America’s big problem is not Joe Biden, it’s the menace to democracy posed by Donald Trump
America’s big problem is not Joe Biden, it’s the menace to democracy posed by Donald Trump
The presidential debate was further proof of the fragility of the country’s constitution. Radical reform is crucial, whoever wins in November
This is such a stupid take that I keep hearing. It's like saying, "Yes, the captain is steering us towards the iceberg, but the real problem is the iceberg." Well, we can't change the iceberg, but there's still time to change the captain.
THE PROBLEM IS FUCKING PROPAGANDA RUNNING RAMPANT!!
we would LITERALLY not have to deal with Trump if Newsmax, OANN, Fox, and their like weren't allowed to just lie and specifically aim to enrage the population. They hide behind the "opinion" designation of their show but act like it's news, or they admit it's opinion and claim it's opinion entirely based on "facts."
The reason Trump exists in the form that he does, with the support that he does is 110% at the feet of the fucking propaganda that gives him cover.
We can trace this back to Reagan nixing fair reporting laws.
Yup. Decades of conservative propaganda calling Democrats the enemies for no specific reason. Republicans have been brainwashed 100%. No sane human being would ever fucking vote for trump.
we would LITERALLY not have to deal with Trump if Newsmax, OANN, Fox, and their like weren’t allowed to just lie
Okay, but while we're rounding them up for the gulags, can we sweep through and pick out all the fuckwits at NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and The Economist that were insisting Joe Biden was our Last Best Hope To Save Democracy and Actually Whip Smart And Totally Ready To Lead? Hell, even NPR gets in on this shit, and its supposed to be the nice polite republican media rather than the frothing bomb-everyone-that-criticizes-Israel news outlet.
The reason Trump exists in the form that he does, with the support that he does is 110% at the feet of the fucking propaganda that gives him cover.
Trump is the direct result of Republican rhetoric outrunning its own policy. For the last 40 years, we've been told that immigration is the root of every problem in the country - from bloated budgets to housing crises to drug use to violent crime to COVID. And as things keep getting worse, and immigration keeps getting blamed, the only conclusion Americans are allowed to make is that they're not hard enough on migrants.
The celebrity candidacy of Trump was made possible by a news media fixated on the opulence of rich white guys, a conservative leadership that saw enormous profits in using migrant laborers to supplant labor unions, and an aging American public with a Pavlovian hatred of brown people. (And also, Hilary Clinton backing him in the GOP primary because she thought he'd be easy to beat).
But the real root of the problem is our national fixation on scapegoating. If Trump hadn't won in 2016, it could just as easily have been Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, both of whom are perfectly happy with our home grown brand of fascist tendency. They're riding the same Hate Wave as Trump, he just did it better.
We wouldn't have to deal with trump had it not been for Clinton's Pied Piper strategy. That's the sole reason he's in politics.
He ran in 2000 or 2004 on the democratic ticket. Didn't get very far. Joked about having Oprah as his VP
Diaper Retard Hitler will kill the Western world as we know it, and the only other option we present to you is a man who is too old and senile to hand out werther's originals by himself.
Civilization is a lost cause.
At this point it is the fault of the media that is keeping us divided, democrat hubris, and the bubble they live in thinking a man with dementia will bring out the parties very fickle voters to vote.
Don't vote for the man, vote for the administration. The Trump administration will be evil incarnate and absolutely the end American democracy.
Right, the options in this election are:
- Mildly senile and slightly incompetent old man
- Fascist
If the election were between trump and another sack of shit, I would vote for the non-human looking sack of shit.
Biden may not be perfect, but he's way better than a facist sack of shit.
Let's assume what you're saying is true. Why has Biden's administration ignored his own voters on the genocide taking place in Palestine? Why has his administration vetoed the UN council now 12 times since 2020 now relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Why did Biden's administration pressure Robert Kur to revise his report in his classified documents investigation saying that Biden's poor memory wasn't supported by facts? Why did his administration push through with him as a candidate and not work to find a different candidate before now?
Instead I got Photoshopped images of Biden in sunglasses and a bunch of fake PR making it seem like Biden was as nimble as ever. You know what happened? I ended up becoming part of the Biden cult. After seeing his debate, what his administration is planning to do in 2024 is elder abuse. Biden needs to step aside immediately. I can't believe people discussing anything else right now. You say democracy is on the line but his administration has made one terrible mistake after another. I'm sick of it. They want democracy then he can step down and put his support behind someone else. Otherwise I'm done with it. If his administration doesn't act like democracy is on the line, then why should I?
