Summary
Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 election leaves no room for ambiguity or an “asterisk” in his legitimacy, as he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
This outcome represents a clear mandate from American voters, who knowingly chose Trump’s policies and approach.
The anticipated results include pardons for January 6 participants, attacks on the press, and an administration filled with controversial figures.
By voting for Trump, Americans prioritized divisive rhetoric over democratic values, accepting the resulting turmoil.
I am American, and I have always loved my country. Until now, I’ve never been ashamed to call myself patriotic. My thought has always been than there will always be uninformed, uneducated assholes that vote against their own self-interests and the interests of their own country.
This election is different, though. We knew exactly what we were getting if we re-elected Trump. We responded by not only electing him in a landslide election, but handing the House and the Senate over to the Republicans, too. It was a clear message. America is not a nation of mostly good people with a few vocal “bad apples.” We are a nation of hateful, scared bigots, and we proved it in a big way.
This was a turning point in American history, and the majority of us sent a clear message to their fellow citizens and to the world. America is not a nation of mostly good people being overshadowed by a media that covers the loudest assholes in the room. America is a nation of people who by a majority support exactly what the “crazy” Republicans are saying. I would feel better if Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, but that’s not what happened.
This isn’t an election where I’ve lost only lost faith in the democratic process or my fellow citizens, although both are true. This is an election where I’ve lost faith in my country as a whole. I have never been proudly Republican or proudly Democrat, but I’ve always been proudly American. Now I’m just… sad. I don’t expect I’ll see a day any time soon where I can honestly say I’m proud of my country. The best I can do is retreat into my own personal bubble, live my life, and watch the world burn around me until the flames consume everything I care about.
For me, it was the days and weeks after Jan 6th, when it became clear that outright insurrection, a violent coup, was not going to spark a course correct.
The republican party should have shattered. The non-fascists should have woken up, and fought with MAGA, and years later, a viable political party rise from the ashes.
But that didn’t happen. A few conscientious dissenters fell on their swords, most at retirement age anyway. Fascism took over completely. And the American people ate it up.
Weeks after Jan 6th, it was clear that consequences were not coming. They took their mask off, and no one cared, or couldn’t stop them.
And here we are. Convicted felon with absolute power on his way to the Whitehouse, who owns the SCOTUS, Senate, and likely the House.
Trump will have unchecked power to do whatever he damn well pleases.
Way to fucking go, America. I fucking hate my countrymen.
How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m 40, started paying attention to politics in the Clinton years and then really paying attention with Bush v Gore in 2000. America was full on neolib vs neocon bullshit back then, a quarter of a century ago. The 2nd Iraq War was a big moment for me of realizing that the only thing America stands for is corporate hegemony. Project 25 is no different than the Project for a New American Century, and the “opposition” from the “left” isn’t fundamentally against any of it, they just pay a bit more lip service to culture issues (which are of course important if you aren’t a cis white christian male, but they are clearly not enough).
Tl;dr
I am close to the same age and something feels different now. The Trump administration is many levels of degenerate beyond the Bush administration. Even Dick fucking Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris FFS. I think Trump is pretty far beyond neocon, unfortunately. Just straight up Fascist.
The Neocons may have started rolling this snowball back then, but it is an avalanche now.
The majority of modern Republican presidents lost the popular vote, for one thing. This time that isn’t the case.
I’m with you. It was absolutely soul crushing to watch the worst person to run for president get elected on no qualifications and give us reasons to despise him deeply every day for 8 years. But even worse was that people cheered him the fuck on. Then demanded more. This country is lost. We have no reason to hope anymore. Everything good is in danger and everything dangerous is a possibility. We’re fucked. I’ll never have another warm and fuzzy feeling about this country or its institutions.
I feel the exact same way…I’m disgusted with us for letting this happen.
If you truly consider yourself a patriot, you will do what you can to help the people who will actually be in danger during this administration. Find orgs near you that help the marginalized and underrepresented. Volunteer. Educate others. Do whatever you are able to.
