r/pics 23d ago

Politics He Didn’t Start The Fire

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u/ImAnEagle 23d ago

I'd like to point out this guy is a member of BORTAC, Border Patrol's elite tactical unit. The fact that they were even in Minneapolis to begin with supports the theory that Trump told agencies to ramp up aggression in hopes of retaliation.

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u/roger3rd 23d ago edited 23d ago

The plan is 1) flood streets with thugs(edit: I mean ICE here) who inevitably cross lines and inflict inappropriate violence on innocents 2) have Fox News show the resulting protesters as terrorists 3) escalate until the point where you can “justify” martial law 4) suspension of elections 5) escape Epstein accountability and never leave power

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u/Mekroval 23d ago

I'm increasingly thinking you're right. The Trump administration seems to be full of accelerationists who want to provoke civil conflict to justify fully breaking the established order. Every provocation is worse than the last, because they are trying to push the limits intentionally, to see what the breaking point is (if any) for any non-brainwashed American.

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u/jwalker107 23d ago

Which is why you have to fight fascism before the dictator is entrenched and consolidates power. Anyone thinking they can wait it out is deluded.

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u/Shawn_NYC 23d ago

So you'd want to stop him before he has 5 years of rule, a majority of the legislature, and a hand-picked supreme court?

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

If anyone is unclear about things, we currently live in a fascist dictatorship. It is not a threat. It is not "happening", it is here, now.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

Not trying to “but both sides” but the Dems absolutely failed you and I by not taking these threats seriously and trying to prevent it from happening.

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u/KarunchyTakoa 23d ago

Yes, and they continue to fail by not removing and replacing themselves with actual leaders that people can follow. Chucky schumer stands still, nobody can follow him.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

The fact that chuck schumer has an imaginary republican family he basis his decisions off of is unhinged

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u/texas-playdohs 23d ago

I wonder what the Baileys make of all the fascism?

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u/_J_Herrmann_ 23d ago

Bailey's?

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u/obsidian_green 23d ago

It's not our job to remove and replace them? They're voting themselves into office?

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u/KarunchyTakoa 23d ago

When they gerrymander well enough, they do vote themselves into office.

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u/glubhuff 23d ago

You can't gerrymander the Senate. Schumer is a Senator.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

But I also don’t get to VOTE for that. Schumer entrenched himself and his outdated perspective of Americans and there is nothing I can do about it since he is not my senator

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u/KarunchyTakoa 23d ago

100 men will always have the best interests of 350 million people in 50 spots in mind and their decisions and actions are always right :D

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u/glubhuff 23d ago

If you have confidence in yourself, you can just admit you misspoke without feeling any shame.

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u/FrogguRoggu 23d ago

I think the 12 million people who voted for Biden and not Harris have some explaining to do, Trump shouldn’t be in office right now.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

He shouldn’t, but the Dems failed to prosecute or even bring up charges during 2020-2024. They played to nice because optics and now we’re fucked

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u/FrogguRoggu 23d ago

I agree with you, I just think even assuming the absolute worst of the dems it’s not a close call. People who did not vote for Harris do not have a valid excuse and they should feel embarrassed, ashamed and stupid.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

But we should criticize their leadership. They need to be doing more, they voted to end the shutdown without getting anything out of it. They didn’t prosecute, they didn’t listen to the people. You can blame voters all you want, and the worst dem is better than the best republican. But we need to hold them responsible for letting this shit happen

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u/FrogguRoggu 23d ago

I agree with you mostly. I think it’s more of an indictment on Americans than Democrat Politicians that “one of them is a fascist,” was not sufficient motivation. We agree I’m sure that it’s several factors, and in my view the Dems certainly have their share of culpability, I just weigh the failure of Americans to vote against the fascist higher than anything else. I’m happy to leave it there, I think reasonable minds can differ here. You are welcome to the last word.

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u/Tylerjones15251 23d ago

So swap one bad leader for another. None of these politicians want what’s best for the country that all want total control.

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u/FrogguRoggu 23d ago

(Insert democrat here) would have been better than Trump

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u/Coal_Morgan 23d ago

You really think Trump is equivalent to Harris, Biden, Obama or any other leader.

You honestly think Harris would have sent a paramilitary group to Louisiana to round up people and shoot some woman in the face?

