Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?

pearable , 25 minutes ago

You’re in a media bubble. It feels like there’s no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don’t understand how you could believe what you do.

For everything you said they

• don’t believe happened
• think it was a deep state plot
• believe it’s good actually and believing anything else means you want to kill babies or destroy the economy
• have never heard of it

Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don’t live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.

dudinax , 8 minutes ago

There’s some truth to this, but if you take the effort to break out of your media bubble, to find original sources, to read documentary evidence, indictments, transcripts.

To go the other direction and track down evidence for Trumps accusations against others,

the guy comes off even worse.

shalafi , 6 hours ago

Nothing I’ve read has ever explained Trump’s appeal like this article.

cracked.com/…/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-t…

Nothing in there makes a cute soundbite. “They’re racist!”, is far easier than having to digest what the author lays down.

Seriously, read it. It’s important.

SnotFlickerman , 6 hours ago

Honestly, hadn’t read this one and it’s got some seriously solid points in it.

AwesomeLowlander , 5 hours ago

That was an amazing read.

rustydomino , 5 hours ago

It’s a good article. It explains rural America. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in Huntington Beach CA. It doesn’t explain the well off assholes living in suburban Inland SoCal. It doesn’t explain rich privileged shitheads like Musk and Thiel.

magnetosphere , 5 hours ago

It doesn’t explain them because that’s who the author assumes he’s speaking to.

roscoe , 4 hours ago

Exactly. I get the frustrations of the son and grandson of factory workers that finds it hard to imagine anything more than working at Walmart wanting to tear it all down. What I don’t understand is my neighbor in Dana Point.

kbal , 3 hours ago

Is it a good article? I don't know. There's some truth in there, but I'm pretty sure there are a hell of a lot more suburban Trump voters than there are rural Trump voters. And in my experience of it the people who live in small towns, medium-sized cities, suburbs, edge city, and even actual rural areas are in general not nearly as monolithic and politically unified as they're portrayed there. Even if it's always clear which party is going to get the majority of votes, they most often don't get all the votes. Perhaps like the writer of that article many of them like to romanticize the idea of being "rural" because they mow their own lawn and could drive to a farm in half an hour if they wanted to, but although there's some truth in there I think it's mostly foolish rationalizations. Big cities are alien to me too, that's not a real reason to buy into all that cheap right-wing mythology that gets used to explain why we should vote against our own interests.

Telodzrum , 3 hours ago

Of course there are more of them in the suburbs, the plurality of the population lives in suburban census tracts and the race is a tossup.

DelightfullyDivisive , 3 hours ago

People like Musk are cynical, attention-seeking manipulators and narcissists. They aren’t afraid that their way of life is being threatened, they’re using the fears of others to further their own ends, and consider themselves above it all.

That article was the most cogent take I have seen on this subject. I have a similar cultural background (rednecks and urban, religious Polish-Americans), but see myself as a science-literate atheist. I have seen this first-hand, but wasn’t able to articulate it as well.

Today , 5 hours ago

Good read. Thanks!

TheLoneMinon , 1 hour ago

Good. Read, Thanks!

Wav_function , 5 hours ago

Good read thanks

tacosanonymous , 5 hours ago

I remember reading this and thinking it had some points. Then I remembered that despite having some of the same issues, we have vastly different responses. When I’m lied to and beaten, I don’t look to the person that did it for help.

For instance, the church being the only social space. They could have a community center or a library. Sure funds are hard to come by but what kind of political party would even consider that? The answer is probably further left than democrats but fifty years of red scare won’t let anyone accept that.

The “writing them off” part comes from their willingness to not ostracize evil people when they get something they want. We can all be bullheaded or blinded by bias from time to time but accountability and decency shouldn’t be political.

gamermanh , 5 hours ago

They could have a community center or a library. Sure funds are hard to come by but what kind of political party would even consider that?

Funny enough here in the rural parts of CA I’ve seen Raleys and Holiday Markets putting in large community areas with amenities like cheap (sometimes free) printers, office space, children’s areas, etc.

