But you can be mad and still love someone.
“I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is. I do not wonder anymore. He won for that exact reason. He was not a candidate. He was a mirror. If you were a racist, you found your guy. If you were a misogynist, you found your guy. If money was your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart was armoured shut, you found your guy. If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy. If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy. If you were a rapist, you found your guy. If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy. If you had done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy. If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy. If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy. If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy. If you were a conman, you found your guy. If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy. If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy. If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy. If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy. If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy. If you had never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy. If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy. If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy. If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy. If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one. This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated. Trump did not create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate. He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity. If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That is the part that should chill the spine. Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power? We were living in a fool’s paradise. We aren’t anymore." — Michael Jochum
Thank you for this quote and for providing the source. It’s very well put.
Russian bots is why really.
Trump may have Russian backing, but he also has American backing. Lots of corporations hurried to support him. The voters are also all American. This is the fault of America.
What the USA needs is impeachment, removal (with 100% approval from Congress), and then constitutional reforms to ensure that this never happens again.
Instead, what we’re seeing is several prominent Democrats already backtracking and making excuses for doing nothing. Then the pendulum will just swing back again.
No, there will be no forgiveness.
The world was in a forgiving mood when they elected him once. But to do it again, AFTER they knew what he was like. That’s a Hell No from the rest of the world. Go play with someone on fucken Mars
Someone asked, “Why do some British people not like Trump?” An articulate and witty writer wrote the following response: “A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Obama possessd. So, the stark contrast does throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty, or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I do not say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it is a fact. He does not even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he does not just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and automatic nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance, or depth. It is all surface. Some might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we do not. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He is not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He is more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege. And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully and racist. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down. So, the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a few of us– of look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that: You do not need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man. This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty hard to miss. After all, it is impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump. And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumps of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created? If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.
Nate Whight
Also, when he was riding high which ones of them stood up for us when he was threatening us? And now he looks like he might be in trouble they want to be friends again once they think it’s safe to say so? Get fucked
It’s not a matter of simply waiting out one bad president and then expecting everything to go back to normal.
It’s naive to think that there isn’t an enormous fundamental public sentiment in America of everything that Trump and current day Republicans represent.The rest of the world no longer trusts America and has been spending that last few years forging new friendships and alliances.
It will take generations to come back from the damage America has done to themselves over that last decade.And it will never be completely the same. The amount distrust towards everything that is American like tech, products and politics has never been this high. It finally opened Europe’s eyes to see that it needs to be less dependent on America.
Millenia
Fuck that, sanction them out of existence and balkanize them while they’re weak. Like 30% of the country wants to invade and annex Canada. Are you guys fucking awake??
I hope so, anyway. There’s a good chance other countries forget how harmful USA dependence is very quickly
It’s not even about apologizing it’s about proving that such a thing can never happen again. And as far as I know the Republicans are still around the exact same people that allowed this situation to happen are still in government, and are technically still in charge.
Perhaps if we start seeing prisons sentences things will improve.
While the president can just pardon them all? I don’t think so
No one should trust us in the USA ever again. If we elect an idiot, authoritarian sleeze bag once we’ll do it again.
We shouldn’t have been trusting the USA so much in the first place. Trump did us a favour, he showed us what we were trusting,
Tumpism depends on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right. Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted. The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it. In the USA there are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection. Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here. That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality. And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has many more months in power. In his inaugural address he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element. As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in future it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he returns in some way, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine.’ the USA great again.
’
Yeah that’s my big fear, that once Trump is out of office (one way or another) all the other nations of the world will just act like the trouble is over and go back to their old relationships with the US. I think that’s a terrible mistake because, if the system in the US was healthy, Trump wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the presidency in the first place. And like you say, if he got in, someone just as bad or worse can get in too.
Once Trump is gone, the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 will still exist. The dark money, Citizens United and Super PACs will still exist. Stephen Miller, Roger Stone, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will still exist. I don’t mean to minimize Trump or suggest he’s just a harmless byproduct. He’s a monster, but he’s sitting on top of a very corrupt system that isn’t going away when he does.
Agree totally. Old but still elevent. “But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that! You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you. They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it. George Carlin
“Ever” is a very long time and trust isn’t binary.
Until there are actual reforms that are shown to be working, getting rid of FPTP and limiting the president’s direct power for example, there can only be rather limited trust towards the US.
