Trump Promotes Alarming Washington Post Column Warning His Presidency Would Be a ‘Dictatorship’
mediaite.com
He's coming right out and saying it. What more do people need? You'll be safe if you're a white, cishet, Christian man. Anyone else who helps this guy into office could be potentially signing their own death warrant and he's coming right out and admitting it. Promoting it.
You mean he's saying he'll do the thing the right keeps saying Biden is doing???
Yes, but it's better when he does it...for reasons.
Here's the kicker: a substantial number of Americans actually want a dictatorships run by him or someone like him, and they've wanted it since the end of the Civil War. That's why Trump is openly promoting it: he knows it's what will get him elected.
The left badly needs to realize that other people do not think like them or have the same priorities, goals or worldview as they do.
The right simply are not our countrymen and you all need to stop pretending they are before they fucking kill you all.
Hear fucking hear. Conservatives have adopted violence as part of their ideology. If the normal people are not able to prevent them from taking power and are not prepared to physically resist them, conservatives will gleefully kill us wholesale.
Conservatives do not value the lives of humans and animals the way normal people do. They will not spare you because you are their coworker or their relative. They will shrug their shoulders as your existence is made illegal. We have watched conservatives do this exact thing time and time again throughout history.
This is the wrong way to look at it. The left knows that other people are different. It's a core tenant to the idea of liberty.
The understanding that people aren't like them, don't share the same priorities, goals or worldview is it's strength. It can be a heavy burden and painful to understand that people would kill you for allowing them to be different.
But the alternative is only pain and suffering. In the eyes of Trump, there is only one way to gain relevance. And that path is firmly set in, with an edge that would be dead to cross. Because with them you can only think one way. Deviation is NOT acceptable.
So what is the option? Those that know will be slow to act but action will come.
Free Men always fight like badgers and the caged Man will be a slave to his master.
You forgot conservative/republican, anti science, reactionary, pro-gun, etc. just being white and Christian isn’t enough because you can still be a liberal or have some actual intelligence.
I know quite a few people who are pro gun and dislike Trump with a passion, including myself. I would argue Trump is a symptom of why many people keep guns; a fascist dictatorship is an immediate threat to communities who won’t benefit from the “warm embrace” of such a government. I bought my first AR the day after Trump won in 2016 because it was clear the future was not trending toward the light. It was a rabbit-hole, because I realized I needed enough to equip my family and friends for what’s coming, and I like piecing them together over time so the financial outlay isn’t as high due to the variou parts going on sale over time.
You're not alone; I have owned firearms for years and am politically left (like, in the vicinity of being a social democrat). I am not surprised that marginalized people have been buying firearms over the last few years, given the state of things. But I really, really hope we don't see more violence anytime soon.
I feel like our country is in a really precarious place. Republicans plan to elevate the power of the president and erode checks and balances which safeguard against tyranny and autocracy. The GOP's persecution of marginalized people (e.g., trans, gay, black people, etc) will escalate. Yet if Trump is defeated, his rabid followers may pull something better planned and more effective than we saw during the Jan 6 insurrection.
Spot on. I’m politically left of anybody in power, so I know I’m on at least a few lists of potential “dissidents”, let alone being openly Jewish in a Christofascist dictatorship and friends/family with people in the LGBTQ+ community and from various ethnic backgrounds. I always hope for the best, but that hope isn’t going to scare off a truckload of paramilitaries, so I have guns and ammo.
I also stockpile water, medical, food, and so on. If there’s an earthquake, I’m prepared, same for a medium term power outage, but in the most extreme case, I know I’ve done everything I can to keep my family safe in a dangerous time. Nobody else in my family is dying in a ditch if I can help it.
Always a good idea to prepare for adverse situations like, in my case, blizzards, cold spells or heat waves. And those precautions can help with unforseen bad situations as well like you say.
Peace and best of luck you to and all of us.
Exactly. Stay safe my guy/gal/non-binary pal.
He will decide who is liberal and therefore to be burned at the stake.
He did this before with the "I'm going to kick all illegal immigrants out of this country when I become president" and people with illegal immigrants in their families still voted for him!
I remember a new story shortly after this happened of a woman who voted for him crying because her husband was being kicked out and her words were "I thought he was only going to kick bad illegal immigrants out of the country! My husband isn't a criminal!"
These idiots are all for this shit until it affects them personally.
Don’t imply “white, cishet, Christian man” somehow aligns with or is safe from trump. That’s false, and wanting to see rational democratic values upheld is independent of gender/racial identity.
