cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26592059
Summary
Donald Trump is upset after King Charles warmly welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Sandringham, making Trumpās own state visit invitation seem āless special.ā
Trumpās allies allegedly asked the British government to intervene, but officials stated the king makes his own decisions.
Relations may also be strained by Trumpās criticism of Canada, where Charles remains head of state.
The U.K. government denied tensions, reaffirming strong U.S.-U.K. ties.
It blows my mind that so many Americans saw this petulant, orange manchild and thought yes, this man should lead us.
Easy:
They saw themselfs in him: a grown up child
Exactly.
Trump is what everyone who voted for him aspires to be.
A giant, petulant manbaby thatās āallowedā to bully people.
I am honestly surprised so many other Americans did not realize that so many of their fellow countrymen are vindictive, incompetent little shitheels who get off on bullying people.
Even after knowing he bankrupted his casinos and knowing he is a TV show host/actor. He bankrupted his casino, was he voted to bankrupt USA?
Iām at the point where I donāt want to be cynical, and I donāt have any proof, butā¦would anyone put him past rigging the election? Thatās where my head is at right now. It makes sense. I donāt know how he rigged the election. I donāt know how TO rig an election.
But seeing him, and being told he won the popular voteā¦my brain canāt process the core concept of trump being popular. But if you say he rigged it, my brain can follow that concept without having smoke come out my ears.
Popular by total votes tallied, not popular by total eligible voters. Only about 50-70% of all eligible voters vote - call it 2/3. Campaigning is less about swinging voters between parties and more about convincing them to show up for the ballot. This is Trumpās specialty. He is so inflammatory that he has driven more people to the polls, both for and against him. But if you look at the actual stats, 2016 was won with just 27% of the eligible voter populationās vote and 2024 with 32%. The runner up tallied 29% and 31%, respectively. 3rd party votes donāt exceed 2% which means both the winner and the 2nd place candidates collected a total vote count about equal to the number of people who didnāt show up at all.
More towards what people actually see in him, they think heās their friend. His vitriol makes them beleive heās really just in this for an altruistic motive about returning the USA to a place of freedom (for the white Christian patriarchal population). They donāt think he is in it for financial gain. They think theyāre poor because democrats gave money to brown people. They think being a dick to other countries will bring the USA back to a self-sustaining country. They beleive corporations will do the right thing in response and choose to no longer exploit poor countries. They think the decline of US citizensā private wealth is from welfare policies, not from corporate greed. They donāt recognize that the USAās 1950s-60s economic boom was rooted in being the only major industrial nation that was NOT bombed to kingdom come in the 40s.
And above all, I beleive conservatives generally lack empathy. They beleive this dichotomy that everyone has equal opportunity but also that behavior is racial. They canāt bring themselves to beleive minorities have it rougher due to systemic issues. They canāt understand how poverty, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, lacking Healthcare, inability to afford higher education, or predisposition to violence is more easily predicted by birth location than anything else. Until it happens to one of their own, one who looks like them, looks like a daughter, looks like a brother. This frees them to vote for Trump and beleive in a year, theyāll be wealthy, screaming āfuck you, got mineā to the lesser demographics that just wonāt play nice. That gives way to the most upsetting irony. Theyāre voting for a ābusinessmanā who will ārun the country like a businessā yet somehow cannot understand, at all, Trump is a grifter that is excellent at branding himself as successful on the backs of bankrupted companies that gave him golden parachutes. Why would anyone want trump to run the country like a Trump business? Bankruptcies, layoffs, shutdowns, downsizes, and a fat check for Trump? Because itās about race, religion, and societal norms. Itās believing that being white, Christian, and patriarchal should automatically come with success in America. All of the hypocrisy and side effects is just the cost of gaining personal wealth.
I agree with all of your points.
You also seem to write grammatically correct sentences bereft of the typical misspellings that confound ESL writersā¦ which makes me wonder: how did you manage to get ābelieveā wrong FIVE times, and then nail it when it became ābelievingā at the end?
Remember when the traitors illegally seized all the voting machines for their bullshit audits in 2020?
The voting machines that are known to have first hand attack vulnerabilities were in the hands of Americaās enemies.
What vulnerabilities are you referencing?
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-technology-georgia-election-2020-a746b253f3404dbf794349df498c9542
āOne of the most serious vulnerabilities could allow malicious code to be spread from the election management system to machines throughout a jurisdiction, Halderman said. The vulnerability could be exploited by someone with physical access or by someone who is able to remotely infect other systems that are connected to the internet if election workers then use USB sticks to bring data from an infected system into the election management system.ā
Get out and talk to people. Itās 100% believable he won the popular vote, let alone the election.
The election apparatus in the US is extremely hard to rig. Itās run by local officials, so in order to fix the counting of voters you need to get to thousands of individual county/city/town election boards, all at once. Those boards have members of all parties generally present on them so there is a fair amount of local oversight to overcome, too.
There was a bit of time in the early 2000ās where the voting machines themselves were suspect but some good work by independant researchers shined some daylight on that. Now most votes in the US are either done purely by paper ballots (counted by machines) or on machines that generate verifiable paper trails, and are very hard to just casually alter the count without being found out.
Republicans rig the vote by manipulating their media. Roger Ailes was one of Nixonās media advisors during Watergate. The lesson he took away was that if the media didnāt hold Nixon to account, he would have never had to resign. Ailes went on to run Fox News in the mid-90s, and the rest is history.
They relate to him. They feel put upon by the burdens of a world that left them behind. Theyāre struggling financially while those āliberal elitesā laugh at their misfortune. They grind 40 or 60 hours for a pittance that barely keeps food on the table these days. They watch TV and are bombarded by a culture that embraces sexual deviancy and vices that demonstrate the rot at the heart of their once fine upstanding country.
From their perspective, of course. Forged by propaganda and misinformation that they are too furious to examine. This idiot man-baby we see? They see a fucking savior. A man who like them knows how things ought to be. A man with the willpower and knowhow to āsave America.ā
Where we see petulance, they see righteousness, and they sympathize. These people are furious. Heās got them completely weaponized.
Finally, someone gets it.