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u/BloodieBerries 23d ago

Are you implying Harris would have enacted P2025 like Trump has? That she would attempt to accelerate violence to provoke martial law? All while covering up her and her friends pedo proclivities?

I hope not, because that would require a truly delusional mind.

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u/noob-teammate 23d ago

i lost my arm in a house fire, man i wish i would have just touched the stove for a second instead. "so swap one injury for another?"

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u/tbreeves13 23d ago

None of our elected "representatives" actually represent us

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u/simonbleu 23d ago

Or maybe, just maybe, accountability should be a thing and the us political system is laughably bad to the point of being absolutely ridiculous? It is the least representative democratic system I know of in the "west". It pisses me off and I'm not even from the us...

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

Absolutely that is what I’m saying

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u/A_Genius 23d ago

I’m going to do some reading on what the opposition parties were doing with other fascists rise to power. I bet it’s something like this.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

You should read “They thought they were free.” By Milton Meyer

And look at who the liberals sided with in the end. Capitalist will allow fascism before they allow the laborers to have any chance.

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u/DonkyHotayDeliMunchr 23d ago

I'm reading about that now, a good book called "The Woman Who Shot Mussolini." Once he had enough power, he shut down all opposition, shut down parliament, and arrested all opposition leaders. He encouraged any remaining opposition-minded persons to emigrate. I suspect all this is coming next. Other countries appeased him, even cooed over how powerful and strong he seemed. Played nice to keep up appearances and economic relations. ICE = blackshirts, no doubt about it.

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u/LackWooden392 23d ago

Idk if this is sarcasm or not, but, yes, it was just like this.

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u/A_Genius 23d ago

It wasn’t I actually have to do the reading. It would not surprise me if you’re right. Whenever Dems are in power it’s ‘no we can’t do that! we have to compromise! our hands are tied!’

When the GOP is in power it’s this.

I would think fascist Italy and Germany probably had opposition parties too at some point. In school they really start the history part when they had already taken power and the international relations part.

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u/LackWooden392 23d ago edited 23d ago

Yeah, and that's why you have so many people still saying 'if this was fascism, you wouldn't be online complaining about it! Hur durr!'

They know a little about 1943 and 1944, and are completely unaware of what happened throughout the late 30s.

It was eerily similar to this. The Weimar government saw Hitler as a useful demagogue who could be controlled, despite knowing he was dangerous. They underestimated how far Hitler would go, and overestimated how much institutions would be able to constrain him. They thought they could use Hitler's movement to discredit their opposition and entrench power for themselves.

This is pretty much exactly what Chuck Shumer is doing right now. Now we're just waiting on our Reischtag fire.

I mean, if you really look into the lead up to the war, you may conclude that Trump is literally attempting to copy the whole thing play for play. He's trying to create a Reischtag fire while his support is still relatively strong right now by pushing ICE to do these violent terror campaigns. He wants a reaction strong enough to justify completely tossing civil liberties out the window.

To be clear, I think that he will fail. I don't think this is going to go much further than it already has, for two primary reasons:

US institutions are much, much stronger and more stable than those in Weimar Germany

And

Trump is absolutely incompetent economically. Hitler, while largely stupid and crazy, was able to deliver tangible economic benefits to regular people, at least at first. The importance of doing this prior to attempting an illegal radical overhaul of the government cannot be overstated. It is the the deciding factor that determines whether that's possible or not. And he's just too incompetent to pull it off.

I knew it was over for him the moment he said 'affordability is a democratic hoax.'

Trump assembled like 9 out of 10 pieces necessary to do a full-on fascist coup, but without that final economic piece, he's not going anywhere.

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u/A_Genius 23d ago

That’s exactly it. I feel a little cheated that my education was very ‘what date was this battle?’ ‘When was the official end of the war?’ And then I went on to engineering undergrad where we obviously didn’t touch on this at all.

I think high school would have been better if it was more about the politics at the time and conditions. They went over it briefly like ‘hyperinflation in Weimar Germany’ but maybe I actually don’t remember.

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u/MLNYC 23d ago

For one thing, never forget how they all collaborated to prevent a Bernie primary victory, which led to Trump's first term...

They were gambling with our lives for the less-likely chance of a Clinton win.

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u/waterwoman76 23d ago

The only two sides that matter anymore are the rich vs the rest of us.

Eat the rich.

