#are we going to have a repeat of 2016 with Trump

[the-bitch-in-the-tower]

People thinking the other party would have "saved us" is how we got here. Along with lobbying and destroying any real threat to a dem or rep candidate.

I will repeat this until centrists and "moderate" dems understand it:

Kamala Harris tried to win by appealing to Nazis!

Kamala Harris tried to win by appealing to fucking Nazis.

And before anyone comes crying "she was trying to appeal to moderate republicans" No, she was not. There is no such thing as 'moderate reps' anymore. As the saying goes, if you let nazis swim on your pool. It's a nazi pool.

If your comfortable appealing to Nazis....well...you're a fucking nazi.

This was Harris' and dems election to win. All they had to do was take a fucking stand for SOMETHING.

Instead they tried to win by appealing to nazis and playing purity politics. (Not to mention a fair amount of election rigging in 2016 AND 2023 that the dems will do NOTHING about)

Until I am given another reason, I believe that the dems didn't WANT Trump to win. But they are using him and the chaos he creates as a counter to them. So they can turn up next election and go "look at us. We're not THAT insane. Vote for us. We're the 'good' party."

And they want to punish the American voters for calling Biden out on Gaza, and for demanding MORE from dems then they were willing to give.

Harris wasn't the second-coming, she's hardly better than Trump, and the dems, (even the so-called Squad) aren't any better.

I'll throw this advice out for whoever wants it. If we still have elections in three-and-a-half years, research all the candidates. From every party. Use your social media to support them. Campaign for them. Get word out that there are MORE than just two parties, and it's time for someone else to handle the seat of power. Dont just fall for the figure heads.

Learn to think for yourself.

All you stupid bitches had to do was vote for Kamala. Oh my GOD.

[nowisthewinter]

First starting on the plus side for the primary election result for NC, Jeff Jackson won his nomination. So, to all of those who came out and voted for him, I say, "Thank you from the bottom of my heart." Now keep it up this November. We can get him that seat if we stick to it.

Now on the minus side, LESS THAN 24% of registered NC voters came out to vote in the primaries. Look at that number. That's embarrassing!

I keep on hearing people whine, "Why do we get such horrible people to choose from every four years?"

IT'S BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T COME OUT TO VOTE IN THE PRIMARIES, BRENDA!

You had a nice wide range of people to pick from and several weeks of early voting. What kept you?

Non-voters out number actual voters by a huge margin and I swear, they are going to end up killing this country. ...but they'll show up at protests for the Tiktok vid!

[peiskos-and-apricity]

History is going to look back on the people who voted for Trump the same way it looks back on the people who supported Nazis and I'm not even exaggerating. Be joyous in your victory now, but know that when your grandchildren talk about their family tree they're going to erase your name out of pure shame. I hope your heart weighs heavy with the pain you have brought to future generations. I hope it hurts.

[transryanguzman]

tired of election discourse can we just vote already and be done with it

[barzfrommarz]

anyone else lowkey terrified for the outcome of the election now

[vaspider]

i trust you.

is it going to be okay?

Do you want me to tell you the truth, or do you want me to reassure you?

Because Steve Kornacki just said that the question seems to be not will Trump become President-elect, but how.

I have no fucking idea how we ended up here again. I was afraid that we'd be here again, that we'd see a repeat of 2016, that it would seem so clear and so obvious but that it wouldnt be, that we'd feel confident that this time this fucking pustule would get lanced but we'd run face-first into the deep misogyny (and this time, misogynoir) in this country. That we'd end up watching this horrible fucking man get elected when it just seemed... so improbable a day ago.

Is it going to be okay? I mean... no. Not like we hoped it could be. Things are going to be very difficult. They're going to get scary, if Trump has control of both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court, and people are going to be hurt, and people are going to die.

That's the truth, and I'm sorry it's like that right now.

Take time to feel whatever you need to feel, but do not give in to despair. It is - it remains - punk rock time. You are going to need to make sure that you know your neighbors, that you build communities that can weather what's coming as best you can.