If you do not vote, or vote for anyone other than whatever Democrat is on the ticket, Palestinian will be fully wiped out or forced to live in an open air prison the size of a postage stamp, Ukraine will be steam rolled over, Americans who are not straight, white and faux-Christian will be third tier citizens, and American democracy will be dead, forever. Go sell your bullshit to someone else. I have seen too much shit to fall for such a weak and obvious maneuver.
I think Brandon should fuck off. But i am 100% voting for him and it should be plain as day that while he is declining, he is nonetheless leagues superior to a fascist traitor.
Of course trump is an existential threat. Brandon is just a basic problem.
Brandon 2024. Fuck the republican traitor filth.
I hear ya and I guess Im doing the same.... But jesus fucking christ is it hard to imagine voting for that walking corpse after the debate. I'm wondering if it's somehow in the playbook that Democrats secretly want to lose. If we're not in a cult of personality it should be a no brainer to replace the candidate.
He's doing really well in the job and at the debate his answers were good, if you only pay attention to the least important thing then yeah he was low energy.
It's like picking race car drivers, one is a great driver but the other has a racing stripe...
For a while I was like "ok they're both old, but Biden has more than just yes men around him."
After hearing about Bidens capacity being limited to 10am-4pm... Wtf? What happens at 8pm when some emergency happens? The president may have advisors, but he makes the final call.
Obviously I'm not voting for Trump, but that doesn't change the fact that we're kinda fucked no matter what
We are truly fucked. Thanks for letting the wrong guy run and dooming us a terrible outcome.
I agree. We are going to lose in November if we remain on this shuffling horse.
I will vote for Biden, but we will lose because we're not the people who needed to be convinced by that debate performance.
Imagine if Biden has initiated prosection of Trump within his first 100 days, rather than waiting until his last year in office to press charges.
Breaking: Merrick Garland magically throws together a team and analyzes thousands of documents and gets search warrants for former presidents and analyzes all information, gets grand juries and indicts magically really quickly!
(... Later)
Breaking: Merrick Garland's indictments thrown out on technicality because of rushing things; widespread animosity that this is a political witch-hunt thrown together.
We fucked up, but not because of this.
trump isn't the cause, he's a symptom.
trump might be the worst so far, but so has every single Republican president going back to Nixon.
When the Republican nominee is finally not trump, there is zero logical reason to expect that next person to not be even more crazy.
We can't keep reacting to them and treating every election like it's the last night at the Alamo.
If we want to stop fascism we need long term planning, planning for what we do if we win, plans for when shit goes wrong, plans for fucking every contingency. Plans for the next decades even after we think we finally beat fascism.
That's supposed to be the entire point of the national party. Long term strategy past any one candidate.
Instead they only care about raising as much money as humanely possible in the moment.
Shit is too real to just blindly vote blue no matter who, we need to start asking why the people running the party are even around. And if they're honestly more worried about making money that stopping fascism.
Here I think lies the main problem. When Biden was elected in 2020, in my understanding the goal was always for him to warm the seat for the next/younger generation. In those 4 years nobody stepped forward, and they are scared of proposing a forward looking vision because it may alienate some voters (either on the left or in the center). So now we have the choice between stagnation or actively tearing down Democracy.
You can't put it on junior party members...
Biden appointed DNC leadership, and if anyone challenged him or the status quo, then they'd ruin their career if they missed.
Obama made it, but if he had lost 08 and gotten the 2016 Bernie treatment it would have likely ended his career.
I'd also argue the concern of the party and it's leadership isn't alienating voters, it's pissing off donors.
For decades the neoliberals running the party have cared about donors over everything else. It's literally killing the party and preventing us from "winning" even when Dems win an election.
Because the donors that the DNC doesn't want to piss off, are often the same wealthy assholes giving to Republicans.
People desperately want to act like the Clinton's attending Trump's wedding was a one off.
But most of the big Dem donors have more in common with trump than us, and there's no way they're giving all that money away to just have to pay more in taxes.
The wealthy bought out both parties long ago, and we can't just keep ignoring it.
It's not enough to just be slightly less shitty than republicans.
I think you’re right about him not being the cause, but I’m not sure he’s just a symptom. At a minimum he’s certainly a catalyst.
That's where I disagree.
trump just didn't maintain a veneer of civility.
But any Republican president would have done 99% of the same shit trump did.
What would really be dangerous is someone that didn't also run around admitting to all of their crimes, we barely are holding trump accountable and he's completely blatant and unapologetic when breaking the rules.
If it had been Paul Ryan or Jeb in 2016...
We'd be even more fucked than now.
It's not even Republican presidents. Newt Gingrich destroyed the House. Mitch McConnell destroyed the Senate. And there's a whole bench of people willing to continue their work.