Of course they're not ultimately safe; nobody is with authoritarians, but they'll be the safest for longer than anybody else. All of those demographics get immense privilege by default, and they'll be wringing their hands as they watch everybody else lose their rights first.
Naturally, there will be exceptions to that generality, and they might even fall along party lines—certainly religious ones (gotta be their brand of Christian™).
Remember how Putin's best buddy Prigozhin became disillusioned and showed his displeasure and wound up DEAD? Yeah, almost all the orange mobster's underlings have disagreed or abandoned him and suffered his, so far, impotent ire.
He very much targeted punishing legislation at blue states as a whole
The only fun part of a Trump dictatorship would be watching him eat the faces of the leopards. Then it would settle into a proper hellscape for the entire world though, so I think we should take a pass.
I don't disagree with OP's personal take that they added to the post body, but I really think that's a bad practice...
It's one thing when someone links an excerpt from the article they are posting, which is commonplace. But the post body absolutely should not be for the user's subjective take, especially when the common practice is to quote the article. It muddies the waters and can be unclear who the author is (user or article).
Comments like OP made should be in the comments section where they belong. Anyone remember how r/Askreddit had to change the rules/automod because users would ask a question just to make a long story text post?
Comments should stay in the comments section for news communities like this. The only exception should be posts with many links/megathreads.
I've also seen users state things in the post body that contradict the article they posted. I think there should be a rule added to stop this practice. If your personal take has merit, it'll be upvoted in the comments. It's vain and problematic to put it in the post body IMO.
... Or you can just realize this isn't reddit and that the post body is there for a reason. That is for OP to add whatever they please.
The post body is for whatever the community rules say the post body is for. They have an opinion on what rules this community should adopt regarding post bodies, and I think it's fair that they can voice that opinion. It has nothing to do with whether or not this is Reddit, they just used an example from Reddit.
Agreed. And not including post body information beyond anything except the article has always been a strictly reddit based thing.
This is Lemmy and Federated so I'm against that hard.
There really should be no point in having to post a second comment rather than OP utilizing the space already built into post submissions either to save comment space/bandwith or prime discussion.
I see no real need why they need to be separated. The difference is negligible to my browsing experience. It does end up making OP need to do one more post though.
If we didn't want OP to have an opinion on something posted, then what's the difference between simply not letting them comment then? Is there some psychological trick that's make their words at the top of the page more credible just because they posted a bogus or trusted source? Does that distinction really need to be made or are users just not used to it due to reddiquette?
I think it's the latter, and antiquated.
The entire point of the fediverse and Lemmy is that different instances and the communities within them can set things up as they see fit. And I think being so militantly against something simply because people on Reddit did it that way is silly. There's no reason to dismiss an idea simply because it was done that way on Reddit before. Just let Lemmy be its own thing without worrying about how Reddit does or doesn't do things.
The suggestion is based on the opinion that the content of posts on this community should be limited to objective information directly from/about what is being posted. Opinions, discussions, arguments, etc have their place in comments section, that way people can respond to those individual comments. Having the post itself be a combination of an article and a random musing from the OP means top level comments will be a mish-mash of responses to the article and responses to the OP's post body comment. By requiring the OP to post their comments in the comments section, we ensure that all top-level comments are responses to the linked article itself.
Nobody is saying they don't want OP to have an opinion or be able to comment, it's a simple suggestion to separate the OP's comments from the post body itself.
Right, so you've already agreed on the first two points.
I see some merit to the limiting top level comments to the article nobody reads anyway..., but expecting everyone to either go on a hate or love it comment parade feels like something that would naturally happen in the comments anyway.
I'd err to the side of already giving comments free fodder for discussion just to boost engagement. OP is essentially preempting what's already going to be a comment anyway. Hence my emphasis on is there some sort of social trick that leads credence to it? Or is that simply a failure on the readers part. It's the latter to me.
You're also expecting that multiple of the same comments at top level aren't already a thing lol. Or that OP isn't going to bring their argument to multiple levels anyway, which they will if they're active on their posts and not just top level spamming.
I mean ... at least he's finally being honest. It's what he always wanted, but he was too much of a coward until backed into a corner.
Part of him coming out of the fascist closet now may be all the court cases that have been brought up against him. His back is essentially up against the wall and getting the presidency is his only real 'Get Out of Jail Free' card he's got left. If he doesn't get elected, he's pretty much done and may spend the rest of his life in prison. There's the state case that could be problematic, but I doubt he has any problem throwing the country into a constitutional crisis if it means saving his own skin. For the Federal case I imagine he just pardons himself, which could be another crisis in and of itself, or it just flies by without issue.