Whatever happens next won't be pretty, but we will take whatever driftwood we have and keep mending our little boats, and we'll keep going. Okay?

It probably won't be okay, not for a while, not on the macro level, so your focus is going to have to be on the micro level and on acting like a fucking dandelion. Dig your roots in deep and spread as much good around as you can.

[phoenixyfriend]

Michigan just gave us the rhetorical weapon that could push Biden and the DNC to turn their backs on Israel.

Okay so this is amazing news. Michigan was going to be a key state in the push to get Biden, and the DNC as a whole, to start pressuring Israel, and they have just proven that they have that power.

Background: Michigan is a swing state, and it has 16 votes in the electoral college. Winning Michigan was a major factor in Biden's win back in 2020, and much of that rested on the Arab-American vote. It was also a major factor in Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in 2016. She lost the state by ten thousand, seven hundred votes.

Praxis: For obvious reasons, Arab-Americans are incredibly upset with Biden's support for Israel, and support in that demographic has gone from 59% in the 2020 election to less than 17% now. As a form of protest, Arab-Americans in Michigan started a campaign to get voters to check "uncommitted" in the Democratic primary. This is an actual box that can be checked, though some less-organized pushes also suggested writing in 'ceasefire' like New Hampshire primary voters did.

The goal was to get at least 10,000 'uncommitted' votes, as that is how many Hillary lost by.

As Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, the first Arab mayor of this majority-Arab city, said:

"We're not sizable enough to make a candidate win, but we're sizable enough to make a candidate lose."

(Source: NPR, 2/25/24)

Result:

As of 10:49 PM EST, 2/27, there are thirty-nine thousand uncommitted votes, according to CNN, which is doing live coverage.

NPR was reporting 30k at 10:14.

As a caveat, New York Times is saying that each of the last three Michigan Dem Primaries had about 20k uncommitted votes, so the 35k isn't all the push for pro-Palestine stances in Congress, but that's still a jump of almost 20k, which is way, way more than the goal.

And they aren't done counting the votes yet. Barely 30% of votes are in. The goal has been blown out of the water.

Other states are reaching out for advice on how to replicate the results.

This is big news.

So can we relax?

Fuck no.

Do what Michigan did. Vote in the Dem primary, and vote uncommitted or write in "ceasefire."

But on a more daily basis, if you have a Democratic candidate, lean on this.

Tell them it will be repeated elsewhere.

This could very well lose the election for Biden and more. The Democrats can't afford another four years of Trump, and they know it. The loss of Michigan can and will tank this election for them, especially since other states that helped Biden win, like Georgia, were also won on demographics that are growing increasingly upset by the situation in Gaza.

Go to the Michigan section of this post and use that in your calls and emails.

But remember. Call your reps. Call your senators. Call your governor, if you'd like. And if they're a Democrat, you bring this up. Be polite, the staffer isn't making these decisions. They might just be an intern. But bring it up and tell them that we are going to lose the presidency if we do not sanction Israel and actually pressure them into not only pulling out of Gaza and the West Bank, but paying reparations.

[qqueenofhades]

How do we not give into dooming because I mean, the media circus is not letting up on this. It feels like it's going to be the new 'emails' and the prospect of fascist america seems more and more inevitable by the day. Is every election going to be like this?

Look, I don't want to get drawn back into the Politics Discourse because I really only can take a tiny bit of it at a time right now, but once again: IT IS NOT INEVITABLE THAT WE ARE DOOMED.

Fascist ideas are not popular. Polls are bullshit garbage and were off by an average of 6 points in 2022 (remember the endless, ENDLESS weeks of RED WAVE COMING media coverage and then.... literally squat? The media cannot will something into existence just by talking about it over and over, no matter how much they try). Please do not allow polls alone to shape your understanding of the election, especially when Democrats have wildly overperformed and Trump has wildly underperformed in every competitive election since 2016.