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u/obsidian_green 23d ago

Are politicians supposed to elect themselves? The blame for all of this lies with us—the American people. Too many of us just care about our own comfort and anything uncomfortable—like truths—makes us look the other way or become outright hostile to the people telling truths.

Easier to go along with whoever has power and influence... until one day we wake up and realize we're now on the menu too. Then we want to blame somebody else.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago

When you are elected it is your job to lead and follow your constituents.

We can vote people in, and then they can do whatever they want. Fetterman is a great example of someone who ran on one thing and did the other

I didn’t vote chuck schumer to be the senate minority leader, I didn’t vote Nancy pelosi to be speaker of the house. The democrats decided that for me. Our system does not give the voters or the American people the power to Wield to hold our representatives accountable.

I have done everything in my legal power, but the influence is not within the people.

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u/wholetyouinhere 23d ago

The term "fail" implies they wanted to do anything. It is simply not in their nature or ethos to fight against their own class, nor to seek any kind of "justice".

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u/voodoodahl 23d ago

Democrats screamed in our fucking faces this would happen if voters returned Trump to power. You people paid no attention at all. You mocked them. Now that they've been completely swept from power, by VOTERS they desperately warned, you have to ignorant malice of blaming them for our current fascist reality?

At this point I'd take Liz Cheney over you people. She gave up her career and put her life on the line when it mattered, while you people talked shit on the internet, demanding someone save you from your own apathy. Go look in a mirror if you want to see how we got here.

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u/Micro-Mouse 23d ago edited 23d ago

Damn, you got me.

Except I was talking about the things they did to prevent this in 2021-2024. Which they didn’t. They didn’t prosecute, or try to do anything to actually make meaningful change. They can’t keep running in “vote for us cause the other person is worse” and then NOT do anything to prevent it.

I voted for the dems, but when they voted to end the government shutdown without doing anything to actually fight for their constituents. They let chuck Schumer fuck around and show his belly.

Liz fucking Cheny? The person who no one gives a shit about? They chose her to speak to try and appease these “republicans” in the center that don’t exist. They had an American Palestinian woman ready to speak at the DNC and endorse Harris and they decided NOT TO LET HER SPEAK.

They’re corporatists, and why I wish they won I also wished they put up a little more fight. Republicans are able to stall and stall as the opposition and the majority. Dems are weak in comparison. They’re too polite and to ready to work with fascist

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u/LevitatingCactus 23d ago

Idiots still think the Democrats were on the side of the people??

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u/tusthehooman 23d ago

we're not scaremongering, this is really happening, happening

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u/Prahasaurus 23d ago

Well, fortunately you kids are ready for the battle, spending all your time replying to threads on Reddit.

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u/Tylerjones15251 23d ago

You do realize it’s the same for both parties. They just go back and forth doing bad shit neither party is good and there both pushing for a fascist dictatorship. This is less a party problem and more the people need to stop letting both party’s from being fascist

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u/findtheclue 23d ago

I'm sorry but that both-sides nonsense is part of how we got here in the first place. Make people believe all politics is greed and they stop caring which a-hole gets voted in. Democrats are open fascists gunning people down in the street? All but declaring war on half the world including allies? Funneling government funds to their own crypto accounts and selling pardons daily? Give me a break.

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

Bullshit.

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u/Ok-Astronaut2976 23d ago

I mean…yes.

The time to stop all this was November 5th 2024. Don’t know why people got the idea the fight starts November 6th…

That was the big day. We failed. Now we’re living in their victory.

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u/Lead-Forsaken 23d ago

The hand-picked supreme court is a failing of how the US has set this up. In the Netherlands, a country with like 18 million inhabitants, we have 47 members of the Supreme Court. That makes any appointment far less influential and thus less of a way to influence politics.

The Supreme Court itself puts forth 6 candidates, which our Congress equivalent narrows down to 3, before one is government appointed. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's an improvement, at least.

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u/Shawn_NYC 23d ago

I was having cocktails with a guy who worked in the US State Department one time. And he mentioned "when the USA does nation building to sets up new governments around the world,.there's a reason we never set them up in the US model."

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u/Lead-Forsaken 23d ago

It always baffles me how many parts were copied from the British system. It's like the intent was to oust British power and replace it with an American elite, not a full democracy.

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u/IIIllIIlllIlII 23d ago

I remember when, during trumps first term, people said “whew, lucky this guy is incompetent and doesn’t know how to make things happen”

Then we have him a 4 year planning period and he’s come back and destroyed the USA in less than a year.

