Trump made a mockery of American democracy. Why are Americans shrugging this off? | BY THE MIAMI HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD
Donald Trump faces four indictments, 91 criminal charges and hundreds of years of maximum prison time combined.
This is a former president who — according to the latest grand jury indictment in Fulton County, Georgia — participated in a “criminal enterprise.” Trump and 18 co-defendants are accused of trying “to unlawfully change the outcome of the election” in 2020. Among the 13 felony charges he faces is one count of violating the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act and two counts of conspiracy to commit forgery.
Most of those charges are related to a fake elector scheme by the Trump campaign in which a slate of “alternate” electors in Georgia would cast electoral votes for Trump instead of Joe Biden. The president of the most powerful democracy in the world allegedly tried to steal an election.
We can’t say it often enough: This is serious. Americans cannot shrug this off or normalize it, no matter how many times Trump gets indicted. Yet it feels like business as usual. Not only is Trump favored to win the GOP presidential nomination, he’s also neck and neck with President Biden in the 2024 general election, according to a July poll by the New York Times/Siena Poll.
MORE THAN A CULT
Trump’s support cannot only be explained as the product of the cult-like power he has over his MAGA base, which accounts for roughly 40% of Republican voters who believe those indictments are nothing but a conspiracy against him.
more: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article278265068.html
Personal Opinion:
The USA is one of the countries where religion intersects very strongly with politics. His diehard supporters have elevated their support to a level of worship.
Anything he says is true and correct because He said it.
Anything he does is right and proper because He can do no wrong.
I grew up around Republican evangelicals.
I'm a little bit with the dude with the blog post who said that the evangelical Christians should have recognised Trump as obviously the Antichrist. Mr. Trump is practically a physical incarnation of all Seven Deadly Sins. And he's got seven towers, speaks blasphemy, consorts with foreign sex workers, promises greatness, ...
(No links, because that same dude filled that blog post with lots of shitty ads.)
Dude literally lived at 666 park avenue. Christians are stupid
Edit: 5th avenue, thanks blankets
Sauce. It's Fifth Avenue though.
https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/trump-formerly-owned-family-property-666-fifth-avenue-sold-for-73-mil-569125
Oh yea my bad
😮I looked this up! It was Fifth ave, but your point still stands. That's so overt!
But I believe his cultists think they are the seven Trumpets in Revelation.
His cultists are trumpets all right
No links needed. Everyone not in a cult sees all of that plain as day. You don't even need to be religious to see it.
Objectivist Republicans have so coopted religion, using owned media to gaslight and brainwash an evolved Southern Strategy, so as to create a blind cult following.
It is a coup 20-40 years in the making.
I don't think it's "Americans", it's a brainwashed subset of Republicans who have been systematically fed an alternate reality for 30 years all the way back to "Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster!" (investigated by none other than Brett "I like beer, OK?" Kavanaugh) and "Janet Reno is really Chelsea Clinton's father!"
"Americans" also includes the subset that cry "both sides are the same" or are too apathetic to vote. If you don't vote against the Republican party, then you are supporting what is happening.
So no balls to ever vote FOR something? Settle for bread crumbs when you can have the whole damn loaf
Hard to pick out new wall paper when your house is on fire and burning down.
So your solution is voting for the arsonist and not the fire dept
I didn't invent our voting system. I just do the best I can within the system. I vote for the best person running in the primary, then I vote for the best person left running in the general election. "Best" is relative, but it is what it is.
It appears to be a very large subset that's prepared to vote him in for a second term.
It's smaller than you think... keep in mind, the Republican party has been distilling down to a pure crazy base for years now...
So remember, when you see polls like "70% of registered Republicans think... x", that's what's left after 20 years of rational conservatives leaving the party.
This isn't the party of George Will or William F. Buckly, Jr. The academic conservatives are long gone now.
It sure seems like those objectors leaving the party are good at holding their nose in the voting booth
The other side of that is that lots of us have been calling for him to be held responsible for years. He never has been. Forgive me if I'm less than perfecly hopeful this time.
4 indictments and 91 felonies is farther than we've gotten with any other Republican President in my lifetime.
Nixon - Watergate
Ford - Mostly Harmless
Reagan - October Surprise/Iran-Contra
Bush Sr. - Iran-Contra
Bush Jr. - Abu Ghraib war crimes
So I'll take it!
Ford was the corrupt deal to pardon Nixon, and Nixon also sabotaged the 1968 Paris Peace talks with the help of Henry Kissinger to extend the Vietnam War. The two also bombed Cambodia.