This is not the time to retreat. This is a time for action.
Take heart. Our fellow citizens are slow learners, and few of them have paid close attention to Trump and his shit forsaken privilege in escaping consequences since he left office.
It will be a long wait, but four years of unbridled trump will open a lot of eyes. Let them get a healthy, sustained dose of exactly what they didn’t realize they asked for and then we rebuild.
And don’t give away the House like that. It’s not over yet, and with any luck that guardrail will remain.
We had that the last time he won. Apparently we forgot how bad it was. Hell, he probably would have won in 2020 if it hadn’t been for COVID.
Honestly yeah. My hopes are at this point our electoral process does exactly what it just did. It’s clear a lot of people went out and voted for him. Not a small group but a ton. And my resignment has just been “Okay, this is what you asked for, buckle up”.
It’s gonna suck ass and I really hope they don’t start some bullshit that makes them squeak out of the mess they’re about to step in. (They’ll definitely try to) But let’s give the American people exactly what they asked for and just try to stop the house from catching on fire while they realize what a bad idea it was.
I dont think Ill be alive in four years, if theres even an election
They also solidified this form of political campaigning. Its only going to get more hateful from here on out. We are watching Nero burn Rome.
We are watching Nero burn Rome.
Watching? Hell, a third of us fucking gave Nero a match while spraying the city with gasoline, and another third said “You know, I do like s’mores…”
That horse sailed 8 years ago.
Something to keep in mind.
Trump didn’t win a significant number of new voters. He kept his base, which is roughly the size of what it was in 2020.
The problem was that Harris lost voters. In droves. Nationwide. And she took a lot of winnable downballot candidates with her. And I’m not even saying that to blame her. She ran a magnificent campaign while Trump was most noted for saying “They’re eating the dogs!”. So why did she still lose, and lose so hard? Because Democrats stayed home. Roughly about 10% of them overall, nationwide. Sure, some of them stayed home or voted 3rd party to protest Gaza, especially in Michigan. But the real story is that she underperformed so badly nationwide. I mean, for the love of God, New Jersey was competitive. That call about Iowa possibly going blue is going to be up there with “Dewey defeats Truman” in terms of political misfires. She severely underperformed with men and Latinos, especially Latino men. Which means this: 8-10 million people couldn’t stomach voting for Trump, but they’d rather passively hand over the country to Trump vs. voting for a black woman. Whether the problem they have is the fact that she’s black, female, or both is irrelevant. But the message they sent was clear. “We don’t want Trump, but we’d rather step back and just let Trump take the country rather than vote for her.”
The problems with bigotry in this country go much deeper than some people are willing to admit, and Harris just found that out the hard way. As far as the voting base is concerned, voting for Obama was a mistake that they will not repeat again, and they just proved that by handing Trump everything he wanted on a silver platter instead.
We can’t even say that it’s an outsized minority any more. A majority of the people in this country just spoke up and said that they either want the racism and bigotry or are at least willing to put up with it.
Trump won the election not because Democrat voters said “Trump!”, but because they said “Not Harris.”
This honestly cements my view that America is a racist nation, no question.
You don’t get 15 million missing votes without a solid chunk of those being Democrats, bog standard Democrats, that didn’t want to vote for a black woman.
that didn’t want to vote for a black woman.
If you ignore the multitude of policy issues she was to the right of the Dem voter base on, I guess you could blame it on that…
But that would just mean we’d repeat the mistake again…
Can we just stop running candidates who are to the right of the voter base?
We tried your strategy the last three elections and Trump has won 2 of them. It doesn’t seem to be working
Oh please. You all, and let’s face it at 15 million, it’s not progressives that didn’t vote here, but honestly if you didn’t vote because of some pithy bullshit about having not progressive policies vs policies farther than the far right and into fascist policies, well you’re definitely part of that problem and thanks for condoning racism you racist.
