I learned a long time ago that you can not debate politics with the MAGA crowd. Presidential historians ranked their guy the worst president ever. The Trump supporters think he was the greatest. We are living in 2 different worlds, and you can't fix stupid.
Almost all of my real life friends are huge MAGA cultists. The "are you better than 4 years ago?" argument is lost on them.
It's as if we live in a different world.
They absolutely loved, nah, relished, all the chaos those 4 years entailed. They basked in the glow of the freaking President of the United States giving the middle finger to the libs, the Deep State, the rest of the world, the academics, the intelligentsia, our foreign allies, NATO, all of it.
To them, this was the BEST OF TIMES.
So what a few hundred thousand old folks died, they were gonna die soon anyway. Sorry Gramps.
So what that we separated families at the border and some of them were never reunited. Shouldn't have been here anyway.
So what that we were gonna use the military to control riots. Listen to the cops or get what you deserve.
So what that we threatened to leave NATO. We can better spend the money here anyway.
So what that the black folks weren't treated better. They aren't real Americans, everyone deep down knows that.
So what if a bunch of cops got beat up on January 6th. They were all against the real Americans anyway. Besides, everyone knows ANTIFA and the Dems were behind the attack.
So what if they wanted to kill Mike Pence, He deserved it. Sorry RINO Mike.
We gotta stop thinking we can change or convert these folks. Never happening.
They REALLY believe that their lives were better 4 years ago.
I’m in the same boat. The town I live in is MAGA MECCA. One word bad about Trump and you’ll have a pool que in your eye. So I languish in the thinking that we’re about to lose our country to a pack of morons and a psychopath with finger on the nuclear trigger. All I can do is vote and pray.
Copy Dan Holm! Plus: Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine to get dirt on Biden, conspired to co opt republicans into a scheme to reverse the 2020 election, (and ask the Party to pay his legal bills) and ran a criminal enterprise from the White House. No one tweet can describe the criminal fraud that is Trump. Let’s coin a phrase: “history is not a tweet “ “history is a picture of deceit and abject failure to defend our constitution “ under trump.
Call it what is it - trump supporters are either willfully ignorant or just plain ignorant (and like supporting a bully). It's not really more complicated than this.
But it's so much more than the tweets actually being "mean" - the very idea of the President making immediate, unfiltered policy statements on social media is just a VERY BAD IDEA. Was this a serious tweet or was he "joking"? These stupid tweets moved markets and are an incredibly inefficient and ineffective way to govern, wasting time for those who have to respond to them. Thank god this stopped on January 20, 2021, when a sane person was sworn in.
I wonder how many Trump Faithful are watching every dollar they put into Trump Media turn into a penny, if they’re lucky. I hope Mark Jeffrey is one of them. The most valuable investing lessons are the most expensive ones.
Yeah, I know inflation is still too high. However, the people getting all bent out of shape over it (I won't name names right here) were not around in the very late 1960s and the 1970s. Inflation was into the teens, home mortgages approached 10% and President Ford (who took office in mid-1974) had buttons made that read "WIN-Whip Inflation Now." The president during that era were GOPers. Just sayin'..............
As a former GOP Congressional staffer, Trump's record of incompetence as a negotiator/partner with Congress is a major reason that I couldn't support him for re-election in 2020 or in 2024. I'd suspected as much and had voted 3rd party in 2016 because Hillary won my state handily. I' will gratefully vote to re-elect Joe Biden because he's competent, works with Congress and puts Americans' interests above his personal interests. POTUS Trump sabotaged three major policy initiatives: immigration/DACA/border wall, health care reform and infrastructure. Specifically, President Trump announced one day with great fanfare and agreement with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate leaders for an appropriations/immigration reform bill that would have provided $25 billion to build a border wall and provided a path to citizenship for DACA recipients who were brought into the US as children. Rush Limbaugh and other immigration opponents pronounced it was amnesty and Trump reneged on the deal --- and lost all political capital for future negotiations with Speaker Pelosi and Congressional Democrats. Later, when even the Congress refused to appropriate border wall funding Trump demanded, but hadn't included in his own Budget, Trump hacked away Congress'es authority under our Constitution over spending and diverted Dept. of Defense funding to build the wall. On health care, House majority GOPers had spent 7 years during Obaama's administration passing bills to repeal Obamacare. Within days after the GOP-majority House under Speaker Paul Ryan passed a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, POTUS Trump pronounced it mean and tanked any chance for passage of any bill in the Senate. On infrastructure, POTUS Trump announced too many times for me to remember that the next week, he'd be announcing an infrastructure plan. He never did. Plus, I concur with your list Chris. Trump is the worst President since our Civil War.