The entirety of the Republican party, from their philosophy to their platform to their elected officials to the individual voters, is a poison. And they have a lot more power than Democrats thanks to their low population density.
McTurtle is one of the last dinosaurs where he was in office and doing the dirt.
Ever since Nixon though they realized it's better to have a fall guy in office and stay behind the scenes.
There's new generations of them, most people will just never know their names now.
We can't keep reacting to them and treating every election like it's the last night at the Alamo.
Thank you! While I do agree, voting for Biden is a no brainer when it comes to the binary choice, as someone from another country, this shit is frustrating.
You guys have had the same tone since 2016. I get it but clearly there is a huge crack in the system that is just propagating more and more.
The rest of the world is worried, as in worried long term, not just for November.
I think the Democrat party is a problem for pushing forward candidates that suck. There no way Trump wins in 2016 if he was going against somebody that was actually popular.
I am getting serious 2016 vibes this cycle. Biden should never have run a second time. And after that debate performance it feels like continuing with Biden is just as big of a mistake.
People like you underestimate how old and conservative most ppl who vote Dem are
I get that, but part of the issue is optics. The Democratic party can easily promote the narrative that "progressive" ideals are not far left.
Hillary Clinton said in a debate that Medicare for all will never be implemented. She didn't say that because she believed it, or even that she wanted it to be true. She said it because her opponent was running on that platform and gaining a massive following of mainstream voters as a result.
The party needs to quit reacting when Republicans say they are "far left" and instead fight to control the narrative. I guarantee the "old and conservative" democratic voters would follow suit if the party pushed for it.
There no way Trump wins in 2016 if he was going against somebody that was actually popular.
No way he would have won the primary without Hilary's Pied-Piper Strategy
This isn't even entirely an optics problem. Democrats in leadership believe they are best served when they are the centrist running against fascism rather than a progressive running against some boilerplate business conservative. So they actively encourage the freaks in the GOP while fighting tooth and nail to keep greens and socialists off their end of the ballot
Interesting headline - its disconnected from the content of the article. Most of it is about how broken the US electoral system is.
The important point is that an electoral and political system that was designed to protect from the "tyranny of the majority" has instead created a system perpetuating the tyranny of the minority.
Americans are indoctrinated to think theirs in the greatest country on earth from a very young age. But the political system is an absolute mess - the electoral college, the senate (which is totally skewed in favour of small states), the supreme court and politicised legal system, and the embedded 2 party system.
Trump isn't a threat to democracy. Democracy in the US has been dead for a long while now. It vaguely worked when there was a post war consensus but now it's completely log jammed. And nobody has a plan to fix it because they can't.
What the ruling class wants you to believe is that they have the ability to subjugate everyone. The heart of power will always be with the people. Despite whatever military force or technology they think is under their control. They keep us glued to a screen and at odds with each other hoping we will never harness that power.
"The Republicans are the problem." (actually fair)
"The democrats are the problem."
"The [insert dice roll here] are the problem."
It's more complicated than one or another. So taking into account that all parties are currently "the problem" with Republicans being absolutely 100% on top of the fuck off list of naughty naysayers, I argue that YOU are also the problem, my dear voter.
So look, Lemmy is a leftist, and to some degree, progressive vacuum consumed by a desire to see better days. We have our trickle-in bright red-orange tarts to displace some sentiment, though mostly we all want similar things. The problem though is that we are all just too fucking opinionated on precisely where and how to do "it". Like fuck, guys, here's our narrative:
"Biden Harris is a good bad mediocre handicapped stable president old man who had a cold raspy voice that still answered, didn't answer, could have answered, more harder faster. His policies are good great bad awful, work, and we need to get him back into office, probably, maybe, someone else, not Trump.
You all collectively sounding like a certain riddle-giving Statue guarding a mad tyrants vault.
We fucking agree on so god. damned. much. But like fuck all if all of you aren't so hung up on the petty details and discourse within your own neigh disillusionment that you can't help but yell at one another over stupid bullshit.
Shut up and come together for fucking once. Because if there is one thing the right has that ANY group left of the bipartisan line doesn't have, it's the ability to hate each other and still act together when the stakes are the highest.
I agree with what you are saying I just don't think it's a problem to also say Democrats are the problem.
In a just world many GOP officials should have been thrown out of office for supporting Jan 6th and the fight to overturn the election and the supreme court should have been packed, and every day our democracy was slowly being destroyed, high up democrat officials stayed quiet instead of loudly proclaiming that the Republicans are destroying our country and democracy.