Edit: replied to wrong post
well you’re definitely part of that problem and thanks for condoning racism you racist.
Ok, and for 8 years we’ve tried that strategy of insulting voters into voting D.
Two of those elections it went so badly trump became president, and the other time he lost by tens of thousands of votes across a couple states.
It’s clearly not working.
So how about we stop repeatedly trying it and instead we run a young charismatic candidate with a progressive platform?
Even if it’s just lies, that was good enough to get Bill and Obama 8 years each.
Look at the last 30 years of American political history and rethink why we’re running candidates that can’t even beat Donald fucking trump.
Well no worries there mate, as a progressive person myself, racist progressives like yourself have now ensured that the Democratic party will never run another candidate like that ever again! Congrats! You did it!! Project 2025 was made possible by viewers like you!
Yes, we all woke up to our future being a fucking fascist horror show. We’re all grieving. Chill the fuck out with the “racist” shit, you just dividing the left more.
Yes, I’m sure some people are just misogynistic and racist and stayed home because of that. However, other people feel like it doesn’t fucking matter. We understand that it does matter, but I’ll be damned if I don’t feel that way too sometimes. It’s so goddamn frustrating when the Democrats tack right over and over again, hamstringing progressives along the way, and then turn around and say “Vote for us because we’re the lesser evil. We’ve wedged you between a rock and a hard place so suck it up and do your patriotic duty like good little peasants.”
Kamala’s campaign veered right and abso-fucking-lutely alienated progressive voters. By the end I was legitimately worried she might actually end up being to the right of Biden economically.
Do I forgive lefties for sitting this one out? No. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it again and that, for the first time in what feels like decades, the Democrats need to actually learn the right lesson from losing an election.
At 15 million non-voters at this point, again, it’s not progressives that lost this election and there’s millions of Democrats here that went, “you know what, this guy’s a criminal, rapist, racist but I’m going to just not vote today to make my point clear”.
Democrats and progressives have divided themselves enough as it is without my help and both groups have enough people that are okay with racism taking power again, they’ve made it loud and clear they’re okay with it.
As a minority that’s had decades of living with this bullshit, nope, I’m done. Electing Trump once was bad but maybe just a fluke. Electing Trump a second time knowing full well what he is and what he stands for, nope America is a racist country and Democrats and Progressives are fine with it.
the Democrats need to actually learn the right lesson from losing an election.
In related news:
Click here for the truth
*Note: the article is satire
Removed by mod
you cunt.
I voted D like every election the last 20 years…
But you need to think about why you respond to people talking about how to better the adem party and increase our chances of beating Republicans.
We absolutely can stop running candidates. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we’ll be running candidates ever again.
Trump won because the DNC underestimated the sexists, racists and the idiot woke who think they somehow did something with this for palestine.
Editorial note:
i know woke is a poisoned word but I like to use to describe idiots who think they are so smart and better than others that they would rather let trump elected than admit that voting for the lesser evil is the right thing to do
Nailed it. People are still mad that Obama made it into the White House and we’re forever going to pay for it. And a black woman running for president? Americans all saw Trump’s serious cognitive decline — I don’t doubt that any outside of a hardcore few didn’t — but America made for damn sure it wouldn’t be Kamala.
Trump won because Harris was a shitty candidate who never won a primary for the president.
I was hoping she’d pull off a victory anyways but the lesson we should take away is that if a sitting president needs to step down from running for another term we need to have a snap election.
This all went to hell when Harris was appointed as our candidate.
I called it back in July when I said Democrats should have run Fetterman. Only appearance matters to the majority of Americans.
Trump won because Harris ran a dog shit campaign.
And Trump didn’t? It’s always very telling when you all love shouting BOTH SIDES from the mountain tops, but when it comes to blame-
Well that’s different.
Trump had nothing to campaign on. He insulted and threw temper tantrums. Yet…. Harris Rand a dog shit campaign…
Got it.
Funny typo.
