I dated a girl who grew up in Germany, and her father was a member of Hitler Youth (they didn't give him much choice, of course). But it means that the last time we faced down fascism wasn't very long ago at all. But Americans are fucking stupid (I've lived among them my whole life).
I am still shocked and confused how the numbers turned out in the blue wall states…
Is there no concern of fuckery by Putin? What of Trump’s secret meeting with Mike Johnson, where afterwards he was all smiles? Something just feels so off! How could the Dems win the popular vote with Hillary and Biden, and not with Harris? There are more of us than them.
Someone please help me put this nightmare into context 😓
Thank you Don for a very thoughtful and well written response. If your explanation is true, then we can only hope that in 2026 and 2028 when the economy tanks under their leadership, which it most likely will, it will be painful enough for them to be voted out. Of course they will still blame the Dems even if they have both houses and the executive office!
There were a lot of things I left unsaid, like the flip side of the economy reason coin that if the economy is not horrible or fabulous and more just meh, then other criteria can be viewed to decide one’s vote. Or it may be too much work for many to understand the other criteria and they just stay home. It will be interesting to see what happens in 26 and esp in 28, esp with Trump far less in the conversation.
Donald Trump didn't win. Kamala Harris didn't lose.
No matter who either party put up for their candidates, the Republican was going to win.
Trump used his marketing skills and tons of money to position himself to take advantage of an anti-incumbent, post-pandemic inflationary time. Just as the pandemic made for an anti-incumbent reaction to death, grief and incompetent handling of the situation in 2020.
Harris used her charisma and tons of money to get as close as humanly possible in a very short period of time, but the hole she was placed in was just too deep to climb out of. Had Biden declared after the midterms he was going to be a one term, interim president, and allowed for a full primary, I'm not sure that would have been enough. The nation was just simply too negative toward the financial implications the global inflationary economy placed on them.
The fact that Trump did better in just about every measurement you can look at-- gender, education ethnicity, geography, previous voting tendency, eye color, etcetera-- can really only be explained by a map that I saw during the coverage Tuesday night that showed of the 4000 plus counties in the country, only three or four had average income increases that outpaced inflation. In effect, the whole country got poorer under Biden's watch. It's ridiculously unfair to place the burden on him, or by association on Kamala, but that's what people did.
You could add the fact that some people may have been uncomfortable with a woman as president or a non-white as president, but the 1992 phrase “it's the economy, stupid” and that most people vote their pocketbook came home to roost. That outweighed all the negatives Trump brought to the race, and they were plentiful. It also outweighed the joy and promise Kamala brought.
Trump was unlucky in 2020 to be the incumbent during the pandemic proper and Biden/Harris were unlucky to be the incumbents during the pandemic aftermath.
It comes down to if people don’t feel comfortable economically, then the incumbent must go.
What are some actual, concrete steps that people can take? I appreciate the broad brush strokes and calls to be organized and proactive, but can the bulwark suggest organizations to volunteer with or donate to? That could be a way for them to rally resources and actually be leaders.
1) Get your vaccines now before RFK Jr finds a way to restrict them. 2) "His priorities—at least those which Republicans can pass through the filibuster-dodging ballot reconciliation process". In what world will Republicans NOT get *rid* of the filibuster? They can do it with a simple majority and unlike Democrats, Republicans will fall in line 100%
Something is terribly wrong with this country. Anti immigrant sentiment, narrowly defining women’s place in the world AND being ok with it, completely ignoring climate change, and toxic toxic masculinity! There’s just such mean spiritedness…. I listened to Rachel Maddow this am, and I’m getting ready for the next phase of our resistance. VP Harris ran a flawless campaign and that being said… this is where we are now. PLEASE PLEASE Bulwark, I will need you for this next phase, so don’t disappear…. I am a devoted listener and I will need you to keep me going! LFG!
" toxic toxic masculinity! " Unfortunately, because no positive version of masculinity was offered for a long time, many men never saw/heard the word masculinity said by the left that wasn't paired with the word 'toxic'. So they felt that masculinity itself was being attacked. This is the Joe Rogan vote.
I do really like (though don't always agree fully) some of the things Mona says about masculinity. Of course, it would never have been enough, but Tim Walz could be an avatar for the type of masculinity that we want--kind, responsible, empathetic--not afraid to be emotional. There are also the 'strong, silent' types that are good examples, too--my uncle-in-law is such a man. I do not like the attitude of domination and meanness that I get from, admittedly, only clips of because I don't expose myself to the Joe Rogan type podcasts at all and I want to combat that somehow; I have a son (he is doing pretty well, but he is not very traditionally masculine; he's a math nerd). At the same time, I really do get my hackles up when I sense this sort of 'put women back in there place' attitude. What do you think? Is there any chance that people like Tim Walz could provide an alternative or am I delusional/in a bubble?
I think, given enough time and exposure, Walz could be accepted as a good model of masculinity. I think he should have gone on Joe Rogan, tbh. You point to something important though: The strong silent type has a hard time being heard over the bloviating bombastic a**hole (which now seems to be in vogue). But one important thing that needs to be honored as a legitimate masculine trait (even if not every man embodies it) is aggressiveness. It's a force like any other, that can be channeled for good or ill.
good point about aggressiveness. I guess I do not think of it a lot because I don't really like it on a personal level, but I think you are right and it CAN be good.
Republicans are no more, and Democrats have been smashed into the wilderness. America is in for some pain, and as much as they don't believe it, that includes a lot of Trump voters. There's 4 years until Trump annoints his successor, which means those who believe in an America that does not exist anymore (according to the majority of voters) need to start working now. One reading of the elction result beyond the obvious mysogyny, racism and hatred voiced by MAGA & voters alike, is that many of you Americans wanted a move away from the status quo.
A large coalition built up against Trump, made up of unimaginable bedfellows all uniting towards a common goal. For various reasons that don't matter now they didn't make it - but let the pundits do what they do as there's nothing more fun for them than playing the what-if game when the horse has bolted lol.
But let your imagination wander a bit - and no I'm not talking about the fact that according to the US Constitution Trump can't be sworn in come January, since no one has the will to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which SCOTUS did not strike down - they only said one state can't enforce it. I'm talking about a similar coalition of centre left to centre right minded people hitting the ground running with a third party, which would certainly be against the status quo. Yes I know people say that's got about as much chance of happening in America as someone like Trump getting elected.....Oh Wait!!!
According to a majority of voters in 2024 the current system is broken, but I don't believe they were paying much attention to the full impact of what they were doing when they threw the match to burn it down. There will be plenty of Trump voters over the coming years that you'll hear saying "I didn't vote for this" or more likely "I didn't believe he'd do this". The trouble is he told the world his plans, over & over again in between Hannibal & electric sharks - side note, how long before Thiel & Musk talk J.D. into calling on the 25th Amendment? One year or two? He even put his plans in writing for everyone to read, just in case you missed the circus shows - and America still gave him the Oval Office, Senate & possibly the House!