We just had it all but inevitable that France was going to turn fascist/elect the National Rally fascist party to a majority in parliament, and instead the leftists banded together and kept them the fuck out (because fulminating about Revolution!!! online never works, but voting sure as fuck does). That did not happen. It is not inevitable here either. I am shit fucking terrified too and today was a real bad mental health day, BUT IT IS NOT INEVITABLE. Do not give up ahead of time. Do not think the media and/or polls can create the reality they want just by being extremely loud and repetitive about it. Do something. Give money. Sign up to volunteer. Check out my resources post for helping the Democrats. And repeat after me:

IT IS NOT INEVITABLE THAT WE ARE DOOMED. Even if Trump did win the election, god fucking forbid, America would not be fascist instantly overnight. People would and will fight back. He would have a really hard time actually cancelling or openly rigging elections and/or using dictatorial powers, no matter how much he would want to try. Take a deep breath. Log off social media. Repeat after me:

IT IS NOT INEVITABLE THAT WE ARE DOOMED. And there is never, ever, a moment where we can never do anything at all or where everything will just Happen to us without us having the opportunity to resist (and win). We just have to make the choice to do so.

That's all I got for now. Hang in there.

[uboat53]

You know, there's been a lot of liberal critique of The New York Times and other mainstream outlets lately accusing them of "normalizing" Trump. These outlets have generally responded that, in the interest of covering all sides, they need to publish pieces from a conservative viewpoint that liberal readers disagree with. They're both right and wrong when they say this and, to understand why, I need to explain how they're repeating exactly the same mistakes they made in 2016.

In 2016, you have to remember, Trump took the GOP by storm. The party itself tried to stop him with both the official party apparatus and peripheral apparatus like FOX News doing their best to diminish his support, but none of it worked. Instead, Trump won the primaries despite never winning more than a plurality in any contested state even while he was still opposed by a huge number of Republicans.

Of course, if you read or watched political news outlets in October of 2016 you wouldn't know any of that, because the immediate action of just about every political news outlet to Trump's nomination was to fire all of their conservative commentators who opposed him and hire a bunch of conservative commentators who supported him. By the time the general election debates were happening, you could be forgiven for thinking that all Democrats supported Clinton and all Republicans supported Trump.

(Note: Nothing similar happened on the Democratic side because nearly all liberal commentators already supported Clinton. Sanders' support in the primaries was surprising, but not overwhelming. He tended to win primaries or caucuses that limited turnout in some way to more enthusiastic supporters while Clinton tended to win primaries that were more broad-based and that was reflected in most of the coverage.)

In other words, by removing the many anti-Trump conservative voices from their air/pages, news organizations gave the impression that all Republicans supported Trump, effectively activating partisan loyalties and subtly encouraging Republicans with doubts about Trump to fall in line. This is what we mean by "normalizing."

They're doing the same thing today. They're not publishing articles where they examine the claims of their MAGA columnists (or their liberal ones for that matter!) and they're not publishing articles about the divides that still remain in the Republican Party and the conservative movement generally (Trump was consistently losing 30%-40% of the vote in 2024 even after it became clear he was going to win), they're just publishing articles arguing for/against Harris and Trump with no deeper analysis whatsoever.

This is why liberals are correct that mainstream political news organizations, even those like The New York Times which are often seen a liberal, are complicit in "normalizing" Trump. These outlets are correct that they need to cover conservative points of view which their liberal readers may find uncomfortable, but they don't have to present them as "the one true conservative" point of view.

By presenting Trump as if he represents all of conservatism rather than just the MAGA faction of conservatism which is staunchly opposed by more traditional conservative factions, these media organizations have fed fuel into a narrative us "us vs. them" which has done as much or more than partisan media to build the partisan polarization of this country.

