The MAGA-cult wants to burn down the country. The billionaires and tech-bros will never pay taxes again.
Chump wants to stay out of prison, and he wants to join up with Putin to start World War 3.

Everybody happy? It would seem so.

That's how the German Jews felt in the early 20th century.

Only this time there will be no one or nothing
to rein them in.

Every whim will turn into iron.

Strutting their stuff for their big win. Like the lemmings they are. Unfortunately for them, they have removed most if not all the people and things that protected them.

That was the number 1 issue. Something smells fishy to me. How can a nation that is concerned about the future of democracy (I think the response was over 70%?) vote for the person who promises to tear down democracy. He told us in so many words that he will ignore the Constitution. He told us that he'd rule as a dictator on day one. Yet we voted him back into office? I'm shaking my head no.

I think that this may be the inexcusably sloppy "both sides" polling of which we see so much. I heard the reich-wing pundits saying that it was the Democratic party trying to destroy democracy. When you include "both sides" in a polling question without nuance, and only one side is actually factual, you get a mishmash that is at best meaningless, and at worst misleading.

it was all part of him making us scary. But I bet lots of MAGA folk bought into it.

of the 35 percent who said saving democracy was the top issue, how many were saying they feared Harris would take away democracy like Trump told them.

I think a lot of rural Americans view themselves as the true Americans & the rest of us are just support staff.

Gonna blame it all on us? What about all those red cities out there? What about those magat city slickers? More of them than there are of rural folks.

and, like some others here, I'm not at all sure we weren't cheated out of that...There's still questions to be answered.

They're not always rational, yet we try to apply rationality to them.

We insist that many are voting against their own best interests, but assuming that we know best what those interests should be is just presumptuous.

Voters and groups of voters aren't monolithic, and they don't all have the same reasons for voting. We try to make them fit in nice, neat boxes, yet every voter has their own unique combination of motives and issues they use to decide for whom to vote.

Making an attempt to better understand those motivations rather than just assuming we already know what they are should be a first step to better understanding the big picture.

...complaints about economy, immigration, minority rights just an product of hatred toward Americans who don't look like them.

Record economy, record employment, rising wages, drastically reduced immigration that their own candidate had made worse with his ordered obstruction of legislation.

Sure, they're political points, but they're full of shit.

It's the racism, xenophobia and assertions of white male supremacy. How do we know? They're telling us.

Also the fact that we've turned our backs to them ... not just the MAGA-cult but all the crazy R's ... we are repulsed by them. We won't live among them, we're disgusted by them, we call them names like "deplorable." This has been shoved down their throats by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Faux Noise, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and all of them right on down the line.

They ARE deplorable, and we never hesitate to let them know it. Our culture is so divided now, and we Democrats/liberals/ progressives have contributed to the division. We have to recognize that we're part of the problem. Racism, sexism, xenophobia ... none of it will end as long as this cultural divisiveness continues.

I was there, once, and I wouldn't be here if I had miscarried, hemorrhaged, in today's Texas. What a fucking insult to women to take away their bodily & professional autonomy.

and the basic foundations of our government

It will be scorched earth.

The question is: how do people get that way.

They must have gone through some serious grooming
and abuse, for starters.

Decades ago, you wanted to talk to the electorate, you would go on prime time network and there were just a few channels. The population was better informed.
Now we have opinion news, rather than regular news, hundreds of vectors of communication by which to spread whatever lies you are pushing preying upon a wholy misinformed electorate when it comes to civic matters and how it works.


In addition, the citizen united ruling opened the floodgates to unlimited money into politics which makes it very hard to get through if you are still playing by the old rules like democrats tend to do.

Finally, our constitution is both a blessing and a curse in some instances. For example, our right to free speech is so broad that's its perfectly ok to lie to get elected. There is no way to regulate this. My conclusion is that, in order to be elected nowadays, you have to be willing to use deceptive tactics. That is a sad state of affair.

more independents voted than democrats. 2024 Kamala got close to 15 million democratic votes less than Biden 2020, they did not vote and stayed home. Why? nobody is going to find the truth, but will all kind of excuses. Stayed home, because people are frustrated with Democratic party insensitivity to middle east problem. My thoughts.

...18 million Americans indifferent or hostile to maintaining Israel as an ally to counter the threat from Iran and associated nations in the region?

Who would Biden align militarily with in the region to protect our national security interests?

A mostly undefined people without a nation living in an area harboring a terrorist group holding multiple hostages including Americans?

I am so fucking done with worrying about Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, and everyone else that is going to take it in the ass hard and raw when I fear to be known outside of my home in redstate Missouri, USA...

I have zero fucks to give to the problems of marginalized communities and future deportees when they would not unite or participate to save themselves. This result is catastrophic to the experiment of self-rule. We are already on the path to simply declaring a new aristocracy, outlawing education (except to the elect or the chosen, but definitely not to all and not publically), ending free-speech (that is not in praise of the dear leader first, last and always), terminating the protections of equal justice under law (as the proverbial pigs and men look from one to the other and cannot tell the difference).

This is the end. Not end times, not really bad... IT. IS. OVER.