If the centrist 3rd part was going to happen though, the clock is ticking. It would take a lot of effort but who knows what could happen. If someone like Trump can get elected, what's the limit of possibilities in your new crazy town called the USA?
As JVL would say....Good luck America. Best wishes from the land down under.
Trump himself is 25th amendment bait. Anyone who imagines that JD Vance and Steve Bannon and Steve Miller and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and all the other mini-Macbeths and little gangsters around him are in fact loyal admirers and forever faithful acolytes is as misguided as the mudsill masses who voted Trump back into power. Unlike the deluded demos, they see Trump as a sort of reverse Joan of Arc, temporarily essential because of his power over his common crowd of mesmerized gulls, but to be endured only until the new regime has a grip on power sufficiently irreversible that they can dispense with him and grasp the imperial purple themselves. In this they overestimate their own degree of very stable genius-ness and like all predatory courtiers in a tyrant's court, as time passes and the old monster fails to shuffle off, they will chafe and grow more and more restive. As they jockey and jostle and backstab, and sharpen their knives and teeth for the day their Macbeth moment presents itself, if Trump is prudent, he will not dine out without his food taster.
If it happens, I expect Trump to be 25thed in the second half of his term, because that would allow Vance to legally run for an additional 2 full terms. of his own, giving him 10 years in office.
From another post: Saw this on another post, and I'll be damned if I don't completely agree with it: "Now Joe needs to resign, sending Kamala to the Presidency for the last two months, making her the 47th President. Then while she's there, sign executives orders and codify Roe V Wade and set term limits for the Supreme Court. And she would be able to do all of this legally since the Supreme Court ruled a sitting President is above the law. She could conceivably order recounts and "find some more votes" without fear of criminality. She can change the rules for an election so that anyone with a convicted felony on their record wouldn't ever be able to run or be sworn in for any office in the land. She could give Trump a taste of his own medicine without any repercussions whatsoever."
They will build the camps and organize a Schutzstaffel adequate to perform roundups and deportations... but immigrants are not the ultimate targets. The new regime, to secure itself, needs the means to take their internal enemies off the board. Trump has made it clear who these enemies are... anti-immigrant hysteria is merely the distracting cape that sets up the bull for the fatal blade thrust. You can joke about Gitmo but the correct historical precedent is Dachau.
Let us not forget to lay some of the blame at the feet of Merrick Garland, who did fuck-all for four years, where Trump should be 3 years into his first prison sentence.
Not sure who said it, David Frum, maybe: "If liberals won't fix the border because they don't want to come across as fascists, the people will elect a fascist to fix the border.
I had a thought about Trump's win and the root cause. One of the things that has been part of the national conversation for quite a while is the continuing gulf in wealth and income between the working class and the very rich. I've heard a lot of comments about how this gulf is as big as it was in the Gilded Age. Also how the working class hasn't gained from the additional wealth coming in and it's all going to the very rich. There have been various attempts to alleviate the situation, but mostly it's been tinkering around the edges, and everyone just shrugs and treats it as an insoluble problem to be just lived with. I think Trump's election represents a chance to blow up the system. I think a lot of people know he's going to do awful things, and they don't care, because the point is to blow things up. Because in the midst of wreckage, it's possible to do big things. I think the next four years are going to be an absolute disaster, because that was the whole point. I also think once Trump has blown things up sufficiently, he's done his job and the country will turn on him. There will be no Trumpism as a thing. What the Democrats need to do is have a plan, a big enough, drastic enough plan, to address the income disparity issue, ready to step into the midst of the wreckage.
"I think Trump's election represents a chance to blow up the system. "
It will blow up the system, all, right, but not in the way those voters think. We'll end up looking more like Russia: the ruler and a small collection of massively rich people who are running everything for their own personal benefit and who are politically invulnerable, and the masses having nearly nothing. Trump's ALREADY planning more tax cuts for the wealthy, and he'll also be cutting benefits that the lower classes most need (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, SNAP, WIC, etc.).
A lot of MAGAs have enough disposable income to travel around to rallies, participate in boat parades, have their shiny trucks painted with the image of the cult leader, etc. And some very well-to-do people have had a big part in driving Trumpism,
With all due respect, I think that's the kind of neo-Marxist analysis that keeps the Democrats divided and losing. It also ignores who Trump is, who his biggest current supporters and future advisors will be, and why he apparently won the popular vote yesterday, or very close to it. Trump voters know perfectly well who Elon Musk is. They don't hate Elon Musk, they want to BE Elon Musk. The fissure in our society isn't about income disparity, it's about ideas, specifically ideas about what America is and should be.
The Founders' ideal of discrete community based on civic equality, ever-expanding individual liberty, the freedom to better one's situation to the extent that one's abilities allow, and a government energetic enough to keep those things from being abused but limited enough not to constrain them continues to be generally popular, even if a lot of voters can't state it that clearly. Trump presents himself as the guardian of those ideas; he lies, because he doesn't care about them, but he's not a bad salesman.
Liberty and equality were intended to expand, so some movements -- universal suffrage, votes for women, civil rights -- could more or less easily be presented as logical corollaries of the Founding ideals. Women's suffrage and civil rights could be written into the Constitution on that basis.
Eliding an incomes policy with Founding principles isn't nearly as intuitive, but it's probably possible, if it's presented in terms of individual liberty and opportunity: that's reasoning that voters can accept. On the other hand, a "big enough, drastic enough" plan of income redistribution by government imposition will be enough of a non-starter to give Trumpism a new lease on life, I think. Look a what happened to Biden's much more saleable proposals. Trump's anticipated failures may provide a way to address income inequality, but it will probably be a middle way.
I also think that it's important to stop ignoring how much Trump was helped by the Democrats insisting that there was no immigration problem, when the electorate knew that there was. Immigration alone need not endanger the "discrete community" that most Americans have cherished since Independence, but unrestricted immigration and refusal to facilitate assimilation certainly do; most voters reject them, and until this past Summer, most Democrats did not. If the only choices offered to the electorate are exclusion or open borders, they're going to choose exclusion. But again, there's a middle way available, and public opinion has been shown to be open to it time and again.
I'm actually not thinking of a direct income policy, like UBI or some such. For one thing, free money that people don't have to work for is never going to fly. However, we've dealt with a Gilded Age before without giving everyone free money. On the other hand, minimum wage increases, heavy taxes on the very rich, and other things along those lines could be quite interesting, as part of some larger plan with a coherent story. Other things can fit in like laws against non-compete agreements, might also be part of such an approach. This certainly aren't big enough to fix the issue, but we haven't always had this problem, and when we didn't, it wasn't because we gave everyone free money
I agree with all of that. I might even go broader and deeper than you suggest on taxation -- I think that our taxation has to be sharply progressive AND able to finance our ongoing spending. Raising minimum wages would be good in itself, and applying them to agriculture would be one of the most humane and effective things we could do to discourage importing poor people just so that they can be exploited. Same for outlawing non-compete agreements (with some kind of cutout about sharing of proprietary information) and compulsory arbitration.