The two of them committed a lot of war crimes.
Nixon also started the war on drugs specifically as a way to harm the anti-war left and black people.
Yeah, I think the Nixon and Bush Jr. examples could have been way stronger than those. It seems they were chosen for their recognition rather than their severity. Abu Ghraib was not good, but blaming Bush for that rather than the whole war?
Kitty Bush was in Dallas that Day https://youtu.be/0-Lvv1f5Qu4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/0-Lvv1f5Qu4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
America democracy deserves to be mocked. Only the rich have a voice in government, MIC gets more aid than its own citizens, people are starving in the streets while capitalism feasts.
What's MIC?
Military Industrial Complex, companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrup Grumman. The war profiteers
I still like you. You speak how I feel.
Nobody is shrugging this off. Those left of center are freaking out while the Nazis on the right are cheering him on.
Nobody is shrugging this off
except the millions upon millions of people who can't even be bothered to vote. I know the systemic vote suppression probably counts for a significant part of it, but honestly most of the rest are skirting their civic duty
Tell people's conservative parents everywhere that. I know for sure mine are shruggers. At this point anything short of "damn it looks like you kids were right, I'm voting Democrat if I have to" is a shrug.
Context matters. When they're in a conversation with another person that they care for and are face-to-face, who is talking about a contrary point of view, logic and thinking is present in some small amount in their brain. They'll actually think about the other person's point, and then make the mental shrug about Trump and his crimes and their effect on his viability/reasonableness as a candidate.
If they're in a group of other supporters, or on the internet, they very quickly do the republican/conservative thing of 'falling in line' and will try to publicly demonstrate (virtue signaling, aye?) how much they are part of the group and follow its standards.
I've had several conversations with my parents. When it is just me and one of them, I get a semi-reasonable conversation, but if another person is present, suddenly it's like having a conversation with a fox news talking-head.
You are lucky honestly. I think my parents double down because it's me talking :/
And I'm definitely more disappointed and upset because it's them, the people who supposedly raised me to be good.
It's baffling how dumb nearly half of the country is. I am definitely not smart but these people must just have nothing left in their skulls if they're wanting to vote for Trump after all this.
When they attack education for decades, you get a fair amount of dumb as a result. They were taught to obey and follow, party over all else.
A good chunk of them are just mean and want liberals to suffer because they find them annoying.
This is the majority of them honestly. They are just straight up fucking mean.
Half the country by land area, not by population. Land matters more than people in our system. Gotta be fair to the empty land in the Dakotas and not give people health care, right?
Think about how dumb the average American is and realize that half of them are stupider than that.
that is... very accurate unfortunately.
I dont think it is that simple. Some can probably be tied to education being demonized on one side. So to trust anyone with a degree becomes taboo, even doctors are not to be trusted at this point.
I think most of it comes down to the right wing news outlets saying anyone slightly to the left of them is working with the Christian devil to destroy america. So now your choice becomes not who best runs the country but a choice of good vs evil. Trump despite everything is smart enough to play directly into this with his rhetoric. He is the saviour the right needs to stop literal evil from taking over. How do you argue people out of voting for good? Its only getting worse it feels like.
Americans are not shrugging this off. Traitors are.
Sure. But most Americans don't seem to regard Trump as the worst president ever which boggles my mind. This guy was openly trying to overthrow democracy in America and was engaging in organised criminal activities, and you think there were worse presidents? I mean he was literally trying to overthrow your entire constitution and system of government. Can it get worse than that?
Do we really not say Trump is the worst president? If not him then who? Maybe W for destabilizing the Middle East? Still seems like more people think Trump is worse than G. W. Bush though.
NIxon is often quoted. But maybe you're right and Americans really do regard him as the worst ever.
Conservatives are not the majority. The majority of Americans do see Trump as the worst president ever. Normal people hate the motherfucker and his followers. Unfortunately, conservatives are as loud and violent as they are unintelligent. They are a plague in desperate need of a cure.
We know a shooting war next winter is possible. Likely even.
It's because conspiracism and anti-democratic sentiments have rooted deeply into the Republican party, and for as long as they remain Trump and candidates like him will remain popular.
I'm plenty mad! But what the fuck do you want me to do about it?! Trump's lawyers keep rolling back the trial dates, Republicans try to keep the trials from happening at all. The only way anyone in power is going to take our complaints seriously is if we go to the same lengths as the January 6th rioters, and we know what happened to them. Really, what would you LIKE us to do? I'm open to fucking suggestions, because nothing we've done so far has accomplished anything. We just get ignored.
