Summary
Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 election leaves no room for ambiguity or an “asterisk” in his legitimacy, as he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
This outcome represents a clear mandate from American voters, who knowingly chose Trump’s policies and approach.
The anticipated results include pardons for January 6 participants, attacks on the press, and an administration filled with controversial figures.
By voting for Trump, Americans prioritized divisive rhetoric over democratic values, accepting the resulting turmoil.
I just want fucking Healthcare and not-extinction.
Healthcare is going away for most people as are women’s rights and rights, really, for anyone who isn’t a rich white Christian man. You guys really fucked yourselves, and to a great extent everyone else, this time. Get ready for the biggest deficit in global history followed by a depression for the ages.
sorry, best i can do is fascism
what will the rest of the world get from this? the obvious one would be higher emissions and more fucked weather…
Second hand fascism
Possibly benefit from some brain drain too
The leopards are about to have a face buffet.
I am American, and I have always loved my country. Until now, I’ve never been ashamed to call myself patriotic. My thought has always been than there will always be uninformed, uneducated assholes that vote against their own self-interests and the interests of their own country.
This election is different, though. We knew exactly what we were getting if we re-elected Trump. We responded by not only electing him in a landslide election, but handing the House and the Senate over to the Republicans, too. It was a clear message. America is not a nation of mostly good people with a few vocal “bad apples.” We are a nation of hateful, scared bigots, and we proved it in a big way.
This was a turning point in American history, and the majority of us sent a clear message to their fellow citizens and to the world. America is not a nation of mostly good people being overshadowed by a media that covers the loudest assholes in the room. America is a nation of people who by a majority support exactly what the “crazy” Republicans are saying. I would feel better if Trump lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, but that’s not what happened.
This isn’t an election where I’ve lost only lost faith in the democratic process or my fellow citizens, although both are true. This is an election where I’ve lost faith in my country as a whole. I have never been proudly Republican or proudly Democrat, but I’ve always been proudly American. Now I’m just… sad. I don’t expect I’ll see a day any time soon where I can honestly say I’m proud of my country. The best I can do is retreat into my own personal bubble, live my life, and watch the world burn around me until the flames consume everything I care about.
Thanks for writing this for me.
I’m in the same boat. I’m a white straight guy. So, I guess I’m not in immediate danger, although I am an academic. So, I guess my choices are: fight, flee or essentially hide.
Fighting seems infeasible although I think violence is justifiable.
Fleeing would require leaving the country. I dunno if I can swing that.
So…I guess I just live my life and hope it’s not quite as bad as I fear? I dunno. I’m open to advice.
I do now hate this country and the bulk of the people who live here. Fuck them.
For me, it was the days and weeks after Jan 6th, when it became clear that outright insurrection, a violent coup, was not going to spark a course correct.
The republican party should have shattered. The non-fascists should have woken up, and fought with MAGA, and years later, a viable political party rise from the ashes.
But that didn’t happen. A few conscientious dissenters fell on their swords, most at retirement age anyway. Fascism took over completely. And the American people ate it up.
Weeks after Jan 6th, it was clear that consequences were not coming. They took their mask off, and no one cared, or couldn’t stop them.
And here we are. Convicted felon with absolute power on his way to the Whitehouse, who owns the SCOTUS, Senate, and likely the House.
Trump will have unchecked power to do whatever he damn well pleases.
Way to fucking go, America. I fucking hate my countrymen.
I’m with you. It was absolutely soul crushing to watch the worst person to run for president get elected on no qualifications and give us reasons to despise him deeply every day for 8 years. But even worse was that people cheered him the fuck on. Then demanded more. This country is lost. We have no reason to hope anymore. Everything good is in danger and everything dangerous is a possibility. We’re fucked. I’ll never have another warm and fuzzy feeling about this country or its institutions.
Take heart. Our fellow citizens are slow learners, and few of them have paid close attention to Trump and his shit forsaken privilege in escaping consequences since he left office.
It will be a long wait, but four years of unbridled trump will open a lot of eyes. Let them get a healthy, sustained dose of exactly what they didn’t realize they asked for and then we rebuild.
And don’t give away the House like that. It’s not over yet, and with any luck that guardrail will remain.
Honestly yeah. My hopes are at this point our electoral process does exactly what it just did. It’s clear a lot of people went out and voted for him. Not a small group but a ton. And my resignment has just been “Okay, this is what you asked for, buckle up”.
It’s gonna suck ass and I really hope they don’t start some bullshit that makes them squeak out of the mess they’re about to step in. (They’ll definitely try to) But let’s give the American people exactly what they asked for and just try to stop the house from catching on fire while they realize what a bad idea it was.