Now we get to learn how citizens of authoritarian countries live.

pave Gaza and put up luxury condos on the water. Well, Trump wants the condos. It will happen quickly - there is no one to slow down Bibi now.

They were fine with Joe leading us, but Kamala? That's a big "Nope!" for them.

We are now officially a fascist state.

This is if Germany and Russia had joined forces, annihilated England and the US stood back instead of entering the war...

Trump-Putin-Xi-Orban-Jong-Un
All dedicated to one thing - power and its retention.

America, we have held our last national election and gave it away freely and willingly.
There will not be a 2028 presidential election. The billionaires already have their guy in the White House (and its NOT Trump).

Here is what will happen...

1) Trump will dismiss ALL criminal investigations into him and direct the DoJ to arrest and investigate all top level members of the Democratic Party, looking to shatter and fragment it into splinter groups of ineffectual morons like Jill Stein and others.

2) Putin will instruct Trump on European foreign policy. Ukraine is gone inside of 12 months.

3) Xi will instruct Trump on Pacific-Asian foreign policy. Taiwan invasion will commence inside of a year.

4) Orban (with a healthy shove from Putin) will instruct Trump on disbanding NATO and Middle East policy. Nuclear weapons will be deployed by Israel against Iran.

5) The United States - under one party rule and a partisan SCOTUS - will announce that due to the emergency situation in multiple theaters of war, elections are suspended and the office of the presidency is now supreme as a the unitary executive. Project 2025 is fully implemented and 'rights' are revealed to be just 'privileges' because they will be taken away.

6) Dissent will be outlawed, the Constitution will be rejected and America will cease to be a representative republic, instead becoming a fully owned subsidiary of billionaires and their whims.

So go on...shop at Amazon and Wal-Mart to "save more" (while finishing the job of killing all local economies), buy a "Tesla" on credit and become a slave to the bankers and the nut job owner with $1T fortune, pretend that voting for a 3rd party candidate was not determinative in getting to this disastrous precipice.

Reality is thus - America as a country is a third-rate shit hole of enormous proportions... America as an ideal in self-rule, democratic principles enshrined in a Constitutional representative republic was doomed from the start by compromises to slave owners and the Electoral College along with the structure that allowed a minority to buy the majority and control the country without the support of the people as a whole.

We lost. Its over and eventually, the bombs will fly, the destruction will be total and the damned will survive in the rubble scratching out an existence but having nothing close to the lives we enjoyed yesterday, saw voted away last night and will never again come close to in the future. The end is nigh alright and the truly tragic thing is it was GIVEN AWAY to lies, propaganda, prejudices and hatreds and most over-riding a desire of people to sacrifice their own good as long as it meant others they don't like would get hurt first and more (at least in their minds).

The doomsday clock should be right now be at 11:59:59. A madman and imbecile returns to power in under 100 days. Society as it was known ends with that on January 21st, 2025.

Because it's right.

I'm serious. We have two months.

Options:
1. Deep investigation into the election
2. Biden proclaims a state of emergency, requests constitutional convention
3. Massive protests and work stoppages
4. Blue States secede
5. Watch the country collapse and try to mitigate the worst of the damage in the blue states.

#1 won't happen
#2 at this point I think it wouldn't be any worse than where we are now
#3 those will come, but right now, the economy is ironically in pretty decent shape
#4 I think it will happen, if not immediately, then within the next 3-5 years.
#5 barring extra-curricular solutions maybe the only thing we CAN do

As far as I'm concerned, we are now outside of the Constitutional Framework. We''ve been skirting the edges for a while, but it finally broke in 2024.

J D Vance.

My best friend is an R, but she'd show intelligence in the past by refusing to support Rick Scott and was severely trash talking tcf this summer - saying he'd already sold our national secrets to anyone possible. Now, because she thinks Kamala was a socialist - she voted for tcf. We usually have lunch most every Friday, and if we miss Friday we have lunch Sat. I was stewing and freaking this am, just couldn't face chatting with her, even if we almost never talk politcs. My life is ruined because of folks like her. She's an elderly white woman from GA and wouldn't vote for a black woman over a criminal - even though she damn well knows he's a criminal. She thinks he wouldn't hurt her - wouldn't dare touch social security or Medicare - but he's going to do just that.

So anyway, I called and left her a message that I wouldn't be seeing her this week, and I'd call her about next week and see if we couldn't have lunch then (if I have calmed down enough to not talk politics by then). So, I guess I didn't do a good job of keeping the anxiety out of my voice, because she called back and said I seemed upset and to please call her. She acted CLUELESS about why I'd be so very upset. She thinks nothing much will change - she's 100% wrong and I can't talk to her about it. I love her and am sad that she's following her upbringing instead of her head and heart and I can't talk about it now without yelling because I'm also very angry.

Cannot be any clearer than this:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219672408

with Germany. There was actual pride over Mussolini. Long story, but it's basically about Italy. Mussolini is a lot like Trump. Strong man. Remaking a long struggling country. Well the US isn't long struggling. But Mussolini was seen as someone who was turning long struggling Italy around.

I think some (especially Rs) said they were voting for Harris, then just fell in line with the party.