If you _had_ lived in a swing state, knowing only what you knew (and, of course, what you thought you could extrapolate) as of the morning of Nov 8, 2016, how would you have voted?
If in some Twilight Zone weirdness you somehow got to pick who would win the election (between the two major party candidates), which would it have been?
I certainly share your complaints (along with quite a few others) about Trump, the clear choice (and probably the Condorcet winner, no less) of the Republican base by Feb 2016 at the latest. However much I may despise much of the leftish wing of the Democrats, there is no way I will trust the Party of Trump with any Federal power until they at least somewhat refudiate :) Trump and Trumpism. (fortunately, at the local level and occasionally at the state level there are still Republicans worth voting for; unfortunately here in California even the rare excellent Republican loses to the all too common execrable Democrat in statewide elections).
An excellent question. I would have held my nose and voted for Hillary in 2016 if I lived in a swing state. And that's after my first vote for President for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 20 years of working for Republican Members of Congress. I started voting for moderate Democrats with Trumpy GOP opponents in 2018. I decided that I couldn't vote Republican again until the Trumpy faction is a powerless rump and Trump is gone from American politics. I voted in the 2020 Democratic POTUS Primary for Joe Biden and again for him in the General Election. I live in a state without party registration. You have to choose either a Democratic or Republican Primary ballot; not both for the same election.
I held my nose and voted for Hillary 2016 not because swing state (see: California), but because there was not a good 3rd party signal vote available (I nearly voted Johnson in 2012, and would have voted in 2016 for the 2012 version of Johnson/Libertarian had it still been available).
I don't know what I would do this November if I lived in MD: I'd much rather Hogan than Alsobrooks (to say nothing of Trone), but it's a balancing act between Republican control of the Senate versus a better individual senator.
N.b. my first vote for POTUS was Ford 1976, one of my least conflicted votes ever.
Voting isn't guaranteed to be easy or painless. You balance all of the information that you've consumed about candidates in light of your personal preferences and vote for the candidates that best reflect your preferences. Not voting abdicates your power over government to the people who take the time to vote. That's the only electoral choice I don't respect.
Agreed (I spend an inordinate amount of time every other November trying to decide intelligently between candidates for Superior Court judge, which is an elected, theoretically nopartisan position here).
My one minor addendum :) is that "my" preferences wind up having recursive/fractal qualities, since I have to evaluate the candidate's marginal contribution to my preferences eventually turning into law (or adminstrative rulemaking, where the real action lies :) ). And worry about the iterative quality.
To the 2016 example, I (like many others) expected HRC to win, which I expected to be followed by a yuuge Republican set of wins in 2018. I had already "lost" when the choice was down to HRC and Trump, in a way that I would not had the choice been down to Trump vs TBD other mainstream D - O'Malley, for example :)
BTW, many thanks to you both for your service to the country and for your engaging with me here.
I remember every awful moment of the Trump presidency. I remember scrounging for toilet paper, standing in line at the grocery store, being horribly embarrassed every time that Trump ventured out into the wider world, prostrating himself before Putin, climbing over Queen Elizabeth(and his evening wear! Argh!). I remember that gas was cheap because we had nowhere to go, I remember a president who refused to implement public health measures and I lost a dear friend because of it..while Trump recommended bleach and light bulbs…the rising deficit and the slanted tax breaks….this was SO much more than a buncha mean tweets….
I can't remember if I posted this here before or not, so I may be repeating myself. I have a cousin who lives on the West Coast of Florida. His area was grazed by Hurricane Ian, so while he had some damage, not nearly what those farther south received. In January he posted on Facebook the outrageous rise in his home owners insurance (up over 45%), his car insurance (up over 35%) and his HOA (up over 30%). Someone commented "yeah, I'll take mean tweets over that any day". I was going to respond to the idiot that the state regulates the insurance industry, so whose fault is that now? But, didn't want to get sucked down that rabbit hole.