[booasaur]

Remember during the 2016 elections, we were so scared of what Trump might do? How afraid we were for Roe but were told by so many people, pro-choice people even, that it was such settled law and it would be such a flashpoint, they'd never touch it. Don't overreact, you sound hysterical, this fearmongering is ruining your credibility. Hell, maybe worry for gay marriage, but abortion? No chance.

We watched Kavanaugh and ACB confirmed with increasing trepidation and STILL there was so much shock when the Dobbs leak happened.

Remember that feeling of knowing what was going to happen, because of your experience and knowledge, and nobody believing you till it was too late? And the very people who smugly shut you up pivoting and continuing to act like the authority, that, ah, yes, now was the time to worry?

This guy above represents the mainstream Western narrative since Israel killed the World Central Kitchen aid workers.

Somehow, after everything we've already seen, Israel was still getting the benefit of the doubt. After killing hundreds of aid workers already, mostly Palestinian, after killing more than 15,000 children, after killing multiple people waving white flags. After literally a scenario where a Red Crescent ambulance arranged safe passage with the IDF--just as this WCKitchen convoy had--to rescue a 6 year old child and ending up bombed.

Why didn't the world listen before? Israel didn't suddenly change, only perceptions have. They're the same now as they were three days ago, as they have been for the last months, years, decades. This wasn't an escalation, it was an inevitability.

Chef José Andrés, who runs the WCKitchen, and recently a vocal critic of Israel, was actually strongly defending them earlier. I saw someone call that Western naivety, but... is it simply being too naive, too trusting, when your good faith is only extended to one side? Isn't that just bias? Now Pelosi is signing a letter to stop weapon transfers to Russia when she was accusing protesters of being paid by Russia? Now, Western governments are saying this is too much?

I'll take any help we can get in stopping this onslaught, but these recent shifts came too late to save so many, including the WCKitchen workers. What changed for so many people now? We can't ignore why THIS was so many people's red line when tens of thousands of Palestinians weren't. Not only would it be an injustice to them but until this bias is interrogated how are we going to stop this or from repeating if the same wrong ass people are making the same decisions with the same worldview?

[probablyasocialecologist]

Many of Harris’s mistakes were similar to those Hillary Clinton made in 2016. Like Clinton, Harris cozied up to billionaire donors. Mark Cuban, for instance, said he was delighted that Harris was abandoning Democrats’ commitments to progressive principles and letting the business community propose the policies it wanted. Like Clinton, Harris and Tim Walz made hubristic campaign stops in solidly red states like Texas and Kentucky rather than spending the final days laser-focused on crucial battlegrounds. Like Clinton, Harris emphasized celebrity endorsements while failing to successfully court unions. (Most notably, the Teamsters declined to endorse her after she refused to pledge that she wouldn’t break a national railway strike.) Like Clinton, Harris focused too much on the danger of Donald Trump (which is very real) and not enough on the reasons why she would be good at being president herself. Most importantly, like Clinton, Harris ultimately decided upon a strategy of trying to woo moderate Republican voters away from Trump, reasoning that it didn’t matter if doing so alienated progressive voters and the Democratic base. Chuck Schumer, speaking of Hillary’s 2016 strategy, infamously promised: "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." In fact, they just lost the blue-collar Democrats and didn’t pick up the Republicans! In 2024, Harris, too, aggressively touted endorsements from Republicans, promised to put a Republican in her cabinet (she even cited that as the answer to what she would have done differently from Biden!), and went so far as to praise and embrace Dick and Liz Cheney! The strategy was an abject failure. Because she wanted to appease both Republicans and progressive voters, Harris had to further indulge her weakness for speaking in meaningless word salads, since taking stances that were meaningful could have alienated one of these constituencies. Trump, who is canny about portraying himself as more anti-war than Democrats, correctly pointed out that an endorsement from the hawkish Cheneys should be a badge of shame, not honor. (Specifically he said Cheney is “"the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!")

[...]