There are Democrats who don't fit into this mold but the problem is that if you ask republicans, to a man they can immediately recite the reasons to vote for trump, wall, southern border, china ... And they are dumb in falling for the lies but it's because the Republicans have been so effective at messaging and that the Democrats have failed at messaging that we are in this situation.
AOC has said she would draft up articles of impeachment for the supreme court justices involved in the decision and though she isn't a perfect politician, that's the kind of fire we need from democrats.
Regardless of all of this, in 2024 I will be voting for biden. We can't afford to give trump another chance at Kingship. Project 2025 might mean the end of US Democracy and so it is with great shame that we are all tied to the Democrats on a sinking boat.
Kind of hard to deal with the problem when the democrats insist on using the weakest tools to fight back.
Well that's certainly true, but Biden is a problem that really shouldn't exist. He is by far the lesser of two evils, but we still deserve better.
Biden and Trump are symptoms of the same problem, which is the political system. Without getting rid of the framework that effectively supports only 2 parties you're never going to get better candidates. The parties have too much power over the pick because what are the voters going to do, give their vote to the candidate they believe to be an even worse president?
Without getting rid of the framework
The framework has a lot of fat on it. Tens of thousands of bureaucrats and lobbyists and party cronies exist to facilitate the corporate-financed bipartisan system. To change the framework, you've got to fight with all the folks who profit off their positions in that framework.
The parties have too much power over the pick because what are the voters going to do
Parties have enormous amounts of money and manpower at their disposal. The money comes from business interests exchanging cash for political favors (a thing which SCOTUS now recognizes as perfectly legal). The labor comes from armies of paid workers, complemented by even larger seasonally sourced pools of local volunteers, who have been whipped up into a panic by mass media.
That's what gives party leadership the influence it commands. There are huge carrots for folks who play ball with the sitting administration and huge sticks waved over the heads of party-splitters and indie candidates.
AIPAC wants Trump and 14a3 is not on their policy platform
America’s big problem is not Joe Biden, it’s the menace to democracy posed by Donald Trump
It's neither, the problem is the illusion that we call democracy, and the compromises we (the people, not the rulers, of course) are told we have to make in order to maintain it (AKA the status quo) despite it being designed to keep us down (again, by providing an illusion of choice) rather than serve us.
As another person already said - trump is just a symptom, it is the system that enables and encourages his existence, and it is the system that needs to be abolished if the working class is to ever have a shot at justice, equity, and equality.
Articles like this are acts of systemic self defence - deflection to keep us looking at the illusion instead of the reality.
No, it's Joe Biden. Republicans are total pieces of shit, but they wear their shit on their sleeve. People like Joe Biden Company or like snakes in the grass that hide among us claiming to be our ally. The Joe Biden we saw at the debates was the Joe Biden that the DNC has known about for years yet they still pushed him as their preferred candidate and refusing to primary him. Not allowing voters a right to choose who they would like to elect is not democratic
Donald Trump being a menace to democracy was in Bidens lap at the very start of his term, rallying an attempt to violently overthrow the election. And Biden, the new head of the executive branch, the branch of enforcing the law, just did nothing about it. And nothing about his many crimes beforehand, the documented collusion with Russians, blackmailing Ukraine to interfere in the election, the obstruction of justice, the assassination of Epstein. Trump wasnt held accountable and it was Bidens job to hold him to account. And now here we are.
And Beryl and it's super storm family on the Atlantic. Looks like FEMA is going to need FeMan to save them. (Fe is the element symbol for Iron...Iron Man? Anybody????)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And the storm of white-hot criticism that rained down on his head from friends and foes alike after the 2024 election’s embarrassing and disastrous first presidential TV debate with Donald Trump was blistering.
The other is that Trump, wholly lacking in principle and propriety, is a hate-spewing ethical vacuum who will stop at nothing to get elected – and, if allowed back into the Oval Office, will launch a reign of revenge.
For real-time as opposed to prime-time insight into the Trump menace, consider the testimony of John Kelly, his longest-serving White House chief of staff – a man who watched him up close daily.
They include deportations of millions of undocumented migrants, a sweeping, global trade war-triggering 10% tax on imports, unlimited oil drilling, the abandonment of Ukraine to Russia and the evisceration of Nato.
The debate not only highlighted Trump’s unchanged, unhinged behaviour, it also underscored fundamental constitutional problems that have enabled this lowlife to move within touching distance of the world’s most powerful job once more.
Thanks to the anachronistic electoral college, unbalanced bodies such as the Senate (where each of the 50 states has two representatives regardless of population size) and lifetime appointments of federal judges and supreme court justices, political minorities wield disproportionate power.
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This bot sucks, and the author obviously won't listen to anyone's suggestions. Blocked.