She ran a magnificent campaign
The entire point of a campaign is to attract voters…
Because Democrats stayed home. Roughly about 10% of them overall, nationwide.
So I don’t see how both statement can be true…
Her campaign did a shit job at getting people to vote for her, how do you consider it magnificent?
- She absolutely crushed Trump at the debate
- Her rallies were drawing far more people than Trump’s
- She had A-list star power (Beyonce, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift, etc.) actively endorsing her
- She took over a race where Biden was down by 5%+ and losing ground daily to at least making it competitive
- She only had 107 days to work with.
It proved to not be enough. The people who were coming to her rallies were apparently all people who were going to vote for her anyway; the size of the rallies only gave the illusion that her campaign was attracting more voters. And with so many Democrats actively choosing to stay home rather than vote at all, it seems like nothing she did would have mattered anyway. But given the crap she had to work with, she ran a near-flawless campaign. She had no way of knowing that it just didn’t matter.
There’s still a lot of analysis still to be done, but the Pod Save America guys pointed out that the Harris campaign saw less slippage in states where they were actively competing on the ground than in solidly red states where they didn’t fight as hard. This indicates that the campaign did make a positive difference, just not enough to overcome the negatives.
You listed things they tried, but didn’t work
The entire point of a campaign is to attract voters…
Literally the only metric that matters for how good a campaign was, is how many votes they got.
And Kamala drastically underperformed.
So her campaign wasn’t “magnificent” it was a spectacular disaster that couldn’t beat trump with everything you listed and a billion dollars
Yup. If she ran a magnificent campaign she would have won.
I was arguing with my buddy about this last night. He kept saying that she had to pivot right to have any chance of winning the election. Me pointing out that she performed terribly in the election didn’t matter to him. In his eyes shes did everything right and the voters are to blame I guess?
He kept saying that she had to pivot right to have any chance of winning the election.
They can never give any logic behind it, and they’ll never learn it doesn’t work.
But moderates will repeat that line as often as Charlie Brown will attempt a field goal, with the same results over and over again.
Considering where Biden’s polling was this summer, the fact that the Dems held onto New York is impressive.
This is the danger of lowering our bar to Trump’s level as “good enough”
Biden could be better than trump.
Kamala could be better than Biden.
But if Kamala isn’t good enough, trump would win.
Because as multiple people have been shouting for 8 years:
Being better than trump isn’t good enough to get enough votes to beat trump
All of this could be avoided by running decent candidates who won a fair primary. But the DNC won’t give that as an option because they want to use the threat of trump to push thru as “moderate” of a Dem as they can to maximize corporate donations.
Beating trump wasn’t the DNC’s goal, it was raising as much money as possible
Magnificent campaign 🤣🤣🤣
Whether the problem they have is the fact that she’s black, female, or both is irrelevant.
Please consider that it could be neither.
The way I look at it is that Democrat initiatives did well on the ballots. She didn’t. When her initiatives are doing well but states like California, New York, and New Jersey are voting 40+% for Trump, that’s a tell-tale sign that people liked what she was selling. They just didn’t want her to be the one to sell it.
How did we lose Latino votes? I don’t see how they can possibly relate to Trump for all his rhetoric.
I don’t mean to sound stereotypical and I know not all Latinos feel this way, but Latino men tend to have a very strong sense of male dominance and a very strong mistrust of the police. For a lot of them, there was never a chance you were going to get them to vote for a black, female former prosecutor.
I haven’t read the whole article so I can’t say I agree with anything it says, but I just found this:
“From the beginning of the election to its final days, Latino voters in interviews and polls consistently named the economy, inflation or higher costs as their No. 1 issue and gave Trump the advantage on them.”
You made the point yourself: the majority did not speak up. The majority of voters spoke up, and they’re a minority of Americans.
After listening to video after video, podcast after podcast, I think America wants to be racist. They want to be homophobic, and they want to see their fellow citizen suffer. It’s sad.
If Kamala lost because racial bigotry — then how did Obama win? It probably has more to do with misogyny and single issue voters than it does race.