Well, none of the MAGAs like anyone who doesn't look and believe as they do and they are terrified (and thus, also hate) of women...so naturally they would roll right past that--maybe just stopping a moment to agree with Drump's sentiments.
All we need to do is reflect back on refrigerator trucks and body bags and healthcare workers wearing bandannas over their faces as Trump holds a daily, massively hideous press conference to mansplain COVID to a frightened nation. Remember his retort to a reporter who asked, appropriately, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” And the President of the United States, charged with managing a once in a century pandemic, replied “YOU’RE A TERRIBLE REPORTER”.
How anyone can still support this stench of a man, listen to his rants, watch his behavior, and still support him to be the leader of the free world, which won’t be free for long if this stench is elected again, is completely beyond my comprehension.
X or whatever is just another hate-filled cesspool, this one engineered by the self-indulgent Space Nazi.
Every day I am filled with dread. Because the biggest idiots among us are making decisions for OUR LIVES, OUR COUNTRY, and our standing in the world.
I have a theory that any generation that has it easy for too long, takes it for granted. Folks apparently need to face the immediate reality of true economic hardship (food scarcity, losing one's home/car) or they just get spoiled and keep raising the bar on "what everyone deserves." At that point, it's tough to get the average Joe to understand the consequences of bad policy. I feel like America needs a little tough love. A bit of, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Yet, I'm not particularly interested in any of the events that might shake things up - a major economic depression, world war, authoritarian government.
I learned a long time ago that you can not debate politics with the MAGA crowd. Presidential historians ranked their guy the worst president ever. The Trump supporters think he was the greatest. We are living in 2 different worlds, and you can't fix stupid.
I know you just wanted to give a brief list of what Trump did as President, but I’d argue that these “accomplishments” need to be on any list:
• Added $8.4 trillion to the national debt (10-year estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget)
• Blatantly pandered to Putin and other authoritarians
• Attempted to convince a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a political opponent in exchange for US support
• “Probably played 261 rounds of golf as President” (Washington Post)
That last accomplishment is probably the one he’s most proud of.
Almost all of my real life friends are huge MAGA cultists. The "are you better than 4 years ago?" argument is lost on them.
It's as if we live in a different world.
They absolutely loved, nah, relished, all the chaos those 4 years entailed. They basked in the glow of the freaking President of the United States giving the middle finger to the libs, the Deep State, the rest of the world, the academics, the intelligentsia, our foreign allies, NATO, all of it.
To them, this was the BEST OF TIMES.
So what a few hundred thousand old folks died, they were gonna die soon anyway. Sorry Gramps.
So what that we separated families at the border and some of them were never reunited. Shouldn't have been here anyway.
So what that we were gonna use the military to control riots. Listen to the cops or get what you deserve.
So what that we threatened to leave NATO. We can better spend the money here anyway.
So what that the black folks weren't treated better. They aren't real Americans, everyone deep down knows that.
So what if a bunch of cops got beat up on January 6th. They were all against the real Americans anyway. Besides, everyone knows ANTIFA and the Dems were behind the attack.
So what if they wanted to kill Mike Pence, He deserved it. Sorry RINO Mike.
We gotta stop thinking we can change or convert these folks. Never happening.
They REALLY believe that their lives were better 4 years ago.
I’m in the same boat. The town I live in is MAGA MECCA. One word bad about Trump and you’ll have a pool que in your eye. So I languish in the thinking that we’re about to lose our country to a pack of morons and a psychopath with finger on the nuclear trigger. All I can do is vote and pray.
Oh man!! 😲 I hope you have other friends to hang out with.
Copy Dan Holm! Plus: Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine to get dirt on Biden, conspired to co opt republicans into a scheme to reverse the 2020 election, (and ask the Party to pay his legal bills) and ran a criminal enterprise from the White House. No one tweet can describe the criminal fraud that is Trump. Let’s coin a phrase: “history is not a tweet “ “history is a picture of deceit and abject failure to defend our constitution “ under trump.
Thanks for pushing back Chris. It will not change much since these people are totally brainwashed and believe everything this moron says or does.
It changes nothing. But makes me feel slightly better ;)
Call it what is it - trump supporters are either willfully ignorant or just plain ignorant (and like supporting a bully). It's not really more complicated than this.
I walked away from Twitter/X in December of 2022 because of crap exactly like this.