MAGA thought-leaders also want to blow things up and then build new institutions that they control - for cultural rather than economic reasons. Some of them say that when they speak of the accursed "elites" they don't mean the superrich -- many of whom pour a lot of money into right-wing causes - but rather the upper-middle class, who have the wrong cultural attitudes.
Oh, they want to control them for economic reasons as well. Many of the very top MAGA backers are already super-rich; they want to be even richer, and controlling the government insures that they will be.
I urge all of the Democrats to read the excellent article by Bret Stephens in the NYT. It describes how I feel when you guys talk about your version of the “basket of deplorables”. You never look at yourselves and where the Dems have gone completely off the rails! And I reluctantly voted for Harris because I can’t stand Trump! You all need to come down off of your moral superiority high horse, ditch the pronouns and understand that it isn’t sexism or racism. The Country elected Obama twice and I believe would have elected a woman if we had had a better option than Harris. Not her fault but she didn’t inspire confidence to many people and couldn’t win over the middle with her policies. Time to look in the mirror guys!
I watched from Australia as day after day in interviews, Americans were saying "I don't know about her policies/I don't know enough about her". There was one candidate in the race that talked about policies day in & day out, & it wasn't Trump. Now we are post election and the people have spoken in overwhelming numbers, and whilst a lot of Americans seem uncomfortable admitting it (as they have been for over a century), the world sees the truth. You made your choice as you should, you're still a democracy right now, but at least be honest with yourselves about why the choice was made.
At it's heart America is still a deeply racist, misogynist country. I'm not counting all Americans here, but there's enough to make the difference in an election.
Here's some evidence from the outside looking in. America had the choice between a person who is an adjudicated rapist, convicted of 34 felonies & who started an insurrection based on lies, who lied about LEGAL immigrants in Springfield eating cats & dogs (among all the other lies), talked about terminating the Constitution, using the military to go after American citizens & vowed to be a dictator on day one. His policy announcements were no tax on tips, returning the tax cut for billionaires paid for by tariffs on everything imported, deporting 12 million people from all across America, giving police immunity for violent actions & pardoning the Jan 6th insurrectionists. Oh, and Drill Baby Drill was in there when America already leads the world in energy production, along with sharks & batteries, Arnold Palmer's penis, Hannibal Lecter and multitudes of other nonsense.
The other candidate talked about uniting the country, the rule of law, bringing back the bi-partisan border bill, giving tax cuts to middle America & small business, giving a leg up to new business start-ups, restoring women's right to self determination about their personal healthcare, giving a head start to first home owners, going after coporate price gouging on groceries, expanding health care for regular folk just to name a few. She didn't talk about anyone's genitals, or go off on rambling incoherent speeches for hours.
Yes America we believe you, this election had nothing to do with racism or mysogyny - it was all about who had the better policies. As Desi Lydic put it on the Daily Show, America had the chance to elect a woman President twice, and both times you elected Donald Trump whose attitude to women is abundantly clear! The first time it could be argued that many didn't know who he was, but that doesn't fly in 2024.
She ran to the center. The queers for Palestine didn't vote for her.
People are convinced that some radical leftist caricature of Democrats is what the party is, even while they very conspicuously try to distance themselves from the radical left, as Harris did. Democrats get penalized even though they don't endorse the most radical ideas on the left because they don't fulsomely denounce every bad idea that comes from it. But Republicans are literally controlled by the far right, and you still have voters saying both sides, or even advocating for the Republicans.
Do you call having Walz as VP running to the center?? People didn’t trust that she would! Why would they? She never clearly articulated anything like that! Like I said… I voted for her because I can’t stand him and was more afraid of where the Country would go with him as President. Some other people I know couldn’t make that leap. So here we are🤦♀️
She ran to the center to a far greater extent than her opponent. I was more considering her policy proposals than her VP pick, I guess that's a fair point, though I think of Walz as more of a working class populist/Fetterman type than anything, but Trump didn't exactly shoot for the center with his VP pick either.
I also feel like Harris ran to the center and I am a little conflicted, right now, whether that hurt her or helped her. I tend to like the centrist stuff myself, but people seem to like radical proposals, perhaps? Trump's proposals seem not like actually policies to me, but they sure seem radical.
Thought experiment for you, Ann: If this isn't racism or sexism then why did Harris run behind the white men (who share her exact policies) on her under ballot?
Would you like to know an under ballot candidate who performed even worse than Harris?
Angela Alsobrooks.
Go ahead, I'll wait why you do a Google Images search.
Thanks for your help!! Can you see clearly from way up there??? Obama won twice! Hillary had too much baggage and pandered to the wrong people. The elites when she should have gone for the deplorables like her husband did. Not smart for a very smart woman. BTW… I voted for her too!!
Actually the Latino vote, both men and women, in the last three elections, was strongest for Hillary Clinton. It’s in today’s Washington Post. (Formatting lost in cut and paste):
“Harris suffered significant losses among both Latino women and men Latino men, in particular, veered hard to the right. In 2016, Clinton won Latino men by 31 points; by 2020, their support for Democrats had cooled somewhat, as Biden won them by 23 points. On Tuesday, Trump won this group handily, by 10 points, according to exit polling performed for the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/exit-polls-2024-election/) and other outlets. Meanwhile, Harris won Latina women
by 24 points, a victory that pales in comparison to Clinton’s 44-point lead in 2024.”
I don’t know for a fact, but would be willing to bet, that Latino support for Obama was at least as strong as for Clinton. I don’t think this debacle can be laid at the feet of racism or sexism.
I saw an interview with a Puerto Rican radio host who lamented the fact that most of the latino males he talked to, openly stated that they could not vote for a woman President. The host also explained it's hard baked into some latino cultures (latinos aren't all the same, just like asians aren't). Whilst they are happy for the woman to run the house, outside the home they are expected to be subservient to the man. However you want to wrap it, that's sexism.
Racists are a segment of society too, so are misogynists outside of latino culture. When you add them together the numbers rack up. Other reasons Harris lost were the Jewish space lasers, Haitians eating dogs & cats, the secret Democrat weather machine that controls hurricanes, directing the FEMA budget to finance kids going to school boys and coming home in the afternoon as girls. Oh, and let's not forget that God told sooooo many people directly that Trump was chosen by him! From all the religious texts I've read, God hasn't been so vocal since Moses lmao. Ridiculous? Not to way too many Americans who believe all that garbage - plenty of interviews with Trump supporters over the last couple of months showed that. You tell yourself whatever you need to believe that makes you feel better about the country you now live in, that's your right and your choice. I will never agree with your belief but will always respect your right to have it.
The MAGA base couldn't tell you what Trump's policies are, or what he's actually done in the past. It's the middle-finger-to-the-establishment attitude they like, or the bizarre mythology cultivated around him - that he was sent by God and is giving up everything because he's so devoted to saving America etc.
I've seen people ask MAGAs their opinion on some particular action, prefacing it by attributing it to Joe Biden, and they would say it was terrible - and then the interviewer says "Oh sorry, that was Trump" - and the person immediately says "I think he had a good reason for it" or something like that, hardly showing any awareness of the hypocrisy they're displaying.
