will remain popular.
The two party system gives the American people a choice between two right of center corporatist options.
None of Trump's crimes threaten that power structure. Quite frankly his antics really only serve to facilitate corporate capture of the American political system even further. Which is why all this is presented in such a business as usual and 'trust the institutions to sort things out' way.
I'm plenty mad! But what the fuck do you want me to do about it?! Trump's lawyers keep rolling back the trial dates, Republicans try to keep the trials from happening at all. The only way anyone in power is going to take our complaints seriously is if we go to the same lengths as the January 6th rioters, and we know what happened to them. Really, what would you LIKE us to do? I'm open to fucking suggestions, because nothing we've done so far has accomplished anything. We just get ignored.
THIS IS NOT OUR FAULTS.
Take a page out of the French playbook. General strike.
[Oh but wait they have rigged system such that if you do that you'll get fired, thus losing your healthcare and possibly spiraling into bankruptcy. Seems that ship has sailed....]
Yet if the latest New York Times poll is right — and we’re still a long way from the presidential elections — many Americans either believe Trump’s alleged crimes didn’t occur or they think they aren’t that big a deal.
It has to be the former. I think the one and only thing that sets these "lunatics" apart from the rest of us is simply that they trust Trump. The things he says are terrifying, and would drive any otherwise sane person to do crazy things to defend their country if they were true. I don't think it's fair to call these people evil or stupid, they're just being played by a master scam artist. Add a little bit of ego and stubbornness to it, and I can see someone rejecting logical arguments if they're coming out of the mouth of someone who just called them an idiot.
A smart racist is an oxymoron.
Not all Republicans are racist, but all of them agreed it isn't a deal breaker.
30% of the population still supported Nixon.
Fox News was started to get a future Nixon off. Even Ailes probably didn't forsee the massive Trump family criming (we still haven't talked about Ivanka's Chinese patents and Jared's 2 billion Saudi bailouts.)
Nah, they're stupid. Maybe at first I could give them a pass, but with the mountains it evidence including video evidence and audio recordings of Trump himself, you have to be stupid to still believe he's innocent.
Maybe because americans do not know what a true democracy looks like? The US was never a true democracy. Gerrymandering is the easiest example for that.
A viral tweet stated that we are not a Democracy, we're a Republic, and Republicans collectively nodded their heads in agreement.
Aside from that, I think many Americans don't believe American democracy is currently working in their favor, leading to apathy or outright hostility towards democracy itself.
I think many Americans don’t believe American democracy is currently working in their favor, leading to apathy or outright hostility towards democracy itself.
i think this is basically it. the intellectual left likes to say things like "donald trump made a mockery of our democracy" but the reality is that american democracy has been a mockery of itself for a long time. All donald trump did was make it a bit more difficult to ignore that. Not to say he's not criminal, and treasonous, and should be in jail. but he's really only marginally worse than Mitch McConnell. it's not nearly as shocking as the newspapers want us to believe.
Guess what happens when one party creates a media empire to spread the message that government doesn't work for 40 years?
This should be surprising no one. If anything, it's a bigger surprise it hasn't led to to civil war on a much shorter time scale.
The GOP literally took a seam ripper of the US Constitution.
For being written by slave fucking tax avoiding elitists it is remarkable that the 246 year old document that has basically 27 edits. I've got three line comments with more edits.
So the response needs to be measured and take time to avoid opening further seams for attack while patching and mending the ones abused.
It will likely take longer than I will live to complete, and I am Gen X.