American conservatives wouldn’t understand personal responsibility, especially the ones that crow about others not taking it, if it was literally rage fucking their assholes without lube.
And it absolutely will be once Trump’s policies are in effect.
But somehow it will still be Obama’s fault because the poor, ignorant fools consider critical thinking to be a librul plot like climate change and gravity.
I have a friend. His mother is an undocumented immigrant. He admitted today that he voted for Trump due to concerns about inflation.
I just don’t even know what to say anymore: he’s college educated, but he still thinks Trump wasn’t talking about his mom.
That also seems to be an issue that keeps happening. Single issue voters. People get so locked in to one issue and will just straight up toss salad of the person that says they are going to make their issue their #1 priority.
Only problem is that #1 priority is on the same scale as 20+ other #1 priorities and the official is going to take on those issues that will benefit themselves the most.
My only solace is that he’ll take part in the insane suffering that’s coming.
They are also gonna grab him. Stephen Miller doesn’t fucking care if you are legal or not. Your friend is about to find out after he fucked around
Trump’s stated plan is to deport 20 million people. There are only around 11 million undocumented immigrants. Both the dude mentioned in the comment above and his mom are definitely on the list. It’s staggering that he didn’t take that seriously.
I wouldn’t mind being deported to Ireland.
Be a shame to wind up in the land of whiskey.
Trump wanted to deport Haitans to Mexico. You’re not getting a free ride to Ireland. Hope you like tequila.
“America is for Americans!”
Also, even if it was for “inflation”, just what policy do these people think donnie has that will “fix” inflation?
Yeah, I’m no expert but won’t Trumps tariffs on everything under the sun be much much worse than the inflation?? Manufacturing won’t come back to the USA, it’ll just shuffle around any of dozens of countries that will still be cheaper to operate out of. Also, retalitory tariffs are a thing which will harm what manufacturing IS in the USA. Also, Trump promised his rich buddies 3 trillion dollars in tax breaks. He’s going to slash health budgets (and more besides) to fund it. What are people thinking!? They’re going to fund the ultra rich from their own pockets AND pay massively more for goods while damaging local industry?! I mean there’s a million other things to worry about including mass-deportation but cost of living is about to increase BIGLY!?
I’m pretty convincing he’s being encouraged to outright collapse the us by Putin
The thing about mental illness is it’s not logical, and will never make sense. Cults, religion, and political ideology all indoctrinate — spread a mental illness — in the exact same way; they all attack the same psychological vulnerabilities.
If someone knows the sky isn’t red, but chooses to believe it anyway, there’s not a whole lot that can be done.
I’m glad your man will get what’s coming to him.
Something to keep in mind.
Trump didn’t win a significant number of new voters. He kept his base, which is roughly the size of what it was in 2020.
The problem was that Harris lost voters. In droves. Nationwide. And she took a lot of winnable downballot candidates with her. And I’m not even saying that to blame her. She ran a magnificent campaign while Trump was most noted for saying “They’re eating the dogs!”. So why did she still lose, and lose so hard? Because Democrats stayed home. Roughly about 10% of them overall, nationwide. Sure, some of them stayed home or voted 3rd party to protest Gaza, especially in Michigan. But the real story is that she underperformed so badly nationwide. I mean, for the love of God, New Jersey was competitive. That call about Iowa possibly going blue is going to be up there with “Dewey defeats Truman” in terms of political misfires. She severely underperformed with men and Latinos, especially Latino men. Which means this: 8-10 million people couldn’t stomach voting for Trump, but they’d rather passively hand over the country to Trump vs. voting for a black woman. Whether the problem they have is the fact that she’s black, female, or both is irrelevant. But the message they sent was clear. “We don’t want Trump, but we’d rather step back and just let Trump take the country rather than vote for her.”
The problems with bigotry in this country go much deeper than some people are willing to admit, and Harris just found that out the hard way. As far as the voting base is concerned, voting for Obama was a mistake that they will not repeat again, and they just proved that by handing Trump everything he wanted on a silver platter instead.
We can’t even say that it’s an outsized minority any more. A majority of the people in this country just spoke up and said that they either want the racism and bigotry or are at least willing to put up with it.
Trump won the election not because Democrat voters said “Trump!”, but because they said “Not Harris.”
The large turnout in 2020 was more driven by the will to remove Trump than to elect Biden. This time it seems they forgot how bad it was and decided to stay home.
This honestly cements my view that America is a racist nation, no question.
You don’t get 15 million missing votes without a solid chunk of those being Democrats, bog standard Democrats, that didn’t want to vote for a black woman.
that didn’t want to vote for a black woman.
If you ignore the multitude of policy issues she was to the right of the Dem voter base on, I guess you could blame it on that…
But that would just mean we’d repeat the mistake again…
Can we just stop running candidates who are to the right of the voter base?