The heart of Trumpism is resentment, strutting "machismo," contempt for rules and norms, and a sense of moral impunity. If it were really about policy, Republicans would have nominated someone with similar policies but not the glaring character defects or the history of having tried to steal an election.
Don’t disagree with you! Did you read the article? Written by a Democrat about Democrats. If Harris had won over normie Republicans I believe she could have won! You don’t realize how many Republicans hate him but are more afraid of her. She completely blew it by choosing a running mate to the left of her, signaling to the middle that she had no intention of going there!
Couldn't win with her policies? Trump didn't have any policies. He said whatever he thought the crowd in front of him would like, often changing from rally to rally, and is in reality perfectly happy to hand the reins over to the Project 2025 people when it comes to actual policy. Like him, don't like him, but it's a stretch to compare her policies to his.
I can’t stand Trump!!! Don’t make him the straw man here! The article is not about what an idiot he is but what the Dems should do or could do from here!
Whether it's fair or not, he can get away with being vague about his exact policies because he'd already been in office.
And, his general policy proposals were well known from those years:
1) increase domestic energy production
2) reduce/eliminate illegal immigration using current laws already on the books (including deportation.)
3) erect a physical barrier at the Southern Border to reduce illegal border crossings
4) foreign policy is simple: peace
through strength. That means doing things in an unconventional ways, like getting on speaking terms with "bad guys" &/or acting in ways the media paints as erratic to keep said "bad guys" guessing what your next move will be.
5) eliminate all PC, social justice, woke - ology from the federal government because the Civil Rights Act has been in place since 1964 all of these are examples of the government overstepping its purview & injecting itself into Americans' daily lives (Title I rule changes, trans bathrooms in schools, etc)
Everyone knew where he stood on those issues because he said it over & over again.
Kamala was asked explicitly, more than once to declare where she stood on several specific issues & she punted. Every single time. The polls said people wanted better answers from her...she decided not to give them.
I agree completely. While everything Carol S. says in her reply below is true, none of it clarified Harris’s position. She had a string of policies that no one asked for but nothing to say about issues people care about. Emblematic of this was the silent treatment she gave Biden’s executive order on asylum. This left an impression that she was an unserious person in thrall to the PC left who didn’t recognize a problem at the border or even grapple with the perception of a problem at the border. It certainly wasn’t a vision of where she wanted to take the country. I’m not saying that this was the reason she lost. She lost various voters for various reasons. But Trump’s views are known to all, which relieved him of the burden of stating them. All he had to do was say “they’re eating the dogs and cats” and everyone was reminded immediately of his take on immigration.
You're absolutely right Jonathan, she was completely silent on the border.
"I will bring back the bi-partisan border bill that was written by some of the most conservative members of Congress, the bill that Donald Trump told his people not to vote for, and sign it into law".
Yep, yep.......totally silent on the border, nothing to say about it at all. Never visited the border, never mentioned it once. She also never talked about economic policies, or healthcare policies. She just talked about sharks & boats, golfer's penis', crowd sizes, the late great Hannibal Lecter...oh wait, that was the other guy.
Uh-huh, sure. You people keep telling yourselves that to make you feel better. It's alllllll about the policies and her silence on them.
Domestic energy production is now the highest it has ever been.
Legal immigration was severely cut back. Illegal migration not really - per Cato Institute studies - except when no one was traveling during Covid.
The physical barrier - insofar as it was built - was shown to be not very effective. Trump blocked the toughest border-control bill in a generation because he preferred to campaign on the issue.
Being erratic is not "strength." It's a lack of disciipline. It exasperated our allies, making them unable and unwilling to trust us.
Trump gave Kim Jong Un a PR victory without getting anything in return.
He made a big security concession to China because Xi asked him nicely and probably flattered him - and Ivanka wanted trademark approval.
He cut out the Afghan government to make a lopsided deal with the Taliban, then showed impatience to pull out sooner and didn't enforce the terms of his own agreement, then left the Biden administration with a difficult situation - and Trump claimed full credit for the withdrawal up until June, then did an about-face when it started going badly.
The so-called "historic peace" in the Middle East obviously did not being peace.
Trump's hostility to NATO is not "strength." Curiously, he took that position soon after being a guest of the Kremlin in Moscow in the 1987, and he appears to be in some kind of thrall to Putin and Russia. He clearly wants to end NATO, allowing the neo-Soviet empire to expand, harming our allies and diminishing our position in the world. Kremlin mouthpieces on state TV call him their "useful idiot" and gloat over how they've manipulated him.
I was just listening to David Pakman, someone I've often tuned in to in this dispiriting time, and he said he lost 5,000 subscribers between last night and this morning. He texted Brian Tyler Cohen and some others, and they all reported the same experience.
He said it's very worrying that the left seems to be checking out of politics after one serious defeat, when the right would respond by doubling down and getting more engaged. It's contrary to what I recall as a truism on the right: that conservatives mostly just go about their own business while leftists try to interfere in their business by making everything about politics and trying to refashion the world.
Maybe that hasn't really been true for decades now. And while I don't identify as being on the left, I find it worrying that active opposition to MAGA might erode, to our peril.
One of my biggest fears actually is the Anti-Trump coalition falling apart because elements of the Left secede from it, either to drop out or to try to go it alone.
Maybe they just need some decompress time? I've always found the Left to be way too emotionally invested in politics, to an almost unhealthy degree. So, maybe it's good to step away for awhile.
Seems reasonable to me. They're probably be back & get engaged again in a little while.
Because the authoritarians only have to win once. We have to win every damned time. And we didn't. Now the GOP has all the power, the oligarchs, and the media. We just have to hope at this point they won't be as bad as we fear, because we're kind of powerless to stop it.
I dated a girl who grew up in Germany, and her father was a member of Hitler Youth (they didn't give him much choice, of course). But it means that the last time we faced down fascism wasn't very long ago at all. But Americans are fucking stupid (I've lived among them my whole life).
I am still shocked and confused how the numbers turned out in the blue wall states…
Is there no concern of fuckery by Putin? What of Trump’s secret meeting with Mike Johnson, where afterwards he was all smiles? Something just feels so off! How could the Dems win the popular vote with Hillary and Biden, and not with Harris? There are more of us than them.
Someone please help me put this nightmare into context 😓
Thank you Don for a very thoughtful and well written response. If your explanation is true, then we can only hope that in 2026 and 2028 when the economy tanks under their leadership, which it most likely will, it will be painful enough for them to be voted out. Of course they will still blame the Dems even if they have both houses and the executive office!
Again, thanks for the perspective. ❤️🩹
There were a lot of things I left unsaid, like the flip side of the economy reason coin that if the economy is not horrible or fabulous and more just meh, then other criteria can be viewed to decide one’s vote. Or it may be too much work for many to understand the other criteria and they just stay home. It will be interesting to see what happens in 26 and esp in 28, esp with Trump far less in the conversation.