But it's so much more than the tweets actually being "mean" - the very idea of the President making immediate, unfiltered policy statements on social media is just a VERY BAD IDEA. Was this a serious tweet or was he "joking"? These stupid tweets moved markets and are an incredibly inefficient and ineffective way to govern, wasting time for those who have to respond to them. Thank god this stopped on January 20, 2021, when a sane person was sworn in.
I was a bit slower. Left in December 2023.
I wonder how many Trump Faithful are watching every dollar they put into Trump Media turn into a penny, if they’re lucky. I hope Mark Jeffrey is one of them. The most valuable investing lessons are the most expensive ones.
It's only got about $23 per share more to drop until it is fairly valued
I just checked and it’s at 23.33 so that sounds about right. I’ve been rooting for it to be a literal penny stock.
It’s so cool to be able to watch a Trump flop with the dollar value attached.
That is a good goal, but I want it to be delisted.
Ditto that.
Yeah, I know inflation is still too high. However, the people getting all bent out of shape over it (I won't name names right here) were not around in the very late 1960s and the 1970s. Inflation was into the teens, home mortgages approached 10% and President Ford (who took office in mid-1974) had buttons made that read "WIN-Whip Inflation Now." The president during that era were GOPers. Just sayin'..............
As a former GOP Congressional staffer, Trump's record of incompetence as a negotiator/partner with Congress is a major reason that I couldn't support him for re-election in 2020 or in 2024. I'd suspected as much and had voted 3rd party in 2016 because Hillary won my state handily. I' will gratefully vote to re-elect Joe Biden because he's competent, works with Congress and puts Americans' interests above his personal interests. POTUS Trump sabotaged three major policy initiatives: immigration/DACA/border wall, health care reform and infrastructure. Specifically, President Trump announced one day with great fanfare and agreement with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate leaders for an appropriations/immigration reform bill that would have provided $25 billion to build a border wall and provided a path to citizenship for DACA recipients who were brought into the US as children. Rush Limbaugh and other immigration opponents pronounced it was amnesty and Trump reneged on the deal --- and lost all political capital for future negotiations with Speaker Pelosi and Congressional Democrats. Later, when even the Congress refused to appropriate border wall funding Trump demanded, but hadn't included in his own Budget, Trump hacked away Congress'es authority under our Constitution over spending and diverted Dept. of Defense funding to build the wall. On health care, House majority GOPers had spent 7 years during Obaama's administration passing bills to repeal Obamacare. Within days after the GOP-majority House under Speaker Paul Ryan passed a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, POTUS Trump pronounced it mean and tanked any chance for passage of any bill in the Senate. On infrastructure, POTUS Trump announced too many times for me to remember that the next week, he'd be announcing an infrastructure plan. He never did. Plus, I concur with your list Chris. Trump is the worst President since our Civil War.
If you _had_ lived in a swing state, knowing only what you knew (and, of course, what you thought you could extrapolate) as of the morning of Nov 8, 2016, how would you have voted?
If in some Twilight Zone weirdness you somehow got to pick who would win the election (between the two major party candidates), which would it have been?
I certainly share your complaints (along with quite a few others) about Trump, the clear choice (and probably the Condorcet winner, no less) of the Republican base by Feb 2016 at the latest. However much I may despise much of the leftish wing of the Democrats, there is no way I will trust the Party of Trump with any Federal power until they at least somewhat refudiate :) Trump and Trumpism. (fortunately, at the local level and occasionally at the state level there are still Republicans worth voting for; unfortunately here in California even the rare excellent Republican loses to the all too common execrable Democrat in statewide elections).
An excellent question. I would have held my nose and voted for Hillary in 2016 if I lived in a swing state. And that's after my first vote for President for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 20 years of working for Republican Members of Congress. I started voting for moderate Democrats with Trumpy GOP opponents in 2018. I decided that I couldn't vote Republican again until the Trumpy faction is a powerless rump and Trump is gone from American politics. I voted in the 2020 Democratic POTUS Primary for Joe Biden and again for him in the General Election. I live in a state without party registration. You have to choose either a Democratic or Republican Primary ballot; not both for the same election.
Thanks - I feel your pain.
I held my nose and voted for Hillary 2016 not because swing state (see: California), but because there was not a good 3rd party signal vote available (I nearly voted Johnson in 2012, and would have voted in 2016 for the 2012 version of Johnson/Libertarian had it still been available).
