#trump 2016

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

@chamath says President Trump is completely different from how he is portrayed by the media.

“He is charismatic. He’s intellectually sharp, and he’s funny. And when you put that together, he can engage an audience for a long time and be totally extemporaneous. The other thing I would say is that he is very polite. And he’s kind in a way that was disarming and was not what I expected.”

“And so I felt that I had misjudged him many years in the past. And so I was very glad that I had an opportunity to sit beside him and to actually interact with him one-on-one. It was really engaging.”

“It was not just a pro-America agenda, but it was very clear that he was pro-innovation. So he was really supportive of AI in the details that he talked about, he was very supportive of crypto in those details. And he’s very much low regulation, low taxation. And so when you put that together, it does stand very much in contrast with what the alternative is.”

“So it’s us talking, and he says, you guys are a really beautiful couple. And I said, well, thank you. And then he turns to me, and he goes, well, you must be really rich. And I started laughing out loud. Natalie thought he was hilarious.”

[uncivildiscourse]

Vintage 2016 Photoshop I did for the election out of the Clash at Demonhead videogame box art (1989)

[paintballdays]

[blujane]

"Voting third party does no harm—"

If we lose so much as 11% of the votes to third party votes, Trump wins and Project 2025 plays out.

Source.

In case you didn't know, Project 2025 is the Republican Party's nightmarish dystopian and genocidal 920-page plan for the first 180 days of Trump's second term reign (the Supreme Court has now granted absolute immunity to presidents; Trump will be effectively a tyrannical monarch).

Note: Read Project 2025 here.

Third votes are doubly useless for another reason: there are too many third party candidates and none of them are known well enough to have a chance in hell to win.

Voting third party as things are helps no one but the Republicans.

It is as helpful as abstaining from voting, which is to say not at all.

Please, for the love of god and democracy, vote blue up and down the ballot!

[sophies-junkyard]

Change is incremental, but something CHANGED today. You weren’t sure about voting for Biden? You don’t have to anymore! And now is the time to RALLY. The world is fucked up, but letting Trump win will not lead to the political revolution we’re waiting for. Wake up.

Im gonna vote for Kamala Harris in November because I don’t want a wannabe dictator running our country. Simple as that.

[irenespring]

Really I think nothing shouts "my first Presidential election as a politically active person was 2016" more than the fact that when I feel hope and excitement for the future (possible President Harris) for more than five minutes I immediately get a crushing, all-consuming anxiety of "feeling this positive emotion now is going to make it so much worse when the worst thing possible happens" to the extent that I'll probably need my break-glass-in-case-of-emergency anxiety medication.

[c-rowlesdraws]

(Note: I’m writing this in good faith and not trying to come across confrontational)

Have u forgotten u can vote 3rd party? I know there will likely not be enough people voting independant party for a non red or blue president to be elected THIS voting cycle. But. If enough people vote independent maybe america will wake up and realize there are more than 2 shitty options. (It takes time to change, and change for the better)

Look the problem with the blue no matter who mindset is that these people know you are going to vote for them no matter what. Not because you necessarily like them but because at least they aren’t the other guy. Which gives dems absolutely no incentive to not be a piece of shit. Like do you get it? They will be awful and endorse genocides and all other terror because they know you will let them get away with it. Maybe biden isn’t as bad as a republican would have been but he is still pretty fucking bad. Personally, morally, I cannot in any way justify voting for him again.

voting for someone as damage control in an election does not mean you can't heckle the shit out of them once they are in office. You elect the officials you think you and groups you belong to have the better chance of pressuring into better policies, and who will do the least amount of damage in the meantime.

Democrats are relentless towards their elected officials-- at least the ones I know who are actually politically active are. They call, they protest, they campaign. Plus, as you're demonstrating, people on the left do not blindly vote (that's the other guys). It's totally unrealistic to say that elected Democratic officials just think they have an easy ride.

people can and should vote for whoever they want to in local elections, primaries, etc. But in the big one, the president one, the one in the fall, voting third party is like drawing up plans for a nice new extension on a house that is actively being set on fire. Voting for president is damage control. Voting is your hard-fucking-won civil right. Voting in smaller elections can also be damage control; when there is no-one to feel "good" about voting for, you vote for the less-worse one, because maybe that one is more receptive to the idea of climate change being real than the other one, and you can work with that.