This is how I see it.
Donald Trump didn't win. Kamala Harris didn't lose.
No matter who either party put up for their candidates, the Republican was going to win.
Trump used his marketing skills and tons of money to position himself to take advantage of an anti-incumbent, post-pandemic inflationary time. Just as the pandemic made for an anti-incumbent reaction to death, grief and incompetent handling of the situation in 2020.
Harris used her charisma and tons of money to get as close as humanly possible in a very short period of time, but the hole she was placed in was just too deep to climb out of. Had Biden declared after the midterms he was going to be a one term, interim president, and allowed for a full primary, I'm not sure that would have been enough. The nation was just simply too negative toward the financial implications the global inflationary economy placed on them.
The fact that Trump did better in just about every measurement you can look at-- gender, education ethnicity, geography, previous voting tendency, eye color, etcetera-- can really only be explained by a map that I saw during the coverage Tuesday night that showed of the 4000 plus counties in the country, only three or four had average income increases that outpaced inflation. In effect, the whole country got poorer under Biden's watch. It's ridiculously unfair to place the burden on him, or by association on Kamala, but that's what people did.
You could add the fact that some people may have been uncomfortable with a woman as president or a non-white as president, but the 1992 phrase “it's the economy, stupid” and that most people vote their pocketbook came home to roost. That outweighed all the negatives Trump brought to the race, and they were plentiful. It also outweighed the joy and promise Kamala brought.
Trump was unlucky in 2020 to be the incumbent during the pandemic proper and Biden/Harris were unlucky to be the incumbents during the pandemic aftermath.
It comes down to if people don’t feel comfortable economically, then the incumbent must go.
Too simple? I think not.
In a nutshell the Trump voters turned our republic/democracy over to a wanna be dictator for the the price of a gallon of gas and a dozen eggs.
What are some actual, concrete steps that people can take? I appreciate the broad brush strokes and calls to be organized and proactive, but can the bulwark suggest organizations to volunteer with or donate to? That could be a way for them to rally resources and actually be leaders.
1) Get your vaccines now before RFK Jr finds a way to restrict them. 2) "His priorities—at least those which Republicans can pass through the filibuster-dodging ballot reconciliation process". In what world will Republicans NOT get *rid* of the filibuster? They can do it with a simple majority and unlike Democrats, Republicans will fall in line 100%
Something is terribly wrong with this country. Anti immigrant sentiment, narrowly defining women’s place in the world AND being ok with it, completely ignoring climate change, and toxic toxic masculinity! There’s just such mean spiritedness…. I listened to Rachel Maddow this am, and I’m getting ready for the next phase of our resistance. VP Harris ran a flawless campaign and that being said… this is where we are now. PLEASE PLEASE Bulwark, I will need you for this next phase, so don’t disappear…. I am a devoted listener and I will need you to keep me going! LFG!
" toxic toxic masculinity! " Unfortunately, because no positive version of masculinity was offered for a long time, many men never saw/heard the word masculinity said by the left that wasn't paired with the word 'toxic'. So they felt that masculinity itself was being attacked. This is the Joe Rogan vote.
I do really like (though don't always agree fully) some of the things Mona says about masculinity. Of course, it would never have been enough, but Tim Walz could be an avatar for the type of masculinity that we want--kind, responsible, empathetic--not afraid to be emotional. There are also the 'strong, silent' types that are good examples, too--my uncle-in-law is such a man. I do not like the attitude of domination and meanness that I get from, admittedly, only clips of because I don't expose myself to the Joe Rogan type podcasts at all and I want to combat that somehow; I have a son (he is doing pretty well, but he is not very traditionally masculine; he's a math nerd). At the same time, I really do get my hackles up when I sense this sort of 'put women back in there place' attitude. What do you think? Is there any chance that people like Tim Walz could provide an alternative or am I delusional/in a bubble?
I think, given enough time and exposure, Walz could be accepted as a good model of masculinity. I think he should have gone on Joe Rogan, tbh. You point to something important though: The strong silent type has a hard time being heard over the bloviating bombastic a**hole (which now seems to be in vogue). But one important thing that needs to be honored as a legitimate masculine trait (even if not every man embodies it) is aggressiveness. It's a force like any other, that can be channeled for good or ill.
good point about aggressiveness. I guess I do not think of it a lot because I don't really like it on a personal level, but I think you are right and it CAN be good.
Republicans are no more, and Democrats have been smashed into the wilderness. America is in for some pain, and as much as they don't believe it, that includes a lot of Trump voters. There's 4 years until Trump annoints his successor, which means those who believe in an America that does not exist anymore (according to the majority of voters) need to start working now. One reading of the elction result beyond the obvious mysogyny, racism and hatred voiced by MAGA & voters alike, is that many of you Americans wanted a move away from the status quo.
A large coalition built up against Trump, made up of unimaginable bedfellows all uniting towards a common goal. For various reasons that don't matter now they didn't make it - but let the pundits do what they do as there's nothing more fun for them than playing the what-if game when the horse has bolted lol.
But let your imagination wander a bit - and no I'm not talking about the fact that according to the US Constitution Trump can't be sworn in come January, since no one has the will to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which SCOTUS did not strike down - they only said one state can't enforce it. I'm talking about a similar coalition of centre left to centre right minded people hitting the ground running with a third party, which would certainly be against the status quo. Yes I know people say that's got about as much chance of happening in America as someone like Trump getting elected.....Oh Wait!!!
According to a majority of voters in 2024 the current system is broken, but I don't believe they were paying much attention to the full impact of what they were doing when they threw the match to burn it down. There will be plenty of Trump voters over the coming years that you'll hear saying "I didn't vote for this" or more likely "I didn't believe he'd do this". The trouble is he told the world his plans, over & over again in between Hannibal & electric sharks - side note, how long before Thiel & Musk talk J.D. into calling on the 25th Amendment? One year or two? He even put his plans in writing for everyone to read, just in case you missed the circus shows - and America still gave him the Oval Office, Senate & possibly the House!
If the centrist 3rd part was going to happen though, the clock is ticking. It would take a lot of effort but who knows what could happen. If someone like Trump can get elected, what's the limit of possibilities in your new crazy town called the USA?
As JVL would say....Good luck America. Best wishes from the land down under.
Trump himself is 25th amendment bait. Anyone who imagines that JD Vance and Steve Bannon and Steve Miller and Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and all the other mini-Macbeths and little gangsters around him are in fact loyal admirers and forever faithful acolytes is as misguided as the mudsill masses who voted Trump back into power. Unlike the deluded demos, they see Trump as a sort of reverse Joan of Arc, temporarily essential because of his power over his common crowd of mesmerized gulls, but to be endured only until the new regime has a grip on power sufficiently irreversible that they can dispense with him and grasp the imperial purple themselves. In this they overestimate their own degree of very stable genius-ness and like all predatory courtiers in a tyrant's court, as time passes and the old monster fails to shuffle off, they will chafe and grow more and more restive. As they jockey and jostle and backstab, and sharpen their knives and teeth for the day their Macbeth moment presents itself, if Trump is prudent, he will not dine out without his food taster.
