Trump made a mockery of American democracy. Why are Americans shrugging this off? | BY THE MIAMI HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD
Trump made a mockery of American democracy. Why are Americans shrugging this off? | BY THE MIAMI HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD
Donald Trump faces four indictments, 91 criminal charges and hundreds of years of maximum prison time combined.
This is a former president who — according to the latest grand jury indictment in Fulton County, Georgia — participated in a “criminal enterprise.” Trump and 18 co-defendants are accused of trying “to unlawfully change the outcome of the election” in 2020. Among the 13 felony charges he faces is one count of violating the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act and two counts of conspiracy to commit forgery.
Most of those charges are related to a fake elector scheme by the Trump campaign in which a slate of “alternate” electors in Georgia would cast electoral votes for Trump instead of Joe Biden. The president of the most powerful democracy in the world allegedly tried to steal an election.
We can’t say it often enough: This is serious. Americans cannot shrug this off or normalize it, no matter how many times Trump gets indicted. Yet it feels like business as usual. Not only is Trump favored to win the GOP presidential nomination, he’s also neck and neck with President Biden in the 2024 general election, according to a July poll by the New York Times/Siena Poll.
MORE THAN A CULT
Trump’s support cannot only be explained as the product of the cult-like power he has over his MAGA base, which accounts for roughly 40% of Republican voters who believe those indictments are nothing but a conspiracy against him.
more: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article278265068.html
Personal Opinion:
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.)
Objectivist Republicans have so coopted religion, using owned media to gaslight and brainwash an evolved Southern Strategy, so as to create a blind cult following.
It is a coup 20-40 years in the making.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
I still like you. You speak how I feel.
What's MIC?
Military Industrial Complex, companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman. The war profiteers
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.
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.
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.
Half the country by land area, not by population. Land matters more than people in our system. Gotta be fair to the empty land in the Dakotas and not give people health care, right?
Think about how dumb the average American is and realize that half of them are stupider than that.
that is... very accurate unfortunately.
I dont think it is that simple. Some can probably be tied to education being demonized on one side. So to trust anyone with a degree becomes taboo, even doctors are not to be trusted at this point.
I think most of it comes down to the right wing news outlets saying anyone slightly to the left of them is working with the Christian devil to destroy america. So now your choice becomes not who best runs the country but a choice of good vs evil. Trump despite everything is smart enough to play directly into this with his rhetoric. He is the saviour the right needs to stop literal evil from taking over. How do you argue people out of voting for good? Its only getting worse it feels like.
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
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?
Conservatives are not the majority. The majority of Americans do see Trump as the worst president ever. Normal people hate the motherfucker and his followers. Unfortunately, conservatives are as loud and violent as they are unintelligent. They are a plague in desperate need of a cure.
We know a shooting war next winter is possible. Likely even.
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....]
It really sailed when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for striking. If the government has that much power over unions, then unions are powerless.
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.
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.
When was the last time you convinced someone they were wrong by calling them stupid? A lot of people who are smarter than you are falling for this scam. The last time Trump won, the polling suggested he was going to lose because people who were thinking of voting for him didn't talk about it publicly for fear of being mocked by people like you.
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.)
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.
Personally I think the issue is more that there is blind loyalty to team sports in USA culture, and no matter how many bad things are documented about a specific person (Donald Trump, Richard Nixon)... people are loyal to the image of that person, the brand and logo. People are raised in the USA to be inundated with breakfast cereal and toy company logo/brand recognition. It's a faith system. Breakfast cereals and fast-food "Happy plates" that fund a lot of children's TV are incredibly unhealthy and profit machines - and parents think this is psychologically healthy.
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be. -Marshall McLuhan
Don't forget religion
Gerrymandering is the easiest example for that
And here I am thinking that it was the fact that only about a third of adults were actually allowed to vote. Strictly speaking, whichever proportion of that third that owned land but I don't have any way of estimating that, but the tldr is that for the majority of our nation's history the majority of our nation had no say in how it was governed.
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.
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.
Yeah, he was just too stupid to not say the quiet part out loud. And to not be criminal all the time while being very bad at hiding it.
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.
Garbage in, garbage out. We get who we vote for. This is who most Americans are, this is what America was founded on, and we deserve every bit of it.
Nope. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by like 3 million in 2016. More Americans voted for a different candidate.
The electoral college is included in the "garbage in, garbage out" reference.
Not really.
The problem is the corruption and propaganda that is spewed to us on the daily.
The wealthy class have succeeded in making you think that way, blame your neighbor instead of talking to them.
If we didn’t give people in Wyoming more power than people in California, neither Trump nor Bush II would have been electrd
I wish that were true but reality tells a different story. Besides, I hate all humans equally, especially the rich and their corruption and propaganda that you speak of. I do not believe in our species to solve existential problems, thus we deserve every bit of our own downfall and ultimately, our own self-inflicted extinction. I'm blaming all of us, myself included. Our genes, our history, our evolution, our behavior - that is what the problem is: us.
he's funny and we're stupid and bored and there's nothing else on the tv
Because one side approves of what he did and the other wont do anything to stop it other than writing a mildly disapproving facebook post about it.
Remember when the plan was to convince Trump to resign as if there was any chance whatsoever that he would do that? Then it changed to hoping republicans would help impeach him? And now were at hoping that the judge he appointed (canon) wont do anything unethical in his favor and hoping the supreme court agrees to be subject to oversight. What a fantasic plan that cant possibly go wrong.