You guys just allergic to admitting her policy and campaign were shitty? She really didn’t propose anything progressive whatsoever. I’m a Bernie guy and I reluctantly voted Harris. I knew it’d be another 4 years of stagnation, not progress.
I have a friend. His mother is an undocumented immigrant. He admitted today that he voted for Trump due to concerns about inflation.
I just don’t even know what to say anymore: he’s college educated, but he still thinks Trump wasn’t talking about his mom.
Also, even if it was for “inflation”, just what policy do these people think donnie has that will “fix” inflation?
The thing about mental illness is it’s not logical, and will never make sense. Cults, religion, and political ideology all indoctrinate — spread a mental illness — in the exact same way; they all attack the same psychological vulnerabilities.
If someone knows the sky isn’t red, but chooses to believe it anyway, there’s not a whole lot that can be done.
That also seems to be an issue that keeps happening. Single issue voters. People get so locked in to one issue and will just straight up toss salad of the person that says they are going to make their issue their #1 priority.
Only problem is that #1 priority is on the same scale as 20+ other #1 priorities and the official is going to take on those issues that will benefit themselves the most.
He deserves to have her deported, and she deserves not to be punished for him being a dipshit.
Fuck him. Also, that poor woman.
The Democratic Party repeatedly expressed the need for a strong Republican Party. They sure got it.
Joe Biden said as much, out loud, several times.
American conservatives wouldn’t understand personal responsibility, especially the ones that crow about others not taking it, if it was literally rage fucking their assholes without lube.
And it absolutely will be once Trump’s policies are in effect.
But somehow it will still be Obama’s fault because the poor, ignorant fools consider critical thinking to be a librul plot like climate change and gravity.
Had a friend that took the conspiracist road to Nazism, and this isn’t an exaggeration - the dictionary is a Jewish plot, so is any empirical evidence, the existence of qualified experts, observable phenomena…
The small mercy is that the idiots and monsters that voted for Trump and the dipshits that couldn’t be bothered to vote to stave off fascism will drown in the river of shit alongside the well-meaning folk that did their best (or anything at all) to stop this.
There’s no blaming the Russians this time around. There’s no blaming media malpractice. There’s still some blame to attribute to voter suppression, but majorities elect the people who suppress the votes…
what a stupid fucking article. why carve out exceptions for shit you don’t understand and then double down on the politico.
fuck i hate journalists.
Christ - because it’s not as though the media contributes massively to voter suppression.
Journalistic malpractice is one of the main causes - if not the main cause of this result.
what will the rest of the world get from this? the obvious one would be higher emissions and more fucked weather…
Possibly benefit from some brain drain too
they don’t know what they want because the campaign was all about a dude saying bad words instead of any sort of real plan to fix anything. I’m tired of the spin. Harris adopted all the far right framing on immigration and bent over backwards for like half a dozen centrist republicans which lead to low turnout for like the obama voter crowd
Edit: Also apparently now there’s a large sector of people who simply aren’t online and don’t watch tv. Reaching them should be the #1 goal of any future election campaign
no room for ambiguity or an “asterisk” in his legitimacy,
Except for that tidbit about people who attempt to overthrow democracy aren’t eligible to have their seat at the table, sure.
He’s the punishment America deserves, but not the one it needs right now.
America deserves what is to come
Yeah, maybe. But the rest of us sure fucking don’t. I feel a bit like a some random American I don’t know or endorse voted for me on a few global issues.
I’m pissed about that, I have to admit.
We’re going to get it, and we’re going to deserve it
I’m absolutely sure this idiot has 4 years to fuck the world up. He’s not going to make us great again by helping anyone else…
MAGA terrorists want to gun down trans people in the streets because they can’t help their ungodly attraction to them
TBH someone should be planning an “underground railroad” for these people.
I’m talking full on secret code type shit.
its going to get bad fast when he starts mobilizing militia, or worse.