If it happens, I expect Trump to be 25thed in the second half of his term, because that would allow Vance to legally run for an additional 2 full terms. of his own, giving him 10 years in office.
“When a plurality of the electorate likes you less than Donald Trump, it's time to start asking some hard questions.”
From a Canadian paper, which has a pithy and stinging take on the election debacle.
https://www.readtheline.ca/p/election-dispatch-death-of-a-democrat?triedRedirect=true
Not for everyone, but if you take your coffee black and your liquor neat have a look.
From another post: Saw this on another post, and I'll be damned if I don't completely agree with it: "Now Joe needs to resign, sending Kamala to the Presidency for the last two months, making her the 47th President. Then while she's there, sign executives orders and codify Roe V Wade and set term limits for the Supreme Court. And she would be able to do all of this legally since the Supreme Court ruled a sitting President is above the law. She could conceivably order recounts and "find some more votes" without fear of criminality. She can change the rules for an election so that anyone with a convicted felony on their record wouldn't ever be able to run or be sworn in for any office in the land. She could give Trump a taste of his own medicine without any repercussions whatsoever."
A majority of Americans support mass deportations: https://scripps.com/press-releases/scripps-news-ipsos-poll-reveals-a-majority-of-americans-support-mass-deportation-of-undocumented-immigrants/. It's a rough week for anyone still attached to the notion of our essential goodness.
They will build the camps and organize a Schutzstaffel adequate to perform roundups and deportations... but immigrants are not the ultimate targets. The new regime, to secure itself, needs the means to take their internal enemies off the board. Trump has made it clear who these enemies are... anti-immigrant hysteria is merely the distracting cape that sets up the bull for the fatal blade thrust. You can joke about Gitmo but the correct historical precedent is Dachau.
See you there.
This feels less shocking than 2016 because any belief in our general goodness has long since evaporated.
Let us not forget to lay some of the blame at the feet of Merrick Garland, who did fuck-all for four years, where Trump should be 3 years into his first prison sentence.
He'd have won the election from jail. Mitch McConnell is the only person who could actually have stopped it.
I hope Mitch is coherent enough to realize what he's done to the country before he dies.
He does, and doesn't care. He got his corrupt SCOTUS packed & that was all that mattered to him. Diablo has Mitch's place reserved already.
In a way, we did possibly avoid a civil war... by capitulating to the Confederacy.
Not sure who said it, David Frum, maybe: "If liberals won't fix the border because they don't want to come across as fascists, the people will elect a fascist to fix the border.
I had a thought about Trump's win and the root cause. One of the things that has been part of the national conversation for quite a while is the continuing gulf in wealth and income between the working class and the very rich. I've heard a lot of comments about how this gulf is as big as it was in the Gilded Age. Also how the working class hasn't gained from the additional wealth coming in and it's all going to the very rich. There have been various attempts to alleviate the situation, but mostly it's been tinkering around the edges, and everyone just shrugs and treats it as an insoluble problem to be just lived with. I think Trump's election represents a chance to blow up the system. I think a lot of people know he's going to do awful things, and they don't care, because the point is to blow things up. Because in the midst of wreckage, it's possible to do big things. I think the next four years are going to be an absolute disaster, because that was the whole point. I also think once Trump has blown things up sufficiently, he's done his job and the country will turn on him. There will be no Trumpism as a thing. What the Democrats need to do is have a plan, a big enough, drastic enough plan, to address the income disparity issue, ready to step into the midst of the wreckage.
"I think Trump's election represents a chance to blow up the system. "
It will blow up the system, all, right, but not in the way those voters think. We'll end up looking more like Russia: the ruler and a small collection of massively rich people who are running everything for their own personal benefit and who are politically invulnerable, and the masses having nearly nothing. Trump's ALREADY planning more tax cuts for the wealthy, and he'll also be cutting benefits that the lower classes most need (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, SNAP, WIC, etc.).
A lot of MAGAs have enough disposable income to travel around to rallies, participate in boat parades, have their shiny trucks painted with the image of the cult leader, etc. And some very well-to-do people have had a big part in driving Trumpism,
With all due respect, I think that's the kind of neo-Marxist analysis that keeps the Democrats divided and losing. It also ignores who Trump is, who his biggest current supporters and future advisors will be, and why he apparently won the popular vote yesterday, or very close to it. Trump voters know perfectly well who Elon Musk is. They don't hate Elon Musk, they want to BE Elon Musk. The fissure in our society isn't about income disparity, it's about ideas, specifically ideas about what America is and should be.
The Founders' ideal of discrete community based on civic equality, ever-expanding individual liberty, the freedom to better one's situation to the extent that one's abilities allow, and a government energetic enough to keep those things from being abused but limited enough not to constrain them continues to be generally popular, even if a lot of voters can't state it that clearly. Trump presents himself as the guardian of those ideas; he lies, because he doesn't care about them, but he's not a bad salesman.
Liberty and equality were intended to expand, so some movements -- universal suffrage, votes for women, civil rights -- could more or less easily be presented as logical corollaries of the Founding ideals. Women's suffrage and civil rights could be written into the Constitution on that basis.
Eliding an incomes policy with Founding principles isn't nearly as intuitive, but it's probably possible, if it's presented in terms of individual liberty and opportunity: that's reasoning that voters can accept. On the other hand, a "big enough, drastic enough" plan of income redistribution by government imposition will be enough of a non-starter to give Trumpism a new lease on life, I think. Look a what happened to Biden's much more saleable proposals. Trump's anticipated failures may provide a way to address income inequality, but it will probably be a middle way.
I also think that it's important to stop ignoring how much Trump was helped by the Democrats insisting that there was no immigration problem, when the electorate knew that there was. Immigration alone need not endanger the "discrete community" that most Americans have cherished since Independence, but unrestricted immigration and refusal to facilitate assimilation certainly do; most voters reject them, and until this past Summer, most Democrats did not. If the only choices offered to the electorate are exclusion or open borders, they're going to choose exclusion. But again, there's a middle way available, and public opinion has been shown to be open to it time and again.
I'm actually not thinking of a direct income policy, like UBI or some such. For one thing, free money that people don't have to work for is never going to fly. However, we've dealt with a Gilded Age before without giving everyone free money. On the other hand, minimum wage increases, heavy taxes on the very rich, and other things along those lines could be quite interesting, as part of some larger plan with a coherent story. Other things can fit in like laws against non-compete agreements, might also be part of such an approach. This certainly aren't big enough to fix the issue, but we haven't always had this problem, and when we didn't, it wasn't because we gave everyone free money
I agree with all of that. I might even go broader and deeper than you suggest on taxation -- I think that our taxation has to be sharply progressive AND able to finance our ongoing spending. Raising minimum wages would be good in itself, and applying them to agriculture would be one of the most humane and effective things we could do to discourage importing poor people just so that they can be exploited. Same for outlawing non-compete agreements (with some kind of cutout about sharing of proprietary information) and compulsory arbitration.