The lesson to Democratic leaders in 2016 should have been that Bernie Sanders had been right, that the party had betrayed working-class voters and would be doomed if it could not effectively counter Trump’s pseudo-populist appeal with a visionary alternative. (See the excellent analysis in Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal.) Unfortunately, the lessons weren’t learned then, and it doesn’t seem like they’re going to be learned now, either! MSNBC anchor Joy Reid is already insisting that Kamala Harris’s campaign was “flawless” (because she got “every prominent celebrity voice”), and pundits like Jill Filipovic are saying things like, “this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.” (Good luck ever winning with the slogan “You’re the problem, America!”) USAToday’s Michael Stern says that instead of talking about “where the Harris campaign went wrong” we should talk about “where the American people went wrong.” The Harris campaign itself is blaming unspecified “obstacles that were largely out of our control.” 

6 November 2024

[mariacallous]

As President Donald Trump golfed in Florida over the weekend, his hefty new tariffs, which target everywhere from China to the Falkland Islands, started to go into effect, and businesses began to react to them. Jaguar Land Rover, the Anglo-Indian automaker, announced it was pausing shipments to the United States. The American company Howmet Aerospace, which builds parts for airliners made by Boeing and Airbus, also said it may halt sending products that are affected by the new duties.

On Wall Street, where stocks plunged by about ten per cent on Thursday and Friday, analysts and investors prepared for more selling. The widely followed VIX index, a measure of expected volatility, has risen to levels not seen since the early days of COVID. Financial markets often overreact, but this Trump slump is perfectly rational and explicable. Tariffs are taxes on goods, and imposing them reduces over-all buying power in the economy. On Friday, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, noted that the new tariffs are “significantly larger than expected,” so the “same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.” It is very unusual for a Fed chairman to say out loud that an Administration’s policies are bad for the economy. Also on Friday, JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, predicted a recession later this year, despite the fact that the Labor Department’s employment report for March showed solid growth. “We now expect real GDP to contract under the weight of the tariffs,” Michael Feroli, the bank’s chief U.S. economist, wrote, in a note to clients.

To some extent, investors are simply anticipating the negative impact that slower growth, or an outright slump, will have on corporate profits. But there is more to it than that. Many people on Wall Street are also suffering from buyer’s remorse. From August to December of last year, the market rose by about twenty per cent. Investors, analysts, and business executives bought into the notion that a Trump Presidency would boost an economy that was already growing faster than the rest of the developed world, with a very low jobless rate. After the election, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, said bankers were “dancing in the street.” They were also willfully ignoring Trump’s long record of recklessness in his own business dealings and his repeated pledges to upend the global trading system, on which he has now followed through.

In recent years, policy analysts on the left and the right have advocated a retreat from the hyper-globalization that reigned from roughly 1990 to 2016, and which had harmful side effects, including a hollowing out of many industrial regions, and a dependency on fragile global supply chains. Trump’s first term, in which he imposed tariffs on certain goods, including steel, aluminum, and washing machines, and on a much wider range of products from China, marked the end of the free-trade era. The Biden Administration left in place the tariffs that Trump had imposed on China and supplemented them with an ambitious industrial policy designed to boost the industries of the future, including green energy, E.V.s, and semiconductors. Although Trump dismissed these policies as the “Green New Scam,” some conservatives, such as those associated with American Compass, a think tank founded in 2020 by Oren Cass, a former aide to Mitt Romney, supported elements of them. (In an article for the Financial Times last year, Cass referred to “the essential role of public financing, subsidies and procurement in spurring innovation and production at scale.”)

But, even if these developments marked a cross-party revival of what some have termed “neo-mercantilism”—the strategic use of state power to shape trade relationships for national advantage—Trump’s new tariffs constitute a radical departure from previous policies, including his own. Rather than applying to countries that impose specific trade barriers on U.S. goods, they target any nation that runs a trade surplus with the U.S., regardless of how that surplus may have arisen. The arithmetic formula that the Administration used to determine its tariff rates simply takes the bilateral surplus in goods from a given country, divides this figure by the amount of goods imported from that country, and multiplies the resultant fraction by a half. Comically, it also includes some Greek symbols to make it look scientific, but nowhere does it include the level of tariffs that the country imposes on U.S. goods.