They’re not perfect or anything but its wild to see capitalist behemoths pull off something actually close to what the ideal would be, even if it’s likely to manipulate people somehow

Make it law that communities with a dollar general or fuck it any grocery store we all have to eat have a community center of halfway decent quality in it like those places have done willingly and you’ll have an improvement, guaranteed

DarkCloud , 5 hours ago (edited 5 hours ago)

This explains a demographic analysis without explaining anything meaningful or unique. The article could be about any post-Regan Republican campaign (such demographic analysis is used by all modern campaigns, on bith sides), so it wasn’t a satisfying article. Combined with all the pop culture references, it comes off as quite immature and an unextraordinary explanation. Mediocre.

danciestlobster , 5 hours ago

I mean it’s definitely an interesting read. I’m just not sure what to actually do with this information. The fundamental problem feels like a generally small bubble, and at times a specific disinterest in venturing outside of it. If anyone’s whole worldview is shaped entirely by their tiny rural hometown, it’s easy to understand why others with radically different backgrounds feel scary.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t feel like a good enough reason to drag the rest of the country through rigid christofacist moral dogmas and support the industries that prop up those small towns at the expense of the planet as a whole. But as long as those people aren’t interested in venturing outside their communities and meeting other different people, im not sure how to convince them of this.

Maybe if the cost of living becomes too untenable in major cities and work from home continues in certain industries rural areas will see more growth and this will improve somewhat? Idk

BigDiction , 5 hours ago

Great read. There’s 70+ million people out there choosing to vote for Trump, why? Even if the answer is complicated you can’t dismiss them all outright.

I see a decent amount of comments painting all republics with one brush. I think it’s low effort and unproductive.

Waldowal , 4 hours ago

I feel like this is just gift wrapping being a dumb racist hick in prettier paper. They are scared of cities because their full of black people, gays, and Mexicans. They like assholes who show the same level of hate as they do - who will keep the black people, gays, and Mexicans away. And they like someone who justifies hiding behind religion so they can tell themselves that God made them this dumb and rascist. So they can delude themselves into thinking they are really the good guy.

jjjalljs , 4 hours ago

Low density places are always going to kind of suck on a lot of metrics. You just don’t have the people to support a lot of stuff. I’m sorry that small towns are dying but like there’s not really a reason they’d thrive.

Cities have been important since like the dawn of history. At least farms grow food. Suburban sprawl is the worst.

Cost of living needs to go down and wages up, but no one should be vying for low density.

tanisnikana , 3 hours ago

Jason Pargin is a goddamn hero.

Cornelius_Wangenheim , 1 hour ago

The problem with that argument is that 80% of people live in cities. There are not enough rural people for them to be a majority of the Republican party.

Pandantic , 20 minutes ago

That was an amazing read. My hometown was really similar, though maybe not as desolate. Lucky there was a college town close by so we could shop at some place that wasn’t Walmart. This really does sum it up, though, the appeal of Trump out of these smaller rural communities. I like the message at the end, too. Thanks for sharing. 🙏

Chocrates , 4 hours ago

Why is he still in the race or why are his supporters?

For him I think it’s obvious. Narcissism and the fact that he has a lot of federal crimes in the courts that he can stop when he is elected.

His supporters are more complicated. He pretty decently still owns the GOP so even if they are getting cold feet, they don’t seem to have a plan to overthrow him. I feel like they are planning on just stonewalling for 4 more years and then try to win the next one and cut the checks to the billionaires then.

I got nothing on his base though. I haven’t understood them for 10 years now. Not sure I ever will.

DarkCloud , 4 hours ago

Part of the checks cut get reinvested in the propaganda that gets more checks cut. It’s a whole corrupt system, as attested to by this list of think tanks backing someone like a Jordan Peterson:

reddit.com/…/jordan_peterson_and_the_think_tanks/

…you can research most rightwing media and personalities and make lists and connections (some if Trump’s for instance run through Roy Cohn, the original red scare and the mafia for instance).

It’s likely the same for some leftwing individuals to. It’s the reproduction of this culture, and the economic loops that perpetuate the toxicities of the current systems.

…and it will keep going long after Trump is gone.

AA5B , 21 minutes ago (edited 11 minutes ago)

I’m not buying it this time around. Sure, that was the explanation for 2016, and I’m sure a bunch of people who thought like that got some good laughs. But surely they could see what happened. Surely they lived through the following four years. Surely they can see that breaking glass might be cathartic but now they’re surrounded by broken windows

Surely they saw our liberal outrage was directed at how easily they were manipulated into making their own lives worse? Surely they saw further divisiveness as “liberal elites” just shook their heads in sadness and started giving up on their brethren in less successful places. Surely they see those same cities they wanted to wreck are doing better than ever while they’re stuck with the consequences of their votes?

ipkpjersi , 31 minutes ago

Very stupid Americans, mostly.

spankmonkey , 9 hours ago

Republicans have been taught to ignore reality and give in to their hatred.

Eldritch , 8 hours ago

I would say that all Americans were. Republicans/conservatives overachieved however.

SnotFlickerman , 8 hours ago (edited 8 hours ago)

People really underestimate how violently angry “liberals” can be, too.

