The people have spoken and what they say is that they want a corrupt, amoral, hateful narcissist as their president.
Donald Trump has always been this way. One might find excuses for how he won his first term in 2016 by saying that he was largely unknown then, a novelty act that a large part of the country was willing to take a chance on. But in the period since then, he has revealed himself very clearly, and surrounded himself with awful people who espouse the same misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, anti-LGBTQ views. And people said, “Yeah, I’m fine with that”.
There will be innumerable postmortems as to how and why this came about. It seems to me that Kamala Harris was a good candidate and ran a good campaign. One can disagree with this or that policy (For example, I strongly disagreed with the way she and Joe Biden addressed the war in Gaza and the Israel-Palestine issue generally) but I doubt that any one of those was a decisive factor in her loss. The voters wanted Trump.
He has also been given control of the Senate and (likely) the House of Representatives and the chance to appoint more right wing US Supreme Court justices and federal judges. Basically, he now has a much freer hand than he had in his first term to wreak havoc and leave lasting damage.
It is said that a country gets the leaders it deserves. It is hard to imagine that any country deserves leadership like this.
But here we are.
I’m pretty sure the House is still undecided. R’s are up, but CA is very slow at counting votes, and there are a lot of outstanding D leaning districts.
You are correct. I have added the word ‘likely’ to my post.
You forgot to mention he is a rapist.
.
BTW how long will it be before the last mail-in votes in Philadelpia are counted?
They voted the swamp back in.
America reveals itself.
Actually, given that much fewer people voted this year than in 2020 — as in, tens of millions fewer — maybe we should be saying some parts of America HID themselves.
He got fewer votes than when he lost to Biden. The voters didn’t want Harris. It’s simplistic to say that’s down to racism and misogyny, but I’m sure they played a part in keeping so many voters at home.
“fewer votes so far”, since not all numbers are in yet.
Don’t forget the treason, the pilfered classified documents and the fact that some had obviously been copied and likely sold or given to ???
And yet, when faced with voting for a woman, and a woman of color at that, too many Rill Murkkkuns said “give me the traitorous convicted felon who let over a million people die needlessly because he’s too stupid to understand what a pandemic is and who’s promising to tank our economy by imposing tariffs”.
I’ve been chatting with a friend who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, went to college in Texas, and has lived and worked in my state for about 30 years. He’s worried he’ll be deported to Venezuela despite the facts that Puerto Rico is part of the USA and he is a natural-born American citizen. If Trump ever finds the money for mass deportation, he’s going to do it.
Trump got the absolute majority of the votes (so far) so there isn’t even the excuse of the electoral college this time.
And the real winners are JD Vance, the tech bros (and other billionaires) and the Project 2025 gang (and other christofascists) who will be the real ones in control of the policies. Trump will just be the figurehead puppet until his chaos become too troublesome and he will be dealt with then through the 25th or 14th amendment.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
H L Mencken
In March of 2023 I was getting pretty pissed off with complacent lefties here and elsewhere celebrating Trump’s troubles. At that time, I angrily warned people that no, it’s NOT “surely the end for Trump this time”, just like it wasn’t last time and wouldn’t be next time. I said something along the lines of “will ANYONE bet something meaningful that he isn’t selected as the Republican candidate? Is ANYONE prepared to bet something meaningful that he isn’t elected President in 2024?”. (Both possibilities seemed ridiculous when I first posed the question.)
I repeated this question over and over again. I got a lot of pushback… but nobody, funnily enough, actually stuck their neck out and was prepared to actually bet cash money or something equally meaningful that I was wrong.
And it gives me no pleasure at all to sit here and say -- I was right. In fact, it makes me feel a bit sick.
I don’t think I can blame complacency though, despite that being the reason for my anger last year and this. I can’t blame complacency because Biden’s campaign was moribund, and it took a remarkable amount of political guts to do what the Dems did and pull him from the podium. That was the right move -- it is reasonable to suppose that he would have lost to to Trump. Only in retrospect is it possible to say that selecting Harris was a mistake. I wanted her to win, and would have voted for and campaigned for her.
And now recall Dick Tuck.
Agreed -- there were none of the unforced errors or egregious failures of the Clinton campaign (or if there were, I missed the reports of them). And yet she not only failed to beat him, she failed to even win the popular vote.
@Rob Grigjanis, 6:
So what?
When he lost to Biden he got nearly eight million more votes than when he beat Clinton.
When he beat Harris he got about ten million more votes than when he beat Clinton. People bemoaning Harris’s loss won’t even be able to bleat like Clinton fanboys did the tired election-denial “but she won the popular vote”.
What conclusion can you draw from this? It’s hard to argue with the idea that the Democrats’ mistake, TWICE, was putting him up against a woman. The US electorate is clearly in the main a pack of horrible misogynists who simply won’t put a woman in the White House. The question is, what do you do with this information? Do you ignore the evidence and persist in putting women up for election and being bitterly disappointed when they fail? Or do you take the hint? We’ll see when (if) there’s another election.