We tried your strategy the last three elections and Trump has won 2 of them. It doesn’t seem to be working
Oh please. You all, and let’s face it at 15 million, it’s not progressives that didn’t vote here, but honestly if you didn’t vote because of some pithy bullshit about having not progressive policies vs policies farther than the far right and into fascist policies, well you’re definitely part of that problem and thanks for condoning racism you racist.
Edit: replied to wrong post
well you’re definitely part of that problem and thanks for condoning racism you racist.
Ok, and for 8 years we’ve tried that strategy of insulting voters into voting D.
Two of those elections it went so badly trump became president, and the other time he lost by tens of thousands of votes across a couple states.
It’s clearly not working.
So how about we stop repeatedly trying it and instead we run a young charismatic candidate with a progressive platform?
Even if it’s just lies, that was good enough to get Bill and Obama 8 years each.
Look at the last 30 years of American political history and rethink why we’re running candidates that can’t even beat Donald fucking trump.
Get of your moral high horse, you cunt. Through action or inaction you contributed to the coming harm for all of us.
you cunt.
I voted D like every election the last 20 years…
But you need to think about why you respond to people talking about how to better the adem party and increase our chances of beating Republicans.
Well no worries there mate, as a progressive person myself, racist progressives like yourself have now ensured that the Democratic party will never run another candidate like that ever again! Congrats! You did it!! Project 2025 was made possible by viewers like you!
Yes, we all woke up to our future being a fucking fascist horror show. We’re all grieving. Chill the fuck out with the “racist” shit, you just dividing the left more.
Yes, I’m sure some people are just misogynistic and racist and stayed home because of that. However, other people feel like it doesn’t fucking matter. We understand that it does matter, but I’ll be damned if I don’t feel that way too sometimes. It’s so goddamn frustrating when the Democrats tack right over and over again, hamstringing progressives along the way, and then turn around and say “Vote for us because we’re the lesser evil. We’ve wedged you between a rock and a hard place so suck it up and do your patriotic duty like good little peasants.”
Kamala’s campaign veered right and abso-fucking-lutely alienated progressive voters. By the end I was legitimately worried she might actually end up being to the right of Biden economically.
Do I forgive lefties for sitting this one out? No. That doesn’t mean they won’t do it again and that, for the first time in what feels like decades, the Democrats need to actually learn the right lesson from losing an election.
At 15 million non-voters at this point, again, it’s not progressives that lost this election and there’s millions of Democrats here that went, “you know what, this guy’s a criminal, rapist, racist but I’m going to just not vote today to make my point clear”.
Democrats and progressives have divided themselves enough as it is without my help and both groups have enough people that are okay with racism taking power again, they’ve made it loud and clear they’re okay with it.
As a minority that’s had decades of living with this bullshit, nope, I’m done. Electing Trump once was bad but maybe just a fluke. Electing Trump a second time knowing full well what he is and what he stands for, nope America is a racist country and Democrats and Progressives are fine with it.
Translation: “I’m not listening or even willing to pretend to engage in nuance! Which means YOURE RACIST!”
You let a convicted felon, found legally to be a rapist, racist win because you didn’t vote due No True Scotsman, then yeah, you’re a progressive that condones racism and are a racist in my book. You don’t have to agree but then again, I honestly don’t give a crap what you think at this point.
We absolutely can stop running candidates. As a matter of fact, I don’t think we’ll be running candidates ever again.
She ran a magnificent campaign
The entire point of a campaign is to attract voters…
Because Democrats stayed home. Roughly about 10% of them overall, nationwide.
So I don’t see how both statement can be true…
Her campaign did a shit job at getting people to vote for her, how do you consider it magnificent?
- She absolutely crushed Trump at the debate
- Her rallies were drawing far more people than Trump’s
- She had A-list star power (Beyonce, Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift, etc.) actively endorsing her
- She took over a race where Biden was down by 5%+ and losing ground daily to at least making it competitive
- She only had 107 days to work with.
It proved to not be enough. The people who were coming to her rallies were apparently all people who were going to vote for her anyway; the size of the rallies only gave the illusion that her campaign was attracting more voters. And with so many Democrats actively choosing to stay home rather than vote at all, it seems like nothing she did would have mattered anyway. But given the crap she had to work with, she ran a near-flawless campaign. She had no way of knowing that it just didn’t matter.
You listed things they tried, but didn’t work
The entire point of a campaign is to attract voters…
Literally the only metric that matters for how good a campaign was, is how many votes they got.
And Kamala drastically underperformed.
So her campaign wasn’t “magnificent” it was a spectacular disaster that couldn’t beat trump with everything you listed and a billion dollars
Yup. If she ran a magnificent campaign she would have won.