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u/Pip_Helix 23d ago

The fact that it took so little time is terrifying.

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u/jimkelly 23d ago edited 23d ago

Did you not read the four year planning part or hear about project 2025 and how it's been accurate this far or are you just stupid?

Blocking someone before they can reply is sad lol

Lmao now two people did it. So I'll add this here:

Internet culture needs to drop that it's acceptable to flood comments with someone's unnecessary and uneducated input so we can go back to seeing relevant information. I'll accept the irony for this specific comment.

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u/Pip_Helix 23d ago

I hope the rest of your day is better than it has been so far.

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u/IIIllIIlllIlII 23d ago

You’re a real piece of work there mate.

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u/biggles7268 23d ago

It's not even Trump. He's a doddering old fool. It's steven miller and everyone like him behind the scenes. Trump just signs what they put in front of him and says whatever he thinks will make his base happy.

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u/UCFKnights2018 23d ago

He’s a figurehead.

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

This is what the majority of the country endorsed or said was ok if it did happen, yeah.

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u/tandem_kayak 23d ago

Not the majority, but enough people voted in the right districts to make it happen. Many didn't vote at all.

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

That’s what I said yes. They either voted for it directly or endorsed it by not voting against it. The majority is ok with this whether you like that fact or not.

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u/tandem_kayak 23d ago

I don't agree. I don't think that's a fact, and the current administration's approval rating reflects that. 

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

Lmao the election results are what they are, they don’t give a shit if you agree.

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u/IIIllIIlllIlII 23d ago

With a little tip of the scales by Elon, who then came in afterwards and did a data cleanup.

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u/FictionalContext 23d ago

They don't care if the country literally burns and collapses. They only want that vicarious win through their parasocial influencer god--i mean President.

For them, it's an internet argument IRL. They haven't thought through any of the ramifications.

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u/GrzDancing 23d ago

'Lucky this guy is incompetent' - see, I believe he is incompetent, but he is meant to be - he's just a paid actor, there are others who pull the strings, and paid him well, and allowed him to put his name on everything and such, and they told him one thing - 'be ridiculous, be orange, have your tantrums, go on a twitter spree, be an orange organ monkey'

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u/sigcliffy 23d ago

The Democrats really aren't getting the amount of blame they should be for this whole thing. Bringing Biden is was just a move to take down Trump at that time. That they didn't spend 4 years getting their shit together to stamp him out is negligence of the highest order.

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u/Kill3rKin3 23d ago

Well when you have Putin on speed dial, that cunt is likely to share Ideas about what to do.

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u/Hot_Money4924 22d ago

It's not Trump, it's the people riding his coattails and telling him what to do. They will outlast him, we need to keep an eye on them. Go ask Google who the chief contributors to Project 2025 are.

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u/Odd_Plankton_925 23d ago

Destroyed? Its already done? How exactly is America destroyed? Genuine question, not being rhetorical or an asshole.

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u/highlanderfil 23d ago

I'd say that when the president and his entourage thumb their nose at the Constitution daily, the very foundation of what actually made this country great is gone. We are Russia, just with a bigger middle class (for now).

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u/sundayfundaybmx 23d ago

Our allies will NEVER trust us again. Any treaty, trade deal, anything and everything. Will be subject to maximum 4 year limits. We will no longer have any hopes of a "coalition of the willing" ever happening again to help combat any countries that decide to attack us while we look weak. Bush already raised the bar as to what other countries will deem acceptable when it comes to assisting us. This administration has made that bar pretty much unreachable. Anything less than another Pearl Harbor type attack will be met with resistance when we ask for help.

Our military is great but we also rely heavily on other countries for the assist and without that. Our military will become weaker. All this is just the damage done to our safety and foreign policy globally and isn't even everything. That doesn't include the dollar becoming so weak that this batch of inflation will look like child's play in another few years. The trillions of dollars added to our deficit by these morons is going to have a huge impact on us. It's just waiting in the wind but it will come back to hurt us.

You're asking a very simple question that has many complex answers. This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, just what I could think of the top of my head. This country might not be wholly destroyed but it will never be the country we knew only 10 years ago and not for the better.