Just the other day in my city I had some violently unhinged liberals comparing a drug addict who tried to run from cops, failed, and killed someone in the process to mass shooters. Right, because someone with serious mental health and addiction issues who wasn’t trying to kill anyone but rather escape the cops is totally the same as a mass shooter. They were all but calling for her death and doing the good old FOX News of digging up her entire criminal history to show how terrible she is and how much she deserves death.

I’m in an extremely “progressive” city deep in the Northwest.

The US is absolutely filled to the brim with unhinged violent freaks.

OpenStars , 8 hours ago

We are told to be angry, and that spills out in every possible way.

HostilePasta , 8 hours ago

I think you’re correct. We were taught about manifest destiny but not the genocide of Native Americans, and that’s just one instance of the institutionalized racism we were taught was good. SO MANY PEOPLE never grew out of that or tried to be better.

Eldritch , 6 hours ago

Well we were taught about the trail of tears as a thing that happened a long time ago. But it’s all good now. But my family having strong tribal connections. Tribal leader on my father’s side a couple of generations back. We’re all on the official tribal rolls. And I was old enough to have gotten the reparations doled out in the 1980s for what happened to my great great great ancestors. A whole $10,000. Which is better than a kick in the teeth. But definitely not any sort of compensation for what was stolen.

So I knew about the Indian schools and some of the other heinous shit that Canada and the United States had pulled unlike so many others. But even I was surprised to learn that they were still current and operating well within my lifetime. People treated as if it’s a long ago solved problem. There are people still alive and well today that have families destroyed or lost family because of it. And there’s plenty of other shenanigans. Probably the most depressing part is that United States and Canada weren’t all that alone. Heck China is more or less doing it today. To cultural groups whose identity differs from the Vanguard parties chosen monoculture.

HostilePasta , 34 minutes ago

Fuck dude, it’s all so goddamned depressing. The only sliver of hope I have is that I can pass my knowledge to my kids and teach them better much younger. Hopefully enough people do this sort of thing that we might finally pull ourselves out of our bullshit ignorance. I know it’s worth nothing, but I’m sorry all the same.

Asidonhopo , 8 hours ago

Despair is also a key party platform. The more hopeless someone is, the more likely they are to invite catastrophic change like Trump promises.

Juigi , 39 minutes ago

Whole two party system, we vs them sport mentality has fucked their brains up.

LillyPip , 46 minutes ago

Many other comments here have a share in the reasons, but a huge reason is he’s looking at more state and federal charges, and more lawsuits (which haven’t going well for him).

He NEEDS to run and WIN so he can make all these cases go away for good.

jaschen , 1 hour ago

I live in Taiwan and met a guy yesterday who is moving to Taiwan because Austin is a “liberal hell hole”.

When pressed on any issues about Trump, his answer was that Biden is worse than Trump. When I asked about Harris, he just mentioned she will just copy Biden.

The funny thing is that Taiwan is by far more liberal and more progressive than Austin Texas. He seemed to like the universal healthcare and the many social services. He didn’t mind the high corporate taxes companies have to pay.

My assessment is that he is only basing his vote on vibes and feels alone. Judging from the conversation, he is more of a Bernie supporter.

DragonTypeWyvern , 54 minutes ago

Have you considered that you actually found a tankie in the wild?

dubious , 1 hour ago

because we allow the 30-40% who will vote for him to exist. they won’t change their minds. there’s only one solution.

DragonTypeWyvern , 56 minutes ago

As someone who just said fascists aren’t people:

Damn bro chill

At least start with the reeducation camps

blindbunny , 53 minutes ago

What’s the single solution? I’d love to hear this.

psycho_driver , 1 hour ago

Billionaires and their desire to have real wage slavery (even more so than now) and to not have to pay taxes.

xenoclast , 55 minutes ago

Especially, and this is important, every SINGLE media company owner.

He is their golden goose for content and their dream of an oligarchic future

rsuri , 1 hour ago

You have to remember that the voters are human beings, complete with areas of ignorance, prejudices, and logical fallibility. Trump certainly is aware of that and exploits it to the maximum extent.

DragonTypeWyvern , 57 minutes ago

Fascists aren’t people though

fine_sandy_bottom , 2 hours ago

My take:

Americans are either republican or democrat.

If you’re a republican then you’re going to vote for your guy. They see everything he does as just bullshit and bluster. “He says things to rile up the lefties but that’s just his brand.” They see the legal issues as politically motivated, or “maybe he’s a bit dirty, but all politicians are”.