In other words, these are not “reciprocal” tariffs. Reciprocity involves an equal give-and-take. According to the World Trade Organization, the European Union imposes tariffs of five per cent on foreign goods, on average; Japan imposes tariffs of four per cent; and Cambodia imposes tariffs of nineteen per cent. Under Trump’s policy, the tariffs on goods from these places are twenty per cent, twenty-four per cent, and forty-nine per cent, respectively. As CNBC’s Steve Liesman noted online, Trump “straight up lied when he said the US is now charging tariffs at half the rate other countries charge.”

Immediately after Trump announced his tariffs, I noted that they represent not neo-mercantilism but a resurgence of the absolutist approach adopted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by European mercantilists who viewed any trade deficit as an evil. In addition to affecting established industrial powers, including China, Japan, and the E.U., the tariffs also hit Asian economic success stories, such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, and impoverished African countries, such as Lesotho and Malawi. The main reason that Lesotho runs a trade surplus with the United States has nothing to do with trade restrictions; it is because of poverty. With a per-capita annual income of less than a thousand dollars a year, Lesothans can’t afford to buy very many iPhones or Caterpillar trucks. And the new tariffs are threatening one of the country’s main sources of income: factories that make textiles for Levi’s and other Western companies.

Trump’s avowed goal is to re-shore American factories and boost manufacturing employment in the long run, but will it work even on its own terms? In making multibillion-dollar capital investment decisions, such as building a new plant in the United States that could operate for decades, companies need to be pretty sure about the future. With Trump, the only certainty is that things could change. Another factor to consider is that many imports are components for domestically produced goods, and slapping tariffs on them raises the costs to American firms that rely on these parts. A Federal Reserve Board study of the tariffs that Trump imposed on China in 2018 found that, when this factor was taken into account, the duties didn’t lead to any increase in manufacturing jobs. In fact, they led to a reduction of 1.4 per cent.

Trump’s new tariffs are so high and wide-ranging that estimating their ultimate impact, assuming they stay in place, would be largely guesswork. We do know for sure that they represent an unprecedented shock to the economy, and they are being accompanied by policies that run directly counter to the goal of promoting American economic dominance. Guided by Elon Musk and his DOGE colleagues, the Trump Administration is busy making cutbacks at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, which finance basic scientific research on which American businesses rely for their product development. It’s also cancelling grants for clean-energy projects and undermining investments in E.V. manufacturing by, for example, reversing the Biden Administration’s rules on reducing tailpipe pollution. Last week it withdrew funding for a federal program that promotes technical progress and productivity growth at small and medium manufacturing companies across the country. If this is mercantilism, it is mercantilism gone mad.

In recent history, Brexit represents the only comparable act of economic self-harm. But the fallout from the U.K.’s vote, in 2016, to withdraw from the European Union was largely limited to its own inhabitants. This is different. Since the Second World War ended, the U.S. has been the global economic hegemon. While acting in its own interest, sometimes ruthlessly, it has taken the view that promoting international trade and development will ultimately benefit Americans as well as people overseas. The Trump Administration has now formally abandoned this leadership role as a champion of open trade, but it hasn’t stopped there. At least in the short run, it has committed to a policy of inflicting damage not only on itself but on the rest of the world, too, including some of the poorest countries. That’s bad in its own right, but it’s also bad for business. No wonder markets everywhere are tumbling.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

The only thing that surprises me about the assassination attempt was how long it took someone to try.

We really can't forget they've been enacting political violence for years. The Bernie Bro who shot Steve Scalise while trying to shoot up a Senate baseball practice. The guy who was on his way to assassinate Kavanaugh. The street assaults following the 2016 election. The Summer of Love. He'll, I had coworkers that would break into rants about how it should be legal to gun down Republicans in the street when they overheard a conversation about the local school board.

