You native speakers and your problems…I just throw all of my English vocabulary against the forum wall and hope something sticks.
13 Likes
2 Likes
The intention of this post is not to come across antagonistic, but you need to find some way to ease that stress if you are in fact legitimate with that anger. I know so many people who I would have thought far too young who have suffered heart attacks or strokes recently from stress, many since the pandemic and losing their job. You need to find a way through it and get off your current course.
Biden might not be the ideal candidate. Maybe not even for the majority who voted Democrat. But he was the necessary middle ground to get Trump out of power. No-one thinks that the job is over. On the current course, another right wing republican could very well be in power in 4 years time, so the Democrats have a lot of work to do to change public opinion on why Trump is bad for democracy.
IMO these are the baby steps needed to first correct course then maybe some time in the near future a Socialist democrat might rise to power. IMO a left-wing Democrat would have been decimated in
this election. Corbyn may have been poor in most respects but even if he was squeaky clean and wasn’t indifferent on Brexit I dont think he stood a chance of removing Johnson. A good lesson for USA.
In the words of Marty McFly: “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are going to love it”.
8 Likes
what does that have to do with john mccain, genius?
1 Like
2 Likes
Perhaps the most remarkable, for me concerning Graham, is how disloyal he has been to his supposed best friend in congress. Immediately, when McCain died
beyond his general odiousness, mccain himself went full MAGA when he faced a right-wing primary challenge in 2016
(and this is where mccain was mentioned)
1 Like
“How many people would put it past Trump, with his new loyalist Pentagon team, to intentionally saddle an incoming Biden Administration with a potentially catastrophic war? Iran isn’t Somalia.”
Nobody in their right mind would put it past him. Also, if he thought 12 months ago that he would lose the election he’d have started a fight somewhere without hesitation if he thought it would keep him in power IMO. He’s terrifying. I pray that he’s not around in four years time (if they do manage to scrape him out of the White House this time without him doing something colossally stupid).
2 Likes
Would he still be able to do something like that now, even with his ‘lame duck’ status? Would the house and senate not be able to dawdle until they’ve got rid of him? Surely such a transparent move would be blockable somehow? I don’t know!!
2 Likes
Lame duck status really only applies when he cannot act unilaterally in his decision making. 4 nasty letters… AUMF…
3 Likes
3 Likes
Trump has the biggest bully pulpit. As ever, if he has something, prove it. We still (just about) have the rule of law. Take it to court. Win. Or get laughed out, which is what we are actually seeing.
2 Likes
Just wanted to comment on Trump voters for a second, more from a personal family perspective. Father in law and his wife are both ardent Trump fans. He has a PhD and was a professor but is now a successful businessman, even meeting with Pence recently over one of his products, which the CDC is all over (he’s from Indiana so Pence likes a good local boy). His wife is a veterinarian. So, both intelligent people.
I spent a good hour talking with my father in law the other day. He is utterly convinced the election was stolen from Trump. It’s remarkable to me. I can’t dismiss him as stupid, not by a long chalk.
It’s complex people.
I love the general vibe on here, and I’m fully on board and in agreement. Trump is such a wrong un. He is a sociopath narcissist. He’s a conman, and not even a very convincing one.
So how come good, intelligent people like him? (Mostly a rhetorical question).
It’s as perplexing as it is troubling to me,
9 Likes
Hes good looking,rich,intelligent,successful,likeable and sexy. Hes also excellent on Twitter and a real ladies man.
What more can you want 
edited to add
@Magnus told me to say all that 
4 Likes
I always believed growing up that intelligence was almost a binary thing. People were intelligent or they weren’t. A bit like the IQ test. A simple scale.
It was not until I was in management, looking after a large number of people with PhDs that I realized it really isn’t. It was like managing children. Many lacked basic common sense, emotional intelligence, ability to communicate or express themselves, self reflect or adapt to change. I could not believe that people who would widely be considered intelligent, make such dumb decisions, be so gullible/ exploited, act so childishly, or self-sabotage their own careers.
As perverse as it sounds I came to realise qualifications were not really that important, they only reflected small subset of life skills needed to function in the real world.
I can understand intelligent people voting for Trump. The reasons are the same as the general public. Whist critical thinking and objectivity should be higher. Many are also more likely to benefit personally from Trump government. They are more likely to live in a bubble where life is good and don’t wish to be taxed more. They might be experts in their field but have only a superficial understanding of the politics or arguments. Others may hold values that simply align with the values of Trump (America first, protectionism, boaders)
14 Likes
It’s human nature. You can be a good guy and still have a blind spot in regard to a peculiar situation, due to misinformation. It has happened countless times before, and it can happen to anyone of us.
That being said, your father in law sees maybe a direct interest to see Trump re-elected, for his business maybe?