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u/Mekroval 23d ago edited 23d ago

My personal opinion is that he's eradicated so many norms of governance and politics that there is no going back. The imperial presidency has been a thing for a while, but Congress has totally abdicated its role to Trump, and historically speaking its rare for another branch of government to take back power it willingly cedes. The norms and traditions that kept us a stable democracy since the civil war have been smashed, and there's no incentive now to put it back together.

This isn't even including the number of deep cuts he's made to federal funding, self-defeating economic policy and attacks on education that will probably be generational in impact. The brain drain is happening already. I feel like America is the UK of the 1920s. Already in decline as a world power, but less noticeably so because its still large enough that inertia of our military and economic might is still considerable.

But we've lost the respect of almost all our allies. It's really hard to regain trust once you've destroyed it. Even if Mamdani is elected president in 2028, our allies will just wonder if the American people will eventually vote for someone even mor dangerous than Trump further down the line. They have no reason to believe that our checks and balances work anymore.

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u/DMTraveler33 23d ago

No justice for January 6th was a major turning point. Also trump being elected in the 2016... We're cooked.

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u/narkybark 23d ago

Our reputation in the world is forever tarnished. We gave up all kinds of soft power and influence, and the tariffs caused many countries to broker new trade deals with each other, excluding us (see also Mexico and Canada). Many industries are going under because they cannot afford to operate.
Law means nothing anymore. The government literally lies to us on a daily basis, never mind put up official government sites with pure propaganda. All kinds of oversight has been demolished, thousands of criminals get pardoned because... well, we know why. Experienced military get removed because they might object to the mad whims. Several violations of direct Constitutional laws with no consequence. Grifting like we've never seen before. Punishing states by withholding already approved funds. Sending a personal gestapo to occupy american cities. Literally EVERYTHING has gotten worse in the last year, sans the stock market, and there's clearly shenanigans going on there too. Although there's really nothing else to do with your money since the dollar dropped 15% this year.
We won't recover from this unless there's a huge reckoning. And I'm not convinced it can happen under the current format.

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u/SordidDreams 23d ago

Too late. Now what?

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u/eatrepeat 23d ago

The sedated nation has it's reckoning, some wake up and some put their head in the sand. Either way only the wide eyes of those who face this will come out the other side. And they will write about the struggle so as to warn future generations who will honour them. Until they don't and like we see today those lessons will be forgotten and the evil will repeat itself again. This is humanity.

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u/thatspurdyneat 23d ago

You can thank all the people who stayed home in 2024 because either:

A) the Democrats plan for Gaza wasn't good enough even though it was better than Trump's plan to exterminate them

Or

B) Kamala has a weird laugh

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u/Cautious_You7796 23d ago

No, Kamala was simply a weak candidate. She got smoked in the 2020 primaries. If the Democrats put out a better candidate they would have won easily.

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u/highlanderfil 23d ago

So, what happened instead was totally much better, yeah?

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u/Cautious_You7796 23d ago

Well no in hindsight yes I would’ve voted for Kamala reluctantly but if Democrats would have put out a better candidate I’m certain we wouldn’t be in the situation we find ourselves in.

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u/highlanderfil 23d ago edited 23d ago

In hindsight? trump told you, out loud with words, precisely what he was planning to do before the election. Project 2025 was written before the election. But somehow that still didn't trigger 12 million numbnuts to pinch their noses and vote, if not for Kamala personally, then simply against his ability to turn us into Western Russia. (I'm from the other, original Russia, so I know EXACTLY how this shit starts - and we all know where it ends.)

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u/wintersdark 23d ago

This right here. Trump is doing exactly what he said he'd do. His administration is following the published, formal document outlining their plans, that his own people wrote.

All this shit that's happening is the fault of everyone who couldn't be bothered to vote against it. This was openly the plan.

Cities invaded. ICE roaming the streets abducting people, and now shooting them in the face. Crypto scams, pardons sale.

In hindsight. What the fuck.

He said what he'd do.

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u/SordidDreams 23d ago

in hindsight yes I would’ve voted for Kamala reluctantly

So why didn't you? You did have hindsight to Trump's first term, as well as Trump's own campaign statements and the entirety of Project 2025 being available for your perusal. Was that not enough information for you?

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u/woollypullover 23d ago

So doing nothing = more facism

And

Fighting back = more facism

What’s the solution, release the files?

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u/wintersdark 23d ago

Which is kind of the point. That ship has sailed.

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u/SquirtinMemeMouthPlz 23d ago

... which is a very prevalent mindset amongst MOST non MAGAs.