This was not an isolated incident. These are people who were slways chomping at the bit for violence. Do mot forget what they have always been willing to do.

That's the thing, the left and the media (but I repeat myself) have been creating this culture of fear and anger for years. It goes at least back to Bush 43 with the BusHitler stuff and constantly saying he was going to bring back the draft and send everyone's kids to Iraq to die so we can steal their oil. Even if this kid ends up being another John Hinkley Jr, the only reason Trump was an acceptable target is because of t he constant rhetoric that he's worse than Hitler and the country will be destroyed and everyone will be killed if he gets reelected. It's not just that the left is violent. It's that they're violent and they keep getting permission from society to keep being violent.

[greatwyrmgold]

I've been thinking about Ian Danskin's "The South Bank of the Rubicon" again.

It's been a month and a half since the US Supreme Court unanimously voted that the Government must facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States, and Trump just said "no". The Supreme Court, six of whom were appointed by Republicans, two by Trump himself, all agreed that Trump made an error that he must correct, and Trump basically ignored them.

The Supreme Court was perhaps last institution in the country which Trump had not flouted. The last checks and balances he hadn't smashed. And he just...ignored them. A month and a half later, there have been no consequences. As far as I can tell, the Kilmar Abrego Garcia has not changed in the past month.

All of this, not even three full months into Trump's presidency. He's got more than three years to get more brazen, more confident, more entrenched. Will there be a 2028 presidential election, or will Trump invent some excuse to suspend elections indefinitely?

That fear of a new Julius Caesar going all dictator perpetuo on us has been on my mind since Trump v. United States. You know, the Supreme Court decision ruling that the President can't be prosecuted for breaking the law if it was part of an official act. And that would obviously be a bad thing, but perhaps less meaningful than it feels.

Let's assume that Trump doesn't go all Julius Caesar. He ends his second term like a president is supposed to. There's a normal presidential election in 2028. Maybe a Democrat wins! What does that change?

Over at least the past decade (probably longer if you're older than me), the Democrats have been spineless at best. The Republicans talk about wanting to eliminate queer people, but the Democrats won't commit to protecting them; the best we get is Rainbow Capitalism. And yeah, that's better than Heteronormative Capitalism, but it's not a solution. The moment Trump came into power and insinuated he'd throw his weight around, the rainbows came down.

Biden came into office, and while he didn't accomplish nothing, he didn't do much to roll back Trump's crimes or prevent new ones. Why would the presidential elections of 2028 and 2032 be any different?

So maybe the Rubicon we crossed wasn't Trump's re-election. Maybe it was the Democrats' 2020 presidential election strategy, which they repeated in 2024: Bank on conservatives recognizing that Trump is a malicious fraudster and voting for a centrist liberal. But 2020 wasn't the first time they tried that strategy; it started in 2016, with Hillary Clinton's campaign being confident that they could win easily just by being less obviously terrible than Donald Trump.

But history doesn't start in 2016, either. Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama are politically homoousian, of the same substance; Obama was just better at making people believe he'd change things. And Donald Trump has done nothing that conservatives haven't dreamed about for decades; he's just worse at hiding it.

But surely American democracy hasn't been railroaded into fascism for the past 20 years? Surely there this country could've gone a different direction if things had gone differently? Surely the Rubicon was crossed in the past few years, not when I was a child?

Maybe it doesn't matter. One way or another, Caesar is marching on Rome.

[soul-our-punk]

For anyone lamenting the choice-not-a-choice this year (vote Biden, for everyone's sake!!!), I urge you to look into organizations working to eliminate the Electoral College and those working to instate a Ranked Choice Vote. The electoral college is an antiquated system that allows a candidate to claim the presidency despite who the majority of the population prefers. In every instance the EC went against the popular vote, it was for a conservative candidate (Adams 1824, Hayes 1876, Harrison 1888, Bush 2000, Trump 2016). That last one should tell you exactly why every leftist needs to vote and vote blue in less than 4 months (Tuesday, November 5th).