MAGA thought-leaders also want to blow things up and then build new institutions that they control - for cultural rather than economic reasons. Some of them say that when they speak of the accursed "elites" they don't mean the superrich -- many of whom pour a lot of money into right-wing causes - but rather the upper-middle class, who have the wrong cultural attitudes.
Oh, they want to control them for economic reasons as well. Many of the very top MAGA backers are already super-rich; they want to be even richer, and controlling the government insures that they will be.
I urge all of the Democrats to read the excellent article by Bret Stephens in the NYT. It describes how I feel when you guys talk about your version of the “basket of deplorables”. You never look at yourselves and where the Dems have gone completely off the rails! And I reluctantly voted for Harris because I can’t stand Trump! You all need to come down off of your moral superiority high horse, ditch the pronouns and understand that it isn’t sexism or racism. The Country elected Obama twice and I believe would have elected a woman if we had had a better option than Harris. Not her fault but she didn’t inspire confidence to many people and couldn’t win over the middle with her policies. Time to look in the mirror guys!
I watched from Australia as day after day in interviews, Americans were saying "I don't know about her policies/I don't know enough about her". There was one candidate in the race that talked about policies day in & day out, & it wasn't Trump. Now we are post election and the people have spoken in overwhelming numbers, and whilst a lot of Americans seem uncomfortable admitting it (as they have been for over a century), the world sees the truth. You made your choice as you should, you're still a democracy right now, but at least be honest with yourselves about why the choice was made.
At it's heart America is still a deeply racist, misogynist country. I'm not counting all Americans here, but there's enough to make the difference in an election.
Here's some evidence from the outside looking in. America had the choice between a person who is an adjudicated rapist, convicted of 34 felonies & who started an insurrection based on lies, who lied about LEGAL immigrants in Springfield eating cats & dogs (among all the other lies), talked about terminating the Constitution, using the military to go after American citizens & vowed to be a dictator on day one. His policy announcements were no tax on tips, returning the tax cut for billionaires paid for by tariffs on everything imported, deporting 12 million people from all across America, giving police immunity for violent actions & pardoning the Jan 6th insurrectionists. Oh, and Drill Baby Drill was in there when America already leads the world in energy production, along with sharks & batteries, Arnold Palmer's penis, Hannibal Lecter and multitudes of other nonsense.
The other candidate talked about uniting the country, the rule of law, bringing back the bi-partisan border bill, giving tax cuts to middle America & small business, giving a leg up to new business start-ups, restoring women's right to self determination about their personal healthcare, giving a head start to first home owners, going after coporate price gouging on groceries, expanding health care for regular folk just to name a few. She didn't talk about anyone's genitals, or go off on rambling incoherent speeches for hours.
Yes America we believe you, this election had nothing to do with racism or mysogyny - it was all about who had the better policies. As Desi Lydic put it on the Daily Show, America had the chance to elect a woman President twice, and both times you elected Donald Trump whose attitude to women is abundantly clear! The first time it could be argued that many didn't know who he was, but that doesn't fly in 2024.
She ran to the center. The queers for Palestine didn't vote for her.
People are convinced that some radical leftist caricature of Democrats is what the party is, even while they very conspicuously try to distance themselves from the radical left, as Harris did. Democrats get penalized even though they don't endorse the most radical ideas on the left because they don't fulsomely denounce every bad idea that comes from it. But Republicans are literally controlled by the far right, and you still have voters saying both sides, or even advocating for the Republicans.
Sorry but unfortunately not true. Did you read the article at all?? It was written by a Democrat about the Democrats! Trump is not the subject!!!
No, I didn't read the article, and Bret Stephens is not a Democrat. Harris didn't run to the center?
Do you call having Walz as VP running to the center?? People didn’t trust that she would! Why would they? She never clearly articulated anything like that! Like I said… I voted for her because I can’t stand him and was more afraid of where the Country would go with him as President. Some other people I know couldn’t make that leap. So here we are🤦♀️
She ran to the center to a far greater extent than her opponent. I was more considering her policy proposals than her VP pick, I guess that's a fair point, though I think of Walz as more of a working class populist/Fetterman type than anything, but Trump didn't exactly shoot for the center with his VP pick either.
I also feel like Harris ran to the center and I am a little conflicted, right now, whether that hurt her or helped her. I tend to like the centrist stuff myself, but people seem to like radical proposals, perhaps? Trump's proposals seem not like actually policies to me, but they sure seem radical.
Thought experiment for you, Ann: If this isn't racism or sexism then why did Harris run behind the white men (who share her exact policies) on her under ballot?
Would you like to know an under ballot candidate who performed even worse than Harris?
Angela Alsobrooks.
Go ahead, I'll wait why you do a Google Images search.
Thanks for your help!! Can you see clearly from way up there??? Obama won twice! Hillary had too much baggage and pandered to the wrong people. The elites when she should have gone for the deplorables like her husband did. Not smart for a very smart woman. BTW… I voted for her too!!
Actually the Latino vote, both men and women, in the last three elections, was strongest for Hillary Clinton. It’s in today’s Washington Post. (Formatting lost in cut and paste):
“Harris suffered significant losses among both Latino women and men Latino men, in particular, veered hard to the right. In 2016, Clinton won Latino men by 31 points; by 2020, their support for Democrats had cooled somewhat, as Biden won them by 23 points. On Tuesday, Trump won this group handily, by 10 points, according to exit polling performed for the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/exit-polls-2024-election/) and other outlets. Meanwhile, Harris won Latina women
by 24 points, a victory that pales in comparison to Clinton’s 44-point lead in 2024.”
I don’t know for a fact, but would be willing to bet, that Latino support for Obama was at least as strong as for Clinton. I don’t think this debacle can be laid at the feet of racism or sexism.
I saw an interview with a Puerto Rican radio host who lamented the fact that most of the latino males he talked to, openly stated that they could not vote for a woman President. The host also explained it's hard baked into some latino cultures (latinos aren't all the same, just like asians aren't). Whilst they are happy for the woman to run the house, outside the home they are expected to be subservient to the man. However you want to wrap it, that's sexism.
Sounds true for sure but that is just a segment of society. I believe that Harris lost for a host of other reasons.
Racists are a segment of society too, so are misogynists outside of latino culture. When you add them together the numbers rack up. Other reasons Harris lost were the Jewish space lasers, Haitians eating dogs & cats, the secret Democrat weather machine that controls hurricanes, directing the FEMA budget to finance kids going to school boys and coming home in the afternoon as girls. Oh, and let's not forget that God told sooooo many people directly that Trump was chosen by him! From all the religious texts I've read, God hasn't been so vocal since Moses lmao. Ridiculous? Not to way too many Americans who believe all that garbage - plenty of interviews with Trump supporters over the last couple of months showed that. You tell yourself whatever you need to believe that makes you feel better about the country you now live in, that's your right and your choice. I will never agree with your belief but will always respect your right to have it.