I think it really is that simple. The vast majority of the population is not making a decision of whom to vote for based on their research regarding each party’s policies. They will just always vote the way they’ve always voted.

LifeInMultipleChoice , 2 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

I’d say most Americans aren’t Republicans/Democrats, just like most Americans aren’t Christians.

Registering as an independent is a stupid idea in most states, it just means you get less say in the government that rules you. So many people register just because they would rather have the ability to say, “nah not that person” in the primaries.

As for the religion part, if Americans got taxed annually like they do in other countries and had to pay the church out of their incomes or check a box that says they aren’t religious, the number of religious people listed would drop by a fuck ton. Not a single person I know would pay 4% or something to their church, many would lie and say they do, but they would take the money every time. Especially when they realized everyone else was going it, so poof they no longer would feel bad about doing it.

I would bet we would drop to 25% after 2 years, 10% after 5, and 3% after 10, which is where it would stay. Especially if donations to church’s didn’t grant tax deductions, which they shouldnt be.

How did I get here? Oh, Fuck the party system.

mm_maybe , 2 hours ago

It’s 100% this. Politics is treated like a sport in the USA; the only thing that matters is your side winning, and which side you root for is largely dictated by location and family history. This is encouraged by the private news media, who intentionally report on election campaigns in this manner in order to increase ratings and ad revenue. Social media only made it worse because it made a lot of abstract identity dimensions, such as political affiliation, feel stronger to people than their everyday lives.

tacosplease , 2 hours ago

Democrats are a varied group. If Republicans weren’t so bat shit crazy, it would be nearly impossible to get all the Democrats to support the same person or set of policy preferences.

I think built into the question is - how can there still be so many Republicans? The 30% - 40% of voters who support him know what he’s about. That’s a fuck ton of spiteful adults in America. Seems like Canada, UK, and others in Europe aren’t so different either. Fuck.

psycho_driver , 1 hour ago

Who knew the world was so full of terrible people?

psycho_driver , 1 hour ago

I’m a socialist and I’ll vote D for as long as the GOP is the other option.

radix , 9 hours ago

If the race were between The Literal Devil ® and Jesus Christ (D), the vote total would be 45%-55% just based on the letter they choose to run after their name.

Policy doesn’t matter when people base their entire personality on their political party identification.

dhork , 9 hours ago

Jesus was a socialist Jew. We had one of those run for President, too, but couldn’t make it past the Democratic primary.

MeekerThanBeaker , 8 hours ago

But see how evil he looks…

/s

Birdy Sanders

I_Has_A_Hat , 8 hours ago

If you completely forget everything about Bernie; who he is, what he’s done, how he speaks, everything; he does look like a CEO who would lay off half his staff for a discount on a sandwich. But thats more because he’s an old white guy in a suit and they all look like that

Feathercrown , 8 hours ago

He has joyful eyes

OpenStars , 8 hours ago

Wanting us to become fiscally responsible, like not get into new wars into we’ve paid off previous ones? i.e. pay less money to the rich via the Military Industrial complex?

Wanting to tax the wealthy?

Wanting to redistribute money to take care of the poor?

Yeah, obviously evil indeed 😂 (from the POV of “I got mine, now I’m pulling up the ladder🪜”).

HeyThisIsntTheYMCA , 7 hours ago

needs more puppies and rainbows

vaxhax , 7 hours ago

He got my first D primary vote… but NOT MY LAST.

mister_brown , 59 minutes ago

Amen, preach it!

lath , 8 hours ago

Jesus is a Mexican name. Check mate.

dwemthy , 7 hours ago

Like the real Jesus would run as a Democrat. At least with the Devil you know where you stand! /s

OlinOfTheHillPeople , 7 hours ago

Closer to 50/50 with the electoral college.

Today , 5 hours ago

And it pisses me off that people will vote for the dipshit because he’s an R, but i would vote for a half-dead horny toad on the other side.

OceanSoap , 2 hours ago

Lots of coping in this thread, haha.

Her campaign is not flawless, and I just have to know what you all think about the RINO Republicans coming out in support of her? Congrats, the Democratic party is now the party of Dick Cheney. Hope you’re all proud.

rsuri , 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago)

That obviously has more to do with Trump and the GOP than Kamala. It was inevitable when they kicked his daughter (once a right-winger herself) out of the party.

coffee_with_cream , 6 hours ago

The Overton window has shifted dramatically in the last 10 years. He represents aversion to that

DarkCloud , 5 hours ago (edited 5 hours ago)

Propagandizing a proclaimed shift, and there being an actual shift are two different things.