————————--
Observation/prediction: (and clearly given the rules in this joint it’s not possible to enter into conversation about this, so I’m just going to toss this up as something to consider): there have been two attempts on Trump’s life just this year. Echoing Jean @9 -- Trump won’t really be the one in charge. At some point he’ll get troublesome. I don’t think they’ll use an amendment to get rid of him, though -- his most rabid followers wouldn’t stand for that. That would be the Deep State working against him. No… when the time comes, he will be most useful to the Project 2025 crowd as a martyr.
Trump will die in office. And this will NOT be a good thing.
(Imaginary) god damn this racist, misogynist, stupid country. God damn the tidy, orderly, ‘nice’ neighbors, who publicly smile and offer greetings, and then quietly vote (again!) to take away my health care and retirement, my overtime pay, my children’s bodily autonomy.
sonofrojblake @10: No dazzling conclusions, no brilliant insights. Sometimes a probably irrelevant observation is all I can come up with. What’s to be done? Dunno. I’ll leave that to the deep thinkers.
@5 Raging Bee
Fully disagree -- each one of those non-votes is a statement that they consider the two outcomes equivalent, or at least not having enough difference to show up and vote. That means all of those tens of millions are perfectly fine with DT being the next president. So really, add those to the DT column to get a more accurate representation of his true support.
Biden got 81 million votes against trump. Harris 67 million.
Where did those 14 million democratic voters go?
Why didn’t they vote? Complacent? Protest cuz of some Biden policy? Misogynistic?
What do they say to themselves to justify not voting and allowing trump to get back in office.
Atleast the numbers indicate that people who came out in 2020 simply didnt turn up to vote (nationally) because they didnt seem to transfer over to Trump either. I dont know whats the case for the swing states where it may or may not have mattered.
@sonofrojblake @11
Thats right . we should adopt project 2025 and remind women that their place is in the kitchen -- not run for President. Hell might as well join the Republican party and “win” /s
oh, and listening to NPR, exit polls suggest a lot of trump voters voted because of prices/inflation and immigration.
prices are higher now than when trump was in office.
well--duh, that’s what inflation is. you don’t want huge inflation, but it’s always there.
also, the president has very very little control over inflation.
they might as well have decided to vote for trump because the weather was better when he was in office.
(wait, maybe the government *can* control the weather???)
A movement started in the spring of Dems not supporting Biden as a Gaza protest. How many of those stayed home to protest Gaza? Enough to ensure Trump’s victory? Misogyny may have little to do with it. Women in the US get elected to governorships as Democrats and as Republicans.
None of the speculation convinces me, but that’s the problem with speculation.
Choose one of the following to answer:
1. You voted for Biden last time, but you voted for Trump this time.
Why did you vote for Biden (and not Trump) last time?
Why did you vote for Trump (and not Harris) this time?
2. You voted for Biden last time, but you didn’t vote this time.
Why not?
3. Everyone else, I have no questions for you.
It’s natural to be disappointed when one’s preferred candidate loses.
To try to understand why on earth so many people voted for Trump (and other Republicans), it might help to draw from a wider pool of news and opinion sources.
It’s a cliche by now, but still true that many of us live in our own little, comfortable bubbles. Getting news and opinion exclusively from liberal/left-slanted sources does not help one form an accurate picture of reality. These other voters are not necessarily evil or awful or even stupid -- they just have a different perspective owing to differing experiences.
Maybe worth a thought, Mano.
Apparently some of the Hispanic people who voted for Trump said that they wanted to deport immigrants because they’re dirty and sell drugs and aren’t real Americans, like them? And some of the others said it was because gays and trans bad. That’s all I got. I will also point out that some US Hispanics are white or white-passing (like Ted Cruz) and aren’t afraid of being mistaken for immigrants. As a Harris voter (and a reluctant Biden voter in 2020, I was really hoping for Warren), and as everyone I know well voted both times, I couldn’t speculate on what the vote-changers or no-shows were thinking.
I could easily be wrong, but I suspect that the state of the economy, or the perception thereof, was a very important factor. The economy in general is widely seen as being in bad shape, with inflation an especially strong concern. Lots of people who don’t follow other issues base their votes largely on how they perceive the administration to be handling the economy. The Trump/Republican campaign was very good at hammering home the message that the economy sucks, and it’s all Biden/Harris/the Democrats’ fault. I know several acquaintances who said that they would vote for Trump before the election, and they all cited disgust with how they think Biden mishandled the economy as the main reason. Of course, if they think that Trump will be able to restore prices to what they were 6 or 7 years ago, I believe that they will be very disillusioned, but perception is often more important than reality in motivating people.
ML Clark looks ahead: Here Are Your Assignments
Living Colour had it right.
Cult of Personality