Sometimes you get to vote for the option you align with the most. But sometimes voting is about picking the option with the cracks that you can dig your fingers into and pull open. Or at least the one who won't start taking a sledgehammer to civil rights and environmental protections (and, and) with all his buddies while you work to build support behind a candidate you can feel good about voting for in four years.

Biden has shown he can change his policies over time, with pressure. Democrats can be swayed in ways Republicans cannot. One major party can be pushed more left. The other one will drag us into a darkness that I don't even want to think about. The presidency is about so much more than just the individual sitting in the Oval Office.

Voting is strategic. It is strategic. It is not negative moral karma to vote strategically. It is one action amidst all the other actions you can take to fight for the future you want.

[cometrose]

trump may be a lying felon and biden a foot away from death but my fellow americans don’t forget to vote for your senators and representatives they’re important!!!

[batboyblog]

idk, feels like it should be slightly bigger news that a shady dictatorship with a crappy human rights record tried to illegally give Trump $10 million dollars to help win the 2016 election and then the Trump controlled Justice department stopped that from being fully investigated, that seems like a big fucking deal, but what do I know?

[cleophantom]

To anyone who refuses to vote for Biden in the US elections because of what he's done in Palestine: I'd like to hear the plan to get America to stop aiding Israel in the event of a Trump victory you must have to act so belligerently confident in your stance.

[cipheramnesia]

I'm curious to see if US news media will finally stop riding trumfs dick, and report on him honestly, or just switch to focusing exclusively on Kamala Harris as "inexperienced."

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Trump even has Tom Brady's super bowl helmet!

[uncivildiscourse]

Older Trump music video from 2016 where Trump is portrayed as the character God Money from the song Head Like a Hole by NIN. God Money - 2016 - Drunken Info Fist Productions

[decolonize-the-everything]

"The shock that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump was sadly hilarious. It turned out that even among white women, solidarity was only for some of them. For women of color, especially Black women, it wasn't a surprise. It was the same racism we had always seen masked as feminism playing out in real time. Feminism that could ignore police brutality killing women of color, that could ignore the steady disenfranchisement and abuse in local and national politics of some women based on race and religion, wasn't about equality or equity for all women; it was about benefiting white women at the expense of all others. There was a sense that when the targets of oppression weren't white, it was fine to vote based on “economic distress" and not solidarity with other women. Only it turned out that the policies that followed have so far served to increase that stress, disadvantaging everyone who isn't a rich white male."

- Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism

[beggars-opera]

I still find it really, really horrifying funny how many people think that they are going to magic a universally beloved third-party presidential candidate out of thin air and that their revolution is going to sway both the democratic and undecided voters to change their political alliances and vote for this nonexistent mystery person in in *checks watch* the next five months, thus overriding the republican base who has nearly 100% rallied around their one guy for the past decade and show no signs of wavering and, by the way, is also 100% behind funding genocide and various other crimes against humanity along with undoing every single decent thing the other guy has done. But sure. Vive la revolution

[originalleftist]

The thing about "protest votes" that makes them, in this of all elections, so mind-bogglingly intellectually and morally bankrupt, is that the potential consequences now are NOT A HYPOTHETICAL.

We don't need to speculate on what could happen if a bunch of people decide to stay home or vote third party, because they did that in 2016 against THIS EXACT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE, and we all enjoyed four years of hell culminating in an attempted coup as a consequence. And three years and counting of the aftermath since, including the destruction of abortion rights across much of the country. To say nothing of the ones who didn't make it through, like the migrants who died in detention, or the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of preventable Covid deaths.

And now fuckers are saying, "Well, we better do it again just to make sure we get every last bit of the world we haven't burned down yet".

How many real, actual, living people are you prepared to throw under the bus for your "protest vote"?