Ranked choice voting will let us the freedom to vote how we want and for who we want, instead of "spoiler candidate" concerns or "throwing your vote away." It means we can have more than two parties be viable. It means third parties actually stand a chance to qualify for primary matching funds. It means US Americans can have actual options and have parties that more closely represent their views, instead of "the one actively making things more capitalistic and bigoted, and the one that's going along business as usual." I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it again, we cannot afford to let 2016 repeat itself. VOTE. We can fix presidential elections after we ensure a sociopath the SCOTUS says can shoot everyone who disagrees with him. https://www.nationalpopularvote.com https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Olivia Julianna at A New Perspective:

When you study history long enough, you start to recognize the patterns in real time—especially the patterns of right-wing, power-hungry authoritarians. Donald Trump has now entered the first hundred days of his second term as President—a defining period for any administration. But we’ve seen this before. After the chaos of the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte rose through the rubble, capitalizing on public fear and political exhaustion. Backed by key power players and the military, he seized control of the government in a bloodless coup and named himself First Consul. It was swift. It was strategic. And it paved the way for his self-coronation as Emperor. Sound familiar? In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency. Why? The pendulum swung. After eight years of President Obama—an administration full of hope and promise—many Americans still felt left behind. Not because progress hadn’t been made (the Affordable Care Act was monumental), but because the scale and urgency of change didn’t match what they believed the moment required. Just like Barack Obama rode a wave of frustration and a hunger for change in 2008, so did Trump in 2016.

In 2008, Americans chose the charismatic outsider over the seasoned insider. In 2016, they did it again. But in 2020, that same dynamic turned on Trump. The pandemic devastated the country. Over a million lives lost. Mass unemployment. Medical systems pushed to the brink. Americans said goodbye to loved ones through FaceTime, behind plastic curtains—while Trump played golf at private clubs with the elite. “Let them eat cake.” Or, as Trump said, “It is what it is.” And so, he was ousted. Replaced by the safe, institutional choice: Joe Biden. Napoleon, too, was exiled. After launching a disastrous campaign into Russia—600,000 troops sent, only 100,000 returned—he was defeated at Leipzig and sent away. For a moment, peace seemed possible. But tyrants rarely vanish forever.

Before Trump began his second hundred days, Napoleon had his. He returned from exile, regained power, and tried once more to rebuild his empire. But Europe had seen enough. The Sixth Coalition struck quickly, met him at Waterloo, and defeated him for good. Trump has now returned—and so have we arrived at the second hundred days. And he’s wasted no time showing us how he plans to rule. He’s defying court rulings. Disregarding the Constitution. Filling his cabinet with loyalists bent on revenge and suppression. He’s eroding public institutions, gutting essential programs, and using executive authority to shred the social fabric of this country, seam by seam, until the nation is unrecognizable. But like Napoleon, Trump will go too far. Maybe it will be a reckless trade war. Maybe an attack on a powerful institution like Harvard. Maybe a whiplash shift in foreign policy that rattles the world. Whatever it is—his 600,000-troop moment is coming. And we must be ready.

[...]

Accountability is non-negotiable.

There is no “return to normal.” No cushy contributor contracts for Trump’s enablers. No polite re-entry into society for the architects of sedition. Make consequences visible and unavoidable. Because even after Napoleon fell, he remained a myth to some. Romanticized. Revered. And his nephew used that legacy to rise again—declaring himself Emperor and repeating the cycle of destruction. History doesn’t end when you win once. Defeating Trump—and Trumpism—isn’t about one election or one candidate. It’s about suffocating the myth before it can be reborn. Tear it out at the root. Bury it deep. And never let it grow again. Because if we don’t—someone else will pick up the banner. And next time, we may not have the tools to win.

Olivia Julianna coming in with the heat on how Americans should defeat the authoritarian menace of Donald Trump and prevent someone similar from taking root again.