THIS IS NOT OUR FAULTS.
Take a page out of the French playbook. General strike.
[Oh but wait they have rigged system such that if you do that you'll get fired, thus losing your healthcare and possibly spiraling into bankruptcy. Seems that ship has sailed....]
It really sailed when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers for striking. If the government has that much power over unions, then unions are powerless.
Overthrow them and either reset the old system or establish a new one like we should have done 20 years ago.
I assume you’re referring to Bush v Gore. Yes?
you mean that time Florida fucked everything up?
SCOTUS made that decision, but yes.
let's be real, if Florida had not fucked up, there wouldn't have been a whole fucking thing about it stalling the election and what not. Shit was all I could hear about in the news for awhile, cause I grew up in Florida.
The two party system gives the American people a choice between two right of center corporatist options.
None of Trump's crimes threaten that power structure. Quite frankly his antics really only serve to facilitate corporate capture of the American political system even further. Which is why all this is presented in such a business as usual and 'trust the institutions to sort things out' way.
It's never been more obvious that this is all a puppet show. And they hate that it's obvious. Look at how fast the two "opposing sides" (lol) join hands when it comes to something that has to do with war or crushing labor strikes. The rest of the time it's terminal gridlock, posturing, and ostentatious displays of feigned aggression. And it all just so happens to line up perfectly with the will of the bourgeoisie.
It has to be the former. I think the one and only thing that sets these "lunatics" apart from the rest of us is simply that they trust Trump. The things he says are terrifying, and would drive any otherwise sane person to do crazy things to defend their country if they were true. I don't think it's fair to call these people evil or stupid, they're just being played by a master scam artist. Add a little bit of ego and stubbornness to it, and I can see someone rejecting logical arguments if they're coming out of the mouth of someone who just called them an idiot.
A smart racist is an oxymoron.
Not all Republicans are racist, but all of them agreed it isn't a deal breaker.
There’s racists in both parties, don’t fool yourself.
“poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids"
30% of the population still supported Nixon.
Fox News was started to get a future Nixon off. Even Ailes probably didn't forsee the massive Trump family criming (we still haven't talked about Ivanka's Chinese patents and Jared's 2 billion Saudi bailouts.)
Nah, they're stupid. Maybe at first I could give them a pass, but with the mountains it evidence including video evidence and audio recordings of Trump himself, you have to be stupid to still believe he's innocent.
When was the last time you convinced someone they were wrong by calling them stupid? A lot of people who are smarter than you are falling for this scam. The last time Trump won, the polling suggested he was going to lose because people who were thinking of voting for him didn't talk about it publicly for fear of being mocked by people like you.
If they fear of getting mocked, why do they still do it?
Wouldn't that mean they understand their opinion about the topic is just dumb?
Are you being serious, or just circle jerking to feel good making fun of people? If they knew it was stupid, they wouldn't believe it. Clearly, they don't realize that their beliefs are stupid. We can either try to help them, or bully them until they quietly vote for Trump again or attempt another coup.
Maybe because americans do not know what a true democracy looks like? The US was never a true democracy. Gerrymandering is the easiest example for that.
And here I am thinking that it was the fact that only about a third of adults were actually allowed to vote. Strictly speaking, whichever proportion of that third that owned land but I don't have any way of estimating that, but the tldr is that for the majority of our nation's history the majority of our nation had no say in how it was governed.
Personally I think the issue is more that there is blind loyalty to team sports in USA culture, and no matter how many bad things are documented about a specific person (Donald Trump, Richard Nixon)... people are loyal to the image of that person, the brand and logo. People are raised in the USA to be inundated with breakfast cereal and toy company logo/brand recognition. It's a faith system. Breakfast cereals and fast-food "Happy plates" that fund a lot of children's TV are incredibly unhealthy and profit machines - and parents think this is psychologically healthy.
Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be. -Marshall McLuhan
Don't forget religion
Guess what happens when one party creates a media empire to spread the message that government doesn't work for 40 years?
This should be surprising no one. If anything, it's a bigger surprise it hasn't led to to civil war on a much shorter time scale.
A viral tweet stated that we are not a Democracy, we're a Republic, and Republicans collectively nodded their heads in agreement.