Imagine he gets elected (that this is still even a possibility is ridiculous), Georgia finds him guilty in that case and he's supposed to face jail time there. He will refuse to go and I'm not sure that anybody would enforce it to place him under arrest, or if they do try, then does the Federal govt do anything to protect him? Do we have Secret Service agents getting into firefights with Georgia law enforcement? Does the military step in, especially if Trump starts stacking it with his own people? Or does the whole thing just get ignored and we have a sitting President who should be sitting in jail and he either just never goes to Georgia or nobody goes to arrest him?
Lets suppose he wins and logically the house stays at least narrowly red. Basically nobody arrests him and he doesn't leave office until he dies. People yell about this. People riot about this. He sends federal troops to murder the rioters which leads to greater violence. The decent members of the military top brass step down or are removed. Flunkies are put in their place and violence escalates. Real risk of getting ventilated keeps a lot of people off the streets but isolated individuals plot or carry out violence against government stooges. This leads to further repression. With access to everyone's social media data and email AI makes it tractable to carry out both sophisticated and broad analysis to make a pretty good enemies list.
Trump starts rounding up the millions of illegal immigrants as promised. No due process is given or expected and people who have been opening promoting dissent against Trump are disappeared with the immigrants and placed in the concentration camps he promised to build. Since you can't actually make countries just take back millions of people and it would be a humanitarian nightmare they end up staying in the camps long term. They are no better run than the camps Trump built earlier and desperation makes them inherently more violent which is used to justify the violence by the guards and the deaths. Situated as they are near the southern border in the summer the inhumane heat along with old friends like cholera and new friends like covid start to really thin the herd tens of thousands die. People start to compare it to german death camps but they do so quietly offline.
The worst thing is as this horror story plays out most people can continue to live quite normal lives so almost everyone does just like they did in Nazi Germany. There is a push to make they detainees most of which have little hope to get repatriated or released earn their keep and they become work camps. The deaths rise. There is violence in the camps as people are desperate to escape and there are mass killings and reprisals.
Meanwhile overseas China takes Taiwan and Russia Ukraine and begins eyeing the Baltic states. China and Russia with India as a tacit ally end up in a war with western Europe. This time Paris burns but good along with London. Everyone is terrified of nuclear war but nobody on any side really wants to blow up the planet they want to own it not destroy it and eventually a truce is called with Russia now holding all its former possessions and some new ones along with China. The US Russia China and India are the 4 sided economic engine of the world and money from 3 fascist powers and one collaborator spread their poison promoting "right" thinking smaller powers and governments.
In other times this fascist century would eventually be succeeded by a revolution but no country on earth has ever had the power of the tech we have by the 2060s. It is incredibly trivial to give everyone the pretense of privacy while really scrutinizing them down to the pores on their face and removing anyone "subversive" It's kind of funny that everyone was worried about a super intelligent skynet ending humanity when actual AIs turn out to be mere idiot savants no more sentient than a carburetor but far smarter and sleepless and watchful. Better than us at the art of tyranny in the same fashion as they are better at chess simply able to computer and analyze more more input and correlate it more effectively not sentient.
Robot soldiers are if anything much more diligent and ethical performing objectives skillfully and never hurting anyone by accident. A relatively tiny number of people will supervise construction and design and fewer yet will be given any control of policy. All generals and no grunts to get different ideas and if asked to liquidate some folks that are becoming a threat they wont have any qualms.
I'm not saying that Americans are good people, I don't think so myself, but we do seem to be a massive economic and military engine well situated to be used by either side.
It could be the straw that broke the species back.
Before you share this with your trump-loving family like I almost did, he didn’t promote it, he ‘retweeted’ someone who linked the article saying among other things: “The American people want the economy Trump created…” Shitty journalism and click-bait headlines like this is why republicans look down on us and why people start wondering if they’re on the right side.
You're not paying attention if you think bad media headlines are why they look down on "us". Don't get me wrong, i think these things should be criticized and we should expect better but "our" media headlines aren't why they don't like us. Its their media headlines that are telling them how to feel about us.
Well I should say less the headlines and more the number of people spreading this and/or believing it. Look at this thread—there are like no top comments that reflect on the inaccuracy of the headline. no one read the article or clicked the link, it seems worse than Reddit here. It’s embarrassing and disappointing. It makes it easy for the right to say, ‘see how gullible the left is & how easily they’re swayed by media?’ Anyway I’m not trying to start a flame war, I think I’m just starting to feel more stress about the upcoming election.
It's wierd to put more weight on the left or liberals for this then the conservative media appartus that defended and backed trumps play to steal the election by any means necessary.