As of now, the trust has been irrecoverbly dammaged, and the US has lost the vast majority of it’s most powerful tool, soft power.
There is a Japanese saying that is something like “A thousand years of good reputation is lost in a single hour.”
Trump and those that propped him up has burned through the single most valuable resource the US had. Trust.
Why did you trust us? We do this shit all the time and always have.
The US has not hurt its allies in this way before, not that I can think of. It’s been a bully for as long as it has been able, but it also knew who its friends were.
We manipulated them/strong armed them into it
It was more that there is an understanding that the US is allowed to be an empire with benefits kind of trust. The US is the world police that protects those that give them good trade terms and exploits those that don’t for their own gain. Countries/people turn a blind eye to the US coup-ing a smaller country provided they are a part of the benefits. The US could have 4% of the population but use 25% of the materials and 33% of the energy provided that structure holds. It is seen as a better standing than the alternative. We call ourselves allies, others call us a part of the racket.
Then Trump started turning on the allies and the whole agreement started to burn.
I have said it for a while, Trump seems to be acting in a degrowth manner. I don’t think it is because he is a genius but because he is an idiot.
Yeah, we had a lot of what is termed “soft power” in that it’s the ability to negotiate and have market strength to make it worth it. This entire regime doesn’t realize that and squandered decades of it in a single year when he thought he had full control.
Neoliberalism gone bad or mad.
Trump seems to be acting in a degrowth manner. I don’t think it is because he is a genius but because he is an idiot.
You’re not wrong, but even that’s too generous, IMO. Every time I ask myself, “If Putin could install a puppet American president, what would he have that president do?” I am reminded of how neatly everything Trump has done on the world stage supports exactly that.
We may never know the whole truth about President Krasnov, but we know enough: it’s not all just idiocy. It’s overwhelming venality and corruption, pee tapes, and a daddy who didn’t love him enough turned into authoritarian worship too.
That is a fair take. Whoever whispers in the ear of Trump is the one in power. That is not just hyperbole, there are many stories of people in the White house, literally locking others out of the oval office so they can talk to Trump and have him declare things to the public hours later. He is the puppet in chief.
‘The most uneducated buffoon in history stands at a podium, bloated with self-importance, lips pursed like a carnival barker ready to sell turd milk to the unsuspecting. He grins a grotesque smirk stretched across his face as he scrawls his name onto a hollow decree, a sham celebration of the dismantling of knowledge itself. The Department of Education falls, not with a bang, but with wheezing verbs, suffocated under the weight of his own staggering ignorance. Surrounding him are the usual suspects: cowards in expensive suits, servile sycophants clapping like trained seals, and racist opportunistic ghouls picking clean the bones of democracy. Liars, fools, and thieves all parasites fattening themselves on the hardships of the many. They stand in rigid formation, dead-eyed and soulless, their allegiance sworn not to country, not to principle, but to power, and the dark, festering rot that clings to it. And there he is the convicted wrong, the living embodiment of septic tank spew, his voice a noxious fog of grift and grievance. He lectures the world on right and wrong, irony clawing at the walls, desperate to escape the grotesque theatre of his moral void. The stomach turns, the air curdles, and for a moment, history itself recoils watching, in horror, as the great American experiment teeters on the precipice, led by a man who couldn’t spell “precipice” if his life depended on it.’
“I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is. I do not wonder anymore. He won for that exact reason. He was not a candidate. He was a mirror. If you were a racist, you found your guy. If you were a misogynist, you found your guy. If money was your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart was armoured shut, you found your guy. If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy. If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy. If you were a rapist, you found your guy. If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy. If you had done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy. If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy. If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy. If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy. If you were a conman, you found your guy. If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy. If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy. If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy. If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy. If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy. If you had never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy. If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy. If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy. If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy. If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one. This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated. Trump did not create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate. He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity. If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That is the part that should chill the spine. Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power? We were living in a fool’s paradise. We aren’t anymore." — Michael Jochum
We trusted the institutions and distress in place that are supposed to prevent corruption, tyranny, and fascism.
The rest of the world realizes how much we messed up by trusting them that much. Never again. Never 51.
Honestly, I might never support the USA ever again!
