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My guess is that reality will set in during the summer of our discontent in 2025, after all the post mortems of a disastrous election have been forgotten and the view halloo is sounded for the mid-term elections to follow. We shall see if the notoriously fickle American Electorate is satisfied with the new form of illiberal democracy they selected this year. Probably not a good time to count on the validity of polls regarding the coming elections, however.

Let us see how this plays out. The Republicrats have made us many promises, some of which they may deliver. The Demopublicans, always slow off the mark when challenged may decide to flood the zone with rosy views of sunlight uplands - or not. For at least half of the notoriously fickle American Electorate the Demopublican message of late did not and likely will not resonate until the actual results of the November Surprise become apparent. Buckle up, it will probably be a stormy ride.

Wave as you fly over the Christian nationalist swamp of Oklahoma where all 77 counties voted for T. Rump and Jesus is LORD over every square inch according to our Governor/High Priest.

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I keep thinking about that scene in the movie (I believe it was called “The Fourth of July”?) where the President is saying “What do you want us to do?” and the alien says, “DIE!” It doesn’t matter what Harris and the Democrats said, the other side just wants them to die (and I’m no longer sure that is meant figuratively).

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I have to say --- with all respect for the majority of people here who do not fit the following description --- that I am horrified at the small but growing vein of spite, contempt, irrationality, us-v-them tribalism, wannabe domination, classism, and even racism appearing in this comment section.

Is this really who we have become?

It's sure as hell not what Kamala Harris asked us to do going forward.

It's not what Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela did.

It is not reflected in the actual Bulwark columns.

It is not what our forebears sacrified and died for.

Have people never experienced adversity or a setback before, that they can delude themselves that this sort of petulance is *ever* a winning approach? Aside from the fact that IT DOESN'T WORK, it demeans, weakens, and coarsens the speaker *far* more than the object of the speaker's attack (who will probably just eat it up).

This hatefulness is not how we move forward. The people who voted for Trump are Americans and human beings. We don't know why they did it (spare me the simplistic easy answers) or even who they are; pretending that we do is intellectually shallow and politically incompetent and will only dig our hole deeper.

I am shaken by some of the things I have read here today. It is a tiny minority of the comments but (I hope I am wrong when I say this) it seems to be growing. Meanwhile I am deeply grateful for the sane and constructive majority and I sincerely hope that that is still "who we are."

People have endured far worse than we have and managed to respond with grace. How we behave when the chips are down becomes part of who we are forever. Let's think about what we want that to be.

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Mass deportations are grimly laughable. Please DJT, use Texas as your test case. The state of Texas does not enforce Employee ID Verification even though 30-40% of their construction industry workers are illegal. Deporting that workforce will hit the Texas economy hard. I foresee hypocrisy galore.

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Just read some interesting voter data.

Harris got more white people to vote for her than Biden did.

Trump got more blacks and Latinos than any Repub since Nixon.

Biden was +12 with women in 2020, Harris (post-Roe) was +7.

Anyone who says Harris lost because she’s a mixed-race female is playing right in to Republican hands. The perception of the economy by the middle class regardless of gender or race, high rents and mortgages in particular, outweigh abortion concerns and outweigh racism concerns and even Trump’s anti-democratic demagoguery in the minds of voters. If the Dems continue to fret about these things they will lose to JD Vance in 2028.

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Since Trump/Vance have zero plans for reducing rents or mortgages, or few plans other than tax cuts for the rich, Vance has something to worry about.

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Might have been nice if some Dems had a serious plan in place to reduce rents/mortgages themselves. By holding a real primary in 2023 and elevating a Whitmer/Shapiro ticket focused on doing so, for example. Instead of now having to wait for Trump to take credit for, then ruin the improving Biden economy.

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Why the Dems didn't spend more effort on pinning the beginning of this inflationary cycle on DJT's destruction of the economy and supply chains in 2020, I don't and will never understand.

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Because people don't want to hear boring details about how inflation works, never mind supply chains. All they wanted to hear was "I'm gonna get rid of 11 million murders, rapists, and all your problems will magically disappear."

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1 hr ago·edited 53 mins ago

A data point I heard: This is the first year since 1905 that incumbent parties in every developed nation that had elections has lost vote share.

Maybe there was nothing that Harris could have done differently to offset a global "throw out the bums who brought us high prices" mood.

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To Bill Kristol from the esteemed Captain Malcolm Reynolds: "May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one."

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I feel our country has been take over by Reavers.

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"We don’t have to go all the way and embrace the words of the poet Horace: 'Odi profanum vulgus.' That’s surely a bridge too far."

I had to translate that, but yes, hating Trump voters is as morally wrong as it is counterproductive. For years I have viewed them as drug addicts. I just keep underestimating how many of them there are. I don't hate them, I'm just disappointed in their choice, but now that they did, I also understand that it's much harder to kick the habit than to have never started. Of course all but a tiny few will refuse the help, especially now that they're enjoying their biggest "fix" ever. But that should not deter us, because it will be their highest high, and it's only downhill from there, as they actually experience Trump 2.0, not just the fantasy version they have been promised.