Trump’s side have proclaimed a shift which isn’t actually a significant reality. Things change over a decade, but nothing notably significant has changed in terms of the over all running of the system, or the reproduction of culture/society.

It’s mild progress being pushed by right wing propaganda as “civilization ending chaos”.

coffee_with_cream , 4 hours ago

I would be cautious about writing off an entire side’s viewpoint as overdramatic. When they do that to the left, does anyone change their mind?

This is all about division.

We need to work on understanding the root cause of issues and working towards fixing that.

I think economics is actually at the core of the problem.

A lot of people don’t have the basics right now, and they lash out at anything they can to try to fix it.

DarkCloud , 4 hours ago

I didn’t write them off as overly dramatic, nothing of the sort. They’re dangerous (for some of the reasons you point to, division), and it’s a very well organized, well funded, and well oiled machine that keeps them dangerous. Funded by technocratic and Libertarian billionaires.

So I agree with you, that it’s an economic issue, but we can’t just all sit down and “fix it” (that’s a pipe dream) - you can’t sit down with those invested think tank billionaires to solve the problem any more than you can play Jenga with someone who wants to smash the tower before it’s built.

It doesn’t work that way.

coffee_with_cream , 4 hours ago

Thanks! Good response. I think it is always worth the effort to try and understand and talk to people and use words to convince them. I think everyone can be convinced, we just have to pull the right levers.

But if it’s the community’s opinion that that is not an option, and only violence is the answer. I have very low hopes for our country’s future.

DarkCloud , 3 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

— sorry for the wall of text — (Up to you whether you can be bothered reading it)

No offense, but when you say you believe in talking sense to people, have you been specifically occupying their rightwing spaces and trying to talk sense into them for the past ten years?

Most people haven’t, those who have in an ongoing/consistent way, will understand it’s not the community controlling the ideological messaging being posted repeatedly EVERY SINGLE DAY, the community is complicit in its brainwashing, but they’re not the majority stakeholders or main sources of the crypto-fascist extremist economic Libertarianism currently posing as conservativism and “Classical (free speech) British Liberalism”.

Ergo, violence isn’t necessarily a constructive answer where you’d essentially be attacking people who are merely complicit in their own brainwashing (often self-indoctrinating for very personal and individual reasons) - leaving the question of: well what is the answer to these groups then?

I don’t have a single answer or silver bullet, and it’s probably upon the genuine left to now layout many answers on the table, including violent revolution, and parallel governments of mutual aid, but also, extending to culturally corrective efforts (consistent generational brigading/infiltration)… and even all the way down to the solutions of the establishment left.

But I think the big problem is that all of these can and will be folded back into the system. Incorporated. Worked back in, either by tyrants, profiteers, democrats, or PR agencies… So it becomes a question of - what parts of the system will proposed solutions necessarily extend, and will those extensions aid us to think outside the system, beyond it, beyond the current limitations of our own lives and societal limitations.

I would say mutual aid, and parallel governments/services probably do this. The system’s responses to these tend to generate more rights, more service responsibilities, a better system, with more empathy.

Violence is better in times of direct fascist/reactionary violence, this might be more appropriate if Trump’s fascism becomes violent again…

…and cultural solutions beyond PR campaigns, they can be valuable but without solid education in far left discourses, around unionism, marxism, anarchism, mutual aid, black liberationism and civil rights, labor history, schools like the Frankfurt school, ect. then people end up as establishment leftists…

…so it’s also important to figure out how to extend resistances there too (resistances towell meaning but moderate leftists drifting right into centrism or further)…

But ultimately I figure it has to be about knowing how the system will react (and fold/co-opt answers presented into its self), and predicting how those reactions either extend problems or extend solutions/further possibilities…

…with the goal being the liberation of as many people from the struggles of class oppression under capitalism, as possible.

It’s not an easy task, nor can it easily be thought about. Anyways, that’s all I have.

Sorry again for the length, thanks and congrats if you got this far.

coffee_with_cream , 2 hours ago (edited 1 hour ago)

This is great suff and I agree for the most part.

I have not been occupying right spaces online. Don’t have the time / energy. And I don’t really put in the effort to try to change anyone’s mind Online because people are change resistant online.

But

I do argue politely IRL for things that would help. Better infrastructure, trains, good jobs, love everyone, let people do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others, transparency in money and government, and make good things in America. Still unlikely to change minds but at least making friendships with people different from me.

I guess my overall thesis would be: online discourse is has proven unproductive. I’m tired of reading vitriol and “other side is so dumb wow.”

Disappointed to see the echoiness of the echo chamber on Lemmy