"Shitty journalism and click-bait headlines" is why my internet consumption has dropped significantly over the past few years. It's also why I'll rarely comment on anything before I read the entire article (unless I'm commenting on a comment). Sites like Newsweek (off the top of my head) are full of misinformation and contain only a sentence or two of information relevant to the actual news story. The rest is in support of the writer's perspective and opinion which is often coming out of left field.
It feels like most of today's generated content is just about a headline and the shares and comments that that headline can generate. Granted, I could just be handing out in the wrong parts of the internet and have built my own inverse feedback loop.
Yeah I agree this is a bit misleading. I'm leaning more towards it's the publisher that is problematic (meditate).
We had a feeling.
You see, this is why I'm uniquely disappointed in Democrats right now. Instead of doing the legislative blitz to stop a dictatorship from forming, they're almost banking on Trump running because they think they can beat him.
How are you supposed to do a legislative blitz when Republicans have one of the houses of Congress?
Shit, youre right, guess fascism already won and we should just go home /s.
There are other ways to fight it, but you can't expect being able to pass legislation when it requires both parties.
What could they do without a majority?
Upvoting because this is just an opinion. Dems know they can beat him again. It's too early to blitz. A calmer approach next August - November will inform the folks in the political middle and it won't fire up Trump's base as much. When children get upset you calmly tell them the consequences; you don't jump up and down, cry and yell back at them.
Actually most parents do exactly that and then use violence, and that's much more effective for them than calmly telling a kid who refuses to stop, to stop.
I get the point you're making. Your analogy is just very flawed.
Violence is more effective for kids?
Requesting source on that one. Here's what I found: https://www.developmentalscience.com/blog/2022/2/10/hitting-children-leads-to-trauma-not-better-behavior
No, it's more effective and convenient for parents, as it gets them the submission they want and the kid is the only one that paid the price for it.
Which is why the analogy is flawed. It absolutely does work... for the perpetrator.
Where is Trump reposting the article? You'd think that the post would be shown instead of someone else posting it.
They did show it, it's just slightly confusing. He retweeted (or retruthed it's apparently called on truth social) that guy Cory Mills. So in the story where they show the post from Cory Mills and the Washington post article below, that's the entry from trump's account of trump retweeting it. Cory Mills is just the original person who shared the article, then Trump reshared the post about Cory Mills sharing that article. Whoever made the story cropped out a slight thing that's above that where it says "Donald J trump retruthed" this, would have been less confusing if they left that in. He often does it this way with the most controversial stuff and calls to violence and things, so he can falsely claim "I never shared that." He thinks retweeting doesn't count.
Here's his truth social account if you want to scroll down just a bit and see for yourself. Get some eye bleach and brain bleach ready after trying to read that mess though, ugh. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump
Man, I miss the days when I wasn't aware of how stupid trump, the republicans, and the electorate were.
Damn, I had leftover covid bleach ready, but my IP is blocked :/
It's not worth it, I had to follow the ex president's advice and inject it straight in afterwards. The horrible burning helps distract from what I saw. Anyways, time to call 911.
Well, I browsed that cum sock of a channel of his for about 30 seconds and was thoroughly disgusted. What surprised me though, as I was not aware, is that Kelsey Grammer is supporting that piece of excrement. Sigh, another delusional actor who seems to have lost his marbles.
He doesn’t need to be President again to have congress give him the Caesar treatment. In fact, I’ll vote for him…to receive the “Et tu Brute”
I don't think that's right - the bar for "explicit acknowledgment" is pretty high. The context of the post indicates to me that he's saying "they used to claim I couldn't win the election, but now that everyone can see that I can, they've switched to claiming that it would be really terrible if I won." The message is "look how scared of me they are" and "look how powerful even they acknowledge I'd be" and not necessarily "I'm going to be as bad as they say."
(If I ever have the Washington Post compare me to Julius Caesar, I'll be sending that article to everyone.)
When my loved ones and I are being marched to the gas chamber I know I'll be thinking about whether or not we were charitable enough to the man ordering our execution back when he could have been stopped.
I'm not telling you to be charitable. I'm saying that the words "explicit acknowledgement" actually mean something, such that this isn't an explicit acknowledgement.
Well yes, that is the dishonest "plausible deniability" he frequently uses for exactly this sort of thing.
It's just a super crazy coincidence that he keeps talking about destroying democracy and linking articles discussing himself as a literal dictator.
This kind of ambiguity is where these people thrive. Those who want to charge will hear him calling them to arms, those who want to ignore him can think he said nothing too bad.
With this guy it's definitely ok to interpret everything he does or says the worse way possible. We have seen him act in the past, he has lost the benefit of doubt.