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2 hrs ago·edited 2 hrs ago

Why should Democrats stop Trump from destroying the economy? Americans should get what they voted for good and hard.

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JVL's take - let Trump have his way - it's time the voters woke up to reality and not the MAGA fantasy world they've been fed by Tucker, Fox, Vance, Trump, et al. Frankly, I agree. Tough love.

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Because we live here too?

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The good news is that blue state urban democrats will be the most insulated from the results of a Trump presidency.

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That won't do me any good; I'm a red state rural independent and the people I care about span all the categories.

Enough of this tribalism already.

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There is a price to pay for this "BOTH SIDES!" nonsense too. American voters will have to learn the hard way that the only way forward is keeping Republicans out of office.

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Ooooh! Punitive! tough guy cosplay! retribution!

How MAGA. And how very opposed to everything that Kamala Harris has said she stands for and has asked us to do going forward.

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Dumpling, you call yourself an independent but you're smart enough to understand how disastrous the Republican platform is. The whole problem here is that Americans simply refuse to reward Democrats for protecting them from Republicans.

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"Trump is widely expected to take action to make career civil servants easier to fire..."

Having dealt with many of those "career civil servants," both as a government employee and as a private sector contractor for 40 years, I'd be the first to applaud making it easer to fire them. And with Trump, Musk and RFK Jr. you can bet the national debt that firing would be of mostly the wrong people, and for all the wrong reasons.

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The ones that will be booted out are those who work hard and know the jobs. The bootlickers and brown nosers will get to keep their jobs. It'll be a fun time in the skies when competent ATC controllers are replaced by trump lackey or even worse, not replaced. Pink Mist anyone?

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I agree with this take, It used to be conventional wisdom that civil service jobs had a tradeoff: more job security but lower pay than comparable private-sector work. But the second part isn't necessarily true anymore. Some people in the civil service seem to believe their work is morally superior to private-sector work - that it's all about "service" - and therefore they deserve a level of job security that people in the private sector don't have. If they perform poorly or misbehave in some way, firing them is very hard.

Of course, the Trumpers wouldn't be looking to get rid of poor performers, but only the people with insufficient partisan loyalty.

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That second part you mentioned about pay, it's not that the fed employees got huge raises it's that the private sector decided to stagnate wages.

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" If they perform poorly or misbehave in some way, firing them is very hard."

Sounds good. But doing this in a fair and appropriate way is really difficult for many of the positions.

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Consensus of the people? Another commie plot: I’m in, I’m thin—go screw yourselves!

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Booming economy? Just another commie plot (Soros to the gulag!) … my tariffs will cure that!

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About the Stein piece: The campaign was asymmetrical because Trump and MAGA flood the zone with lies. Bannon's advice to flood the zone was based on knowing that THE EFFORT NEEDED TO REFUTE THE GISH GALLOP OF LIES IS EXPONENTIALLY GREATER THAN THE EFFORT TO GENERATE AND SPREAD SAID GISH GALLOP. The bad faith, disinformation-spreading, right-wing spam trolls won.

About the Stoddard piece: IT IS NOT the DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S FAULT. Trump actually won by 2,00,000 million FEWER votes than in 2020. At least 14,000,000 Biden voters did not show up. Maybe they thought Harris had it in the bag, maybe they irrationally hate Biden, maybe autocracy was not a deal breaker for them. In any case they did not add their voice to the effort to resoundingly repudiate Trump and MAGA. Trump's win is not the Democratic party's fault. Half of the country repudiated the Constitution in favor of autocracy, ostensibly over the price of eggs. After the inauguration, Trump will lay claim to the roaring Biden economy, and MAGA will follow right along.

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Bill, you really don’t have to go back to Horace and Yeats. We have a sufficient model in John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus bridge.

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founding

A booming economy if Trump can keep it. That is a nice alteration of Ben Franklin's, "A republic if you can keep it". The best hope for our economy is if Trump gets lazy, goes golfing and takes the Laissez Faire attitude toward the economy. But hope is not a strategy as well known epidemiologist Dr.Mike Osterholm once said. Reportedly, Trump looks back at the 1890's as inspiration of tariffs in place of our current tax system.(which incidentally replace tariffs as a way of generating income) But guess what? The 1890's had a depression because of tariffs. Smoot/Hawley and tariffs were a primary cause of the great depression of the 1930's . The Donald simply has never read history so how can he learn from it? He hasn't and he won't. Lets all cross our fingers.

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I was cry-laughing when Trump was lecturing a true expert on how tariffs work. As he said, he's a stable genius.

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Dear Dr. Franklin, we couldn’t keep it.

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founding

Oh I think we still have it. Just wait till 26.

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