Hell if someone tried to murder you and you just gave up and went about your way, no one would trust you to do anything of substance. That is the problem with the Democratic party today.

I agree that the democrats needed a big bold message, but this is a strange metaphor. If someone tried to murder you and you just went about your way, people would… Vote for the murderer, I guess?

Don’t you dare speak that into existence.

Seeing as how the President is still a position that nominally serves the people, honestly we should be told as a nation whether he’s a security threat in our agencies’ assessments.

I’m all for not scapegoating any minority, since what’s notable about the Black vote is roughly the same as for Latin American, younger demographics, and so on: it isn’t that they are “to blame,” it’s that the support increased over 2016 or 2020.

So while it’s a good reminder not to scapegoat, we definitely still need to talk and think about how different demographics (who will absolutely lose rights and opportunities under Trump) looked at Trump and decided to say, “more, please,” if we’re ever going to get out of this mess.

Yup, Gaetz and (if the GOP does the minimum of trying to protect this country) Gabbard are the sacrificial lambs to get through Hegseth, RFK and already too many others to count.

Yeah, republicans often find even a microscopic backbone once they no longer are running for reelection. In this case, it probably will be “I said no for a few weeks before I said yes.”

Just thinking back to how easy it would have been to never have Trump in our lives again, to get off this worst timeline, if just a handful of people had a tiny bit of courage at the impeachment trials.

Maybe they all thought he was cooked and they could once again forget about doing the right thing one more time, to endear themselves to his rabid supporters. It’s dizzying to think they could have protected the Constitution with a single word, and failed to do even that.

He wrote a chapter in Project 2025 (sensing a trend here?).

He made comments claiming the CBS interview of Kamala needed to be examined after Trump did his usual whiney nonsense about the media treating her better.

Basically he’s another dangerous sycophant.

Sure, yup. But also, imagine if Germany in 1933 was an active worldwide superpower with 128 military bases in 55 foreign countries, with an annual military budget higher than the national GDPs of 167 of the 188 countries in the world.

I don’t think the people who voted for Donald Trump, allegedly because of economic angst, have a full appreciation for what that means.”

My cynical take is that those voters have already tuned out again, and aren’t even paying attention to the consequences of their vote.

When it comes time to personally experience said consequences, they’ll have forgotten their complicity and accept whatever feel-better answer is readily available. No lessons will be learned.

There was something off about his obviously intentionally egregious picks, and what you say makes a lot of sense.

In 2016, Trump was an outsider with a few allies. 2016-2020 he bullied anti-Trump republicans like Kinzinger and Cheney, making examples out of them and getting a lot of candidates, governors and House members to kiss the ring. By 2020 on Jan. 6th when it came time to object to certification and stage the coup, the House was deeply infected by MAGA loyalists, but the Senate was mostly immune (with a few exceptions, like perennially spineless Cruz and Hawley).

Now in 2024, the Senate is showing signs of pushback but Trump knows he has momentum from a likely complete House takeover and his election “mandate.” He’s making a statement: “submit.”

The backlash makes more sense when you consider it’s a purely emotional reaction. It’s a backlash against “feeling bad.” Nevermind that feeling bad when seeing someone who was wronged is appropriate.

Rather than even try to reckon with those feelings, the part of the nation that is not being victimized decided it’s too hard to empathize with victims. They didn’t like feeling bad. And happily for them, there were plenty of conmen and women, influencers, and other people more than happy to tell them they shouldn’t feel bad, in exchange for money and power.

I’m not giving up on America. But for now I’ve given up on Americans.

The reason is that we agree on all of the concerns, working class families should be getting attention and support and they’re not. The rich are eating us alive. Mainstream politics isn’t helping.

But it’s clearly substantially more the fault of the right, who are lying through their teeth to the working class while accelerating wealth disparities, anti-worker policies, and removing their upward-mobility as well as democratic, institutional and social protections they actually rely on.

And if Americans are so uninterested in facing reality that they’d rather be lied to than put in a little effort to actually check the candidates’ policies, if they’ll vote against their interests and give in to blatant propaganda and manipulation, when everyone is telling them what well happen… Well, what can we say but, “Ok, face-eating leopards it is. Enjoy. Let us know when you’re tired of that.”

Putin isn’t waiting, he apparently started amassing troops within a day of the election.

Yeah, for sure. But there’s been trends set off without explicit coordination in the past, especially where there’s an unspoken, unacknowledged pressure built up over time.

I suspect many both celebs and normies are ready to leave, and they’re waiting for an excuse, a signal that they won’t be leaving alone and losing those networks. If Taylor Swift does it, and then some movie star follows, and so on, it can organically cascade.

I wish people would have left earlier as well, but it’s not just sunk cost fallacy. Network effects are a rational reason to stay, and that’s the issue. If he has a community, he loses the community. I get it.

That’s why I wish celebrities would coordinate and all leave at once - it’s far more likely their network will follow them in that case, both hurting X more and helping themselves more, and accelerating people leaving as the network effects disappear on X.

The physics metaphor applies pretty directly here: They need to create momentum to counteract inertia.

I look at it as “the beginning of the end.” It’s crossing the event horizon in a black hole.

The GOP has successfully created an alternate fictional reality for the majority of voters, but once free press has been suppressed, there can’t be competing realities. There’s almost certainly no going back because the state propaganda at that point is the only game in town, and no oppositional narrative can take hold.

Yes, kissing the ring for sure. I knew Zuck was gone as soon as he called Trump “badass” and that he “couldn’t vote for a democrat” after the first assassination attempt.

Dude stood there and by his luck the bullet missed. This wasn’t some courageous action, this was “standing there until the secret service tackled me.” What exactly was “badass” about it?

Yeah, I mean, obviously this is not a 4D-chess move. Trump acts instinctively but he’s had a lifetime of narcissistic manipulation informing that instinct. Gaetz would already have been looking for ways to maximize his visibility while skirting the investigation, Stephen Miller probably could have contributed the “trigger the libs and deep state at first, and make it seems like they get a win once they’ve got it out of their system” part.

Everyone around Trump is self-interested evil in their own way and I could see how it works together pretty well.

The best explanation I’ve seen is that this was a calculated pick to distract and lower the bar for Trump’s eventual real nominee (Paxton?), allowing the Senate and public to swallow someone who will still enable the DOJ as Trump’s own personal vengeance law firm. It is also again Trump nonsense taking up all the oxygen, preventing debate over his other extremely problematic picks like Tulsi Gabbard.

It gave Gaetz cover to resign and prevent his ethics probe from being public, and if this theory is correct, he’ll withdraw from consideration before any of that information is made public. Mission(s) accomplished.