The MAGA base couldn't tell you what Trump's policies are, or what he's actually done in the past. It's the middle-finger-to-the-establishment attitude they like, or the bizarre mythology cultivated around him - that he was sent by God and is giving up everything because he's so devoted to saving America etc.
I've seen people ask MAGAs their opinion on some particular action, prefacing it by attributing it to Joe Biden, and they would say it was terrible - and then the interviewer says "Oh sorry, that was Trump" - and the person immediately says "I think he had a good reason for it" or something like that, hardly showing any awareness of the hypocrisy they're displaying.
The heart of Trumpism is resentment, strutting "machismo," contempt for rules and norms, and a sense of moral impunity. If it were really about policy, Republicans would have nominated someone with similar policies but not the glaring character defects or the history of having tried to steal an election.
Don’t disagree with you! Did you read the article? Written by a Democrat about Democrats. If Harris had won over normie Republicans I believe she could have won! You don’t realize how many Republicans hate him but are more afraid of her. She completely blew it by choosing a running mate to the left of her, signaling to the middle that she had no intention of going there!
Couldn't win with her policies? Trump didn't have any policies. He said whatever he thought the crowd in front of him would like, often changing from rally to rally, and is in reality perfectly happy to hand the reins over to the Project 2025 people when it comes to actual policy. Like him, don't like him, but it's a stretch to compare her policies to his.
I can’t stand Trump!!! Don’t make him the straw man here! The article is not about what an idiot he is but what the Dems should do or could do from here!
Whether it's fair or not, he can get away with being vague about his exact policies because he'd already been in office.
And, his general policy proposals were well known from those years:
1) increase domestic energy production
2) reduce/eliminate illegal immigration using current laws already on the books (including deportation.)
3) erect a physical barrier at the Southern Border to reduce illegal border crossings
4) foreign policy is simple: peace
through strength. That means doing things in an unconventional ways, like getting on speaking terms with "bad guys" &/or acting in ways the media paints as erratic to keep said "bad guys" guessing what your next move will be.
5) eliminate all PC, social justice, woke - ology from the federal government because the Civil Rights Act has been in place since 1964 all of these are examples of the government overstepping its purview & injecting itself into Americans' daily lives (Title I rule changes, trans bathrooms in schools, etc)
Everyone knew where he stood on those issues because he said it over & over again.
Kamala was asked explicitly, more than once to declare where she stood on several specific issues & she punted. Every single time. The polls said people wanted better answers from her...she decided not to give them.
I agree completely. While everything Carol S. says in her reply below is true, none of it clarified Harris’s position. She had a string of policies that no one asked for but nothing to say about issues people care about. Emblematic of this was the silent treatment she gave Biden’s executive order on asylum. This left an impression that she was an unserious person in thrall to the PC left who didn’t recognize a problem at the border or even grapple with the perception of a problem at the border. It certainly wasn’t a vision of where she wanted to take the country. I’m not saying that this was the reason she lost. She lost various voters for various reasons. But Trump’s views are known to all, which relieved him of the burden of stating them. All he had to do was say “they’re eating the dogs and cats” and everyone was reminded immediately of his take on immigration.
You're absolutely right Jonathan, she was completely silent on the border.
"I will bring back the bi-partisan border bill that was written by some of the most conservative members of Congress, the bill that Donald Trump told his people not to vote for, and sign it into law".
Yep, yep.......totally silent on the border, nothing to say about it at all. Never visited the border, never mentioned it once. She also never talked about economic policies, or healthcare policies. She just talked about sharks & boats, golfer's penis', crowd sizes, the late great Hannibal Lecter...oh wait, that was the other guy.
Uh-huh, sure. You people keep telling yourselves that to make you feel better. It's alllllll about the policies and her silence on them.
This is a lark, right?
Domestic energy production is now the highest it has ever been.
Legal immigration was severely cut back. Illegal migration not really - per Cato Institute studies - except when no one was traveling during Covid.
The physical barrier - insofar as it was built - was shown to be not very effective. Trump blocked the toughest border-control bill in a generation because he preferred to campaign on the issue.
Being erratic is not "strength." It's a lack of disciipline. It exasperated our allies, making them unable and unwilling to trust us.
Trump gave Kim Jong Un a PR victory without getting anything in return.
He made a big security concession to China because Xi asked him nicely and probably flattered him - and Ivanka wanted trademark approval.
He cut out the Afghan government to make a lopsided deal with the Taliban, then showed impatience to pull out sooner and didn't enforce the terms of his own agreement, then left the Biden administration with a difficult situation - and Trump claimed full credit for the withdrawal up until June, then did an about-face when it started going badly.
The so-called "historic peace" in the Middle East obviously did not being peace.
Trump's hostility to NATO is not "strength." Curiously, he took that position soon after being a guest of the Kremlin in Moscow in the 1987, and he appears to be in some kind of thrall to Putin and Russia. He clearly wants to end NATO, allowing the neo-Soviet empire to expand, harming our allies and diminishing our position in the world. Kremlin mouthpieces on state TV call him their "useful idiot" and gloat over how they've manipulated him.
Amen to all of it!! He is everything you said and worse!! Soooo depressing!! Can’t stand that he is representing our country 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
I was just listening to David Pakman, someone I've often tuned in to in this dispiriting time, and he said he lost 5,000 subscribers between last night and this morning. He texted Brian Tyler Cohen and some others, and they all reported the same experience.
He said it's very worrying that the left seems to be checking out of politics after one serious defeat, when the right would respond by doubling down and getting more engaged. It's contrary to what I recall as a truism on the right: that conservatives mostly just go about their own business while leftists try to interfere in their business by making everything about politics and trying to refashion the world.
Maybe that hasn't really been true for decades now. And while I don't identify as being on the left, I find it worrying that active opposition to MAGA might erode, to our peril.
This is an important observation. Trump won because he stirs passions that are lasting and override any data.
Now that he's 78 and term limited, I think that a lot of people are just waiting for him to either die (of natural causes) in office or hit the limit.
One of my biggest fears actually is the Anti-Trump coalition falling apart because elements of the Left secede from it, either to drop out or to try to go it alone.
I think it's that the bots are being pulled off the Twitter assignment. They're not needed any more.
This was on YouTube, and he was referring to subscribers.
Maybe they just need some decompress time? I've always found the Left to be way too emotionally invested in politics, to an almost unhealthy degree. So, maybe it's good to step away for awhile.
Seems reasonable to me. They're probably be back & get engaged again in a little while.
The point that Pakman made was: Why does the right seem to get energized instead of tired after a defeat?
Because the authoritarians only have to win once. We have to win every damned time. And we didn't. Now the GOP has all the power, the oligarchs, and the media. We just have to hope at this point they won't be as bad as we fear, because we're kind of powerless to stop it.
This is true.
I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that the filibuster will stop anyone from doing anything they really want to do.
Those people are about to be educated in the new Republican Senate. First time Schumer calls for a filibuster, just watch how fast it's "reformed".