Aside from that, I think many Americans don't believe American democracy is currently working in their favor, leading to apathy or outright hostility towards democracy itself.
i think this is basically it. the intellectual left likes to say things like "donald trump made a mockery of our democracy" but the reality is that american democracy has been a mockery of itself for a long time. All donald trump did was make it a bit more difficult to ignore that. Not to say he's not criminal, and treasonous, and should be in jail. but he's really only marginally worse than Mitch McConnell. it's not nearly as shocking as the newspapers want us to believe.
Yeah, he was just too stupid to not say the quiet part out loud. And to not be criminal all the time while being very bad at hiding it.
The GOP literally took a seam ripper of the US Constitution.
For being written by slave fucking tax avoiding elitists it is remarkable that the 246 year old document that has basically 27 edits. I've got three line comments with more edits.
So the response needs to be measured and take time to avoid opening further seams for attack while patching and mending the ones abused.
It will likely take longer than I will live to complete, and I am Gen X.
Those people are anything but American
Because one side approves of what he did and the other wont do anything to stop it other than writing a mildly disapproving facebook post about it.
Remember when the plan was to convince Trump to resign as if there was any chance whatsoever that he would do that? Then it changed to hoping republicans would help impeach him? And now were at hoping that the judge he appointed (canon) wont do anything unethical in his favor and hoping the supreme court agrees to be subject to oversight. What a fantasic plan that cant possibly go wrong.
Because the DOJ is shrugging it off. What is anyone else supposed to do about it? Do a citizen's arrest? Fly down to Mar-a-lago and protest outside his country club? The Government is literally giving him 24/7 protection day in, day out and almost half the electorate doesn't think he did anything wrong OR just doesn't care and wanted him to be crowned King of America. What else are Americans supposed to do?
I don't understand. How is the DoJ shrugging it off when he's been indicted on federal charges?
As far as not putting him in custody. For almost anybody else that had done a fraction of what Trump has done, they'd be behind bars by now waiting for their trial. Trump has been a free man this entire time, talking trash and juicing up his people to potentially commit more violence. That he's still allowed to walk free after being extremely reckless with National Security secrets seems like a travesty. Just accidentally misfiling something is enough to land anyone else in hot water, Trump blatantly broke rules left and right and even conspired to hide material from investigators. It's mind-boggling that it's gone this far without him being locked up by now.
He is being tried for his crimes. That you want him treated arbitrarily worse in the meantime just seems capricious. The decision to keep someone in custody while they wait for trial is made on a well established set of principles, not based on your need to see him humiliated for your entertainment.
The DoJ following procedure is a sign that they are taking this seriously and not just pandering to people crying out for blood and entertainment.
Bullshit. Bull fucking shit. He’s continuing to incite violence and press the big lie. Were it anyone else, they’d already be held in jail.
he's funny and we're stupid and bored and there's nothing else on the tv
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/08/donald-trump-constitutionally-prohibited-presidency/675048/
Garbage in, garbage out. We get who we vote for. This is who most Americans are, this is what America was founded on, and we deserve every bit of it.
Nope. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by like 3 million in 2016. More Americans voted for a different candidate.
The electoral college is included in the "garbage in, garbage out" reference.
Not really.
The problem is the corruption and propaganda that is spewed to us on the daily.
The wealthy class have succeeded in making you think that way, blame your neighbor instead of talking to them.
If we didn’t give people in Wyoming more power than people in California, neither Trump nor Bush II would have been electrd
I wish that were true but reality tells a different story. Besides, I hate all humans equally, especially the rich and their corruption and propaganda that you speak of. I do not believe in our species to solve existential problems, thus we deserve every bit of our own downfall and ultimately, our own self-inflicted extinction. I'm blaming all of us, myself included. Our genes, our history, our evolution, our behavior - that is what the problem is: us.
I hope you're not using this as an excuse not to vote
I still vote. I know it's all a ruse anyway but it can't hurt, only takes a few mins so why not.
"equally" ... "especially"
Yes, it's especially the rich to blame for our petty shenanigans on this tiny, beautiful rock - like politics - but in the grand scale of the universe, my hatred for all humans is equal, past and present. 'Hatred' might be the wrong word, it's more like extreme disappointment.
Humans don't deserve to evolve past type 0. We failed as a civilization because in the face of solutions, we create more problems and continue to refuse to do what is necessary to achieve utopia; that is to come together as one global and conscious species and take care of everyone. It is entirely possible to do it right now, but we are consciously choosing not to as a species, to our own demise. We shouldn't be allowed to colonize other worlds, however, in our wake, we'll make sure to destroy ourselves too, so no worries there.
This is probably the wrong community for a discussion or comment like this but I really can't give a fuck.
A useless, idiotic, and inaccurate take.