Fuck the USA. 43% still voted Republican. Y’all are a fucking write-off. Elbows up
The average American Trump supporter is a gun toting, neoliberal, bear shooting, death penalty supporting, misogynist, who believe that LGBT people should be stoned to death Old Testament style, a white supremacist, anti-vaccine, climate change denying, anti-evolution, anti- science, flat earth believing, pro-life, anti- intellectual, sanctimonious evangelical Christian, Islamophobic bigot. Chem trail obsessive, xenophobic and a racist. Also ignorant, stupid, perverted and possibly demented.
Trump is a symptom, not the root cause. USA still has a looot of work to do. I think it will take a generation to undo any harm. Most Canadians I know continue to avoid shopping US for the foreseeable future. Hell, I’m not holding my breath that Trump is even gone in 2029, considering he just appointed modern day Goebbels as his Chief of Staff.
That last line is a real banger
Oh, he’s most certainly the symptom, but calling him that comes perilously close to absolving him if responsibility. ‘it was the broken system that gave us trump, and all the terrible things he did’, someone could argue.
He doesn’t get off the hook that easy. He’s championed and enabled all the shit that the administration has done, even if some of it wasn’t his idea to begin with.
His greatest sins were against those little girls
Well put.
Said another way: The US was a dumpster fire, with a few people throwing tires on it and some others trying to set up a bucket line to the river to put it out. Trump came and poured a tanker full of gasoline on it, paid people to spread it, threatened to prosecute anyone trying to put it out, and started throwing Molotov cocktails at the neighbors.
So yeah, he cannot be just painted as a “symptom.”
“I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016 and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic, morally vacant, and psychologically mangled he is. I do not wonder anymore. He won for that exact reason. He was not a candidate. He was a mirror. If you were a racist, you found your guy. If you were a misogynist, you found your guy. If money was your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart was armoured shut, you found your guy. If you mocked disabled people, you found your guy. If you hated intelligent people, you found your guy. If you were a rapist, you found your guy. If you enjoyed golden showers with Russian sex workers, you found your guy. If you had done absolutely nothing to confront your emotional wreckage, you found your guy. If you were a serial cheater, you found your guy. If you were a perpetual bankrupt, you found your guy. If you stiffed honest workers, you found your guy. If you were a conman, you found your guy. If you mocked people’s appearances, you found your guy. If you longed for a toxic Daddy, you found your guy. If you were dissociated and disembodied, you found your guy. If you were unconscionable in every economic dealing, you found your guy. If you lied as naturally as breathing, you found your guy. If you had never eaten a green vegetable, you found your guy. If you were a white supremacist, you found your guy. If your ego contained a hole so large not even the presidency could fill it, you found your guy. If you were a sociopath who cared not one molecule about other humans, you found your guy. If he had only two of these traits, he never would have won. He won because he had hundreds of them, and millions of people recognized themselves in at least one. This has never been about Trump. It has always been about the people who finally had their worst instincts validated. Trump did not create the cruelty, he licensed it. He handed out permission slips for hate. He is merely a symptom of a far deeper disease: collective toxicity. If there is one sentence that explains Trump’s power, it is this: “He says the things I’m thinking.” That is the part that should chill the spine. Who knew that tens of millions of Americans were thinking such unconscionable things about their fellow citizens? Who knew how many white men felt so threatened by women and challenged by minorities that they were ready to torch democracy to feel big again? Who knew that after decades of apparent progress on race and gender, so many people were living in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to legitimize their worst selves and convert their bitterness into political power? We were living in a fool’s paradise. We aren’t anymore." — Michael Jochum
I’ve never read such an eloquent description of the current predicament
I’d be a little flabbergasted if Trump is in better shape than Mitch in 2029
It’ll take a generation if they try. They’re not going to.
I needed that. Thanks!
I hope they prove me wrong. 🤷♂️
Death to America
That’s fair. Can we still shit on politicians together on social media?
We’ll allow it
This is the kind of multilateral cooperation I can get on top of!
For the time being
Let’s see if any systemic issues actually get fixed first. Good luck with it, wish you all the best but you are not dependable right now.
Maybe the better analogy is whether you want to go back to the restaurant where you were treated like shit, after you found out that the server you hate was fired but that the manager is on thin ice with the owner, but had some kind of job protection where he can’t be fired until 2028.
Let’s talk in maybe 12-18y, we’ll see. All the best.
12-18 years? This proved to me that humans as q whole can’t be trusted.
We should have better anti-trust policies between countries, with minimum trust and active interventions against hostile ideologies, corruption, so on.
We will last longer that way.