I don't know what I would do this November if I lived in MD: I'd much rather Hogan than Alsobrooks (to say nothing of Trone), but it's a balancing act between Republican control of the Senate versus a better individual senator.
N.b. my first vote for POTUS was Ford 1976, one of my least conflicted votes ever.
Voting isn't guaranteed to be easy or painless. You balance all of the information that you've consumed about candidates in light of your personal preferences and vote for the candidates that best reflect your preferences. Not voting abdicates your power over government to the people who take the time to vote. That's the only electoral choice I don't respect.
Agreed (I spend an inordinate amount of time every other November trying to decide intelligently between candidates for Superior Court judge, which is an elected, theoretically nopartisan position here).
My one minor addendum :) is that "my" preferences wind up having recursive/fractal qualities, since I have to evaluate the candidate's marginal contribution to my preferences eventually turning into law (or adminstrative rulemaking, where the real action lies :) ). And worry about the iterative quality.
To the 2016 example, I (like many others) expected HRC to win, which I expected to be followed by a yuuge Republican set of wins in 2018. I had already "lost" when the choice was down to HRC and Trump, in a way that I would not had the choice been down to Trump vs TBD other mainstream D - O'Malley, for example :)
BTW, many thanks to you both for your service to the country and for your engaging with me here.
You're welcome. Vigilance is the eternal price of liberty. Good luck to us all.
I remember every awful moment of the Trump presidency. I remember scrounging for toilet paper, standing in line at the grocery store, being horribly embarrassed every time that Trump ventured out into the wider world, prostrating himself before Putin, climbing over Queen Elizabeth(and his evening wear! Argh!). I remember that gas was cheap because we had nowhere to go, I remember a president who refused to implement public health measures and I lost a dear friend because of it..while Trump recommended bleach and light bulbs…the rising deficit and the slanted tax breaks….this was SO much more than a buncha mean tweets….
Yes, SOOO much more!
I can't remember if I posted this here before or not, so I may be repeating myself. I have a cousin who lives on the West Coast of Florida. His area was grazed by Hurricane Ian, so while he had some damage, not nearly what those farther south received. In January he posted on Facebook the outrageous rise in his home owners insurance (up over 45%), his car insurance (up over 35%) and his HOA (up over 30%). Someone commented "yeah, I'll take mean tweets over that any day". I was going to respond to the idiot that the state regulates the insurance industry, so whose fault is that now? But, didn't want to get sucked down that rabbit hole.
It's maddening though!
It is! I just keep repeating "Serenity Now!"
Unsurprising responses. As for X, as far as I am concerned - O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that.
I can’t get my head around how the MAGA crowd, and even those on the fringe, roll right past Trump’s blatant racism and sexually assaulting women.
Well, none of the MAGAs like anyone who doesn't look and believe as they do and they are terrified (and thus, also hate) of women...so naturally they would roll right past that--maybe just stopping a moment to agree with Drump's sentiments.
The MAGA crowd is a cult.
All we need to do is reflect back on refrigerator trucks and body bags and healthcare workers wearing bandannas over their faces as Trump holds a daily, massively hideous press conference to mansplain COVID to a frightened nation. Remember his retort to a reporter who asked, appropriately, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” And the President of the United States, charged with managing a once in a century pandemic, replied “YOU’RE A TERRIBLE REPORTER”.
How anyone can still support this stench of a man, listen to his rants, watch his behavior, and still support him to be the leader of the free world, which won’t be free for long if this stench is elected again, is completely beyond my comprehension.
X or whatever is just another hate-filled cesspool, this one engineered by the self-indulgent Space Nazi.
Every day I am filled with dread. Because the biggest idiots among us are making decisions for OUR LIVES, OUR COUNTRY, and our standing in the world.
I have a theory that any generation that has it easy for too long, takes it for granted. Folks apparently need to face the immediate reality of true economic hardship (food scarcity, losing one's home/car) or they just get spoiled and keep raising the bar on "what everyone deserves." At that point, it's tough to get the average Joe to understand the consequences of bad policy. I feel like America needs a little tough love. A bit of, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Yet, I'm not particularly interested in any of the events that might shake things up - a major economic depression, world war, authoritarian government.