Or maybe, there are also other causes… when I was in Berlin some twenty-five/thirty years ago, I met a man and his wife. They were from the Eastern part of the city, 60-65 years of age, and I worked with the man in the same office. It was incredibly interesting for me as a young man from Switzerland to hear him talk about the war time in Berlin. He made the whole Hitler-Jugend formation and was around 16-17 towards the end of the war. They enlisted him in a troop made of youngsters, to help defend the city against the Russians. He was lucky enough to escape death because his lieutenant said to his bunch of youngsters, towards the very end, to throw their rifles away and to run home. But he saw terrible, terrible things before it was over.
After the war, he made his career within the communist administration. His wife was dentist, and as she was pretty good, became Honecker’s and other party reps’ personal dentist. They had a good life. The regime gave them a nice house and terrain right next to the Müggelsee. Privileged people by all accounts, due to being well-educated and smart. Very nice people also. They invited me at their house, and it was fascinating to hear them tell their stories.
When communism broke down, he quickly found a job in an office, and she started a private dentist cabinet, with many clients from East Berlin coming to her. Remember, both were between 60 and 65 when the wall broke down. Both highly adaptable, and happy, no matter which political system they were living in. The change in system was merely seen as a new opportunity. Their son was studying in a good university in Western Germany when I met him, and was already a full part of the new world.
As for me, I was fascinated and baffled at the same time. These were people who had grown up under the Nazi regime (they fondly told me of their enthusiasm as children, going to the big Nazi parades with their families, the flags and all that stuff), then living under a ruthless communist regime (the woman told me all kinds of funny anecdotes about Honecker and other big guys from the party, and he told me stories about the way the communist regime built their new gigantic habitation districts, laughing at the massive corruption going on at the highest echelon of the regime) without ever acknowledging any major problem under these regimes. It was just like it was. Power is corrupt, and you’d be stupid not to pick a part of the cake if you have the opportunity. They were very proud of their success, and I could partly understand why.
Same for the change from communism to western liberalism. I asked them if they were struggling with this, like so many others at the time (there were beggars on the streets of West Berlin at the time when I came to the city in the early nineties, Eastern Germans who had lost everything after the change), or if they felt nostalgia. They shrugged shoulders and said no, why? For them, it was just the next regime taking over, with new opportunities to be taken.
What I retained from all this: some people have an inner moral compass, an emotional intelligence, and can thus mightily struggle according to which political system they live in. Others, like these people, have not, and they’ll strive in any system, due to them being smart. They’ll simply support the system and the guys in charge, and make their hey as well as they can. I’m sure they’d have supported and liked the Trump regime if they had seen an interest for themselves to do it.
14 Likes
For some is there anything in distinguishing between Trump and his administration? Trump is an odious individual and I struggle to understand why anyone with a moral code would support him as a person. But what about the US over the last 4 years?
As I understand it there are a few things over the last 4 years that have impacted positively on people’s lives. It’s almost irrelevant as to the causes of that improvement (whether they’re legacies from the previous administration, global changes, happenstance etc). If people think things have improved for them during that period then they’ll likely want more of the same, regardless of the particular individual in the White House.
3 Likes
People like that used to be called ‘Wendehals’, which got a fitting new meaning in 1989.
5 Likes
We just call them Farage
2 Likes
Great post, and thanks for sharing.
When my mum said she thought Trump was great I was fucking devastated. I honestly felt sick for days.
Anyways, I have extracted the bit of your post that really gets me. I can almost understand the ‘he’s a shit person but he’s getting things done and is standing up for me’ excuse. But when something is demonstrably and logically so fanciful you would sooner expect to see Bigfoot fly past riding a unicorn…it just doesn’t compute.
I assume your in-laws’ parents were Republicans?? My mum is a lifelong Liberal, the party of Abbott and Howard, despite coming from a poor family…
We literally cannot talk politics (nor with my dad and brother, too…my brother is a proper loon on such things) and I will die with a little bit of a broken heart because of it. Family may be family, but of that I have no doubt.
5 Likes
I think one of the realities is there isnt an immediate and obvious effect of the things the president does. As such people often perceive those effects through rhetoric and through the prism of their pre-existing ideas. So, Trump signs a tax bill that is has almost zero benefit for working people and explodes the deficit. But, Trump and the Republicans are laser focused on talking about their “tax reform”, which when heard through the prism of a belief that Republicans are better on taxes for working people then it is easy to understand how someone can internalize that as Trump having achieved a win for them.
Trump is genuinely, profoundly dumb in the ways we need a president to be smart. However, he does understand the lizard brain very well, being almost entirely driven by it himself. He has spent a lifetime crafting his gaslighting prowess…using brute force rhetoric to convince a certain number of people of something despite realty clearly showing something else. He brought that into politics, and has been enabled by an segment of the media willing to stay on story. That is incredibly powerful, especially when in plays on existing political tropes.
So when people say with a straight face how succesful he has been, there is overwhelming rhetorical evidence to support that. And the reality, in the vast majority of cases, even those most critical of his actions would concede that the negative outcomes from his actions are more abstract for many people (that doesn’t mean they are not real, but just that many people don’t immediately feel them in an obvious way) thus preventing the gut level counterbalance most need when reconsidering their prior opinion.
5 Likes