I was arguing with my buddy about this last night. He kept saying that she had to pivot right to have any chance of winning the election. Me pointing out that she performed terribly in the election didn’t matter to him. In his eyes shes did everything right and the voters are to blame I guess?
He kept saying that she had to pivot right to have any chance of winning the election.
They can never give any logic behind it, and they’ll never learn it doesn’t work.
But moderates will repeat that line as often as Charlie Brown will attempt a field goal, with the same results over and over again.
If the argument is that Harris should’ve run a more progressive campaign, is there any guarantee that she would get more progressive votes than she would have lost from the center/independents?
Is there any evidence she gained any voters from the right/center?
Because Republican numbers went up, and Dem numbers went down…
But as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s not that more progressive campaign would have gotten more progressivesnto vote for her. It’s that nonvoters turn out to vote for progressive campaigns.
Too often people ignore history and say those votes can only be gained from the right. It ignores that one of the biggest reasons people give for not voting for decades is “both parties are the same” and never “the parties are too different”.
Yeah but if you start to poke fingers at the Democratic Party, you might start to realize that most of their corporate donors are fine with a Trump presidency. Almost like they were fine with Harris campaigning on keeping the status quo, because they’d win either way. Better to start blaming voters now!
Considering where Biden’s polling was this summer, the fact that the Dems held onto New York is impressive.
This is the danger of lowering our bar to Trump’s level as “good enough”
Biden could be better than trump.
Kamala could be better than Biden.
But if Kamala isn’t good enough, trump would win.
Because as multiple people have been shouting for 8 years:
Being better than trump isn’t good enough to get enough votes to beat trump
All of this could be avoided by running decent candidates who won a fair primary. But the DNC won’t give that as an option because they want to use the threat of trump to push thru as “moderate” of a Dem as they can to maximize corporate donations.
Beating trump wasn’t the DNC’s goal, it was raising as much money as possible
I agree with you, but you should know that the media is already blaming “the small sliver of the Democratic Party who call themselves progressives.”
Pundits are talking about how Democrats need to shift even further to the right next time. So that’s not going to be fixed any time soon unless voters show up to primaries in a way that can’t be ignored.
The ones owned by billionaires who bought them to control a narrative?
They’re always going to say the party has to move right. The entire reasons billions are buying them is to convince people both parties need to move right.
Yes - the ones who tell the majority of the party what to think and do.
Trump won because the DNC underestimated the sexists, racists and the idiot woke who think they somehow did something with this for palestine.
Editorial note:
i know woke is a poisoned word but I like to use to describe idiots who think they are so smart and better than others that they would rather let trump elected than admit that voting for the lesser evil is the right thing to do
Nailed it. People are still mad that Obama made it into the White House and we’re forever going to pay for it. And a black woman running for president? Americans all saw Trump’s serious cognitive decline — I don’t doubt that any outside of a hardcore few didn’t — but America made for damn sure it wouldn’t be Kamala.
Trump won because Harris was a shitty candidate who never won a primary for the president.
I was hoping she’d pull off a victory anyways but the lesson we should take away is that if a sitting president needs to step down from running for another term we need to have a snap election.
This all went to hell when Harris was appointed as our candidate.
Trump won because Harris ran a dog shit campaign.
And Trump didn’t? It’s always very telling when you all love shouting BOTH SIDES from the mountain tops, but when it comes to blame-
Well that’s different.
Trump had nothing to campaign on. He insulted and threw temper tantrums. Yet…. Harris Rand a dog shit campaign…
Got it.
I called it back in July when I said Democrats should have run Fetterman. Only appearance matters to the majority of Americans.
If Kamala lost because racial bigotry — then how did Obama win? It probably has more to do with misogyny and single issue voters than it does race.
They also solidified this form of political campaigning. Its only going to get more hateful from here on out. We are watching Nero burn Rome.
We are watching Nero burn Rome.
Watching? Hell, a third of us fucking gave Nero a match while spraying the city with gasoline, and another third said “You know, I do like s’mores…”
That horse sailed 8 years ago.
On one hand, it’s going to be funny watching them cry about it once the consequences of their actions start to impact their lives negatively.
On the other hand, I live in Canada, so it’s going to fuck us over too.
Remember, with doublespeak they’ll continue* to blame the democrats while their Republican leaders dismantle their rights, the economy, and the government right in front of their eyes.
It will be a repeat of 2020. They’ll leave the country in shambles and then people will vote Democrat to fix everything.
This is extremely optimistic. Voting, as we understand it, is not going to exist.
You’re assuming that there will be a free and fair election in 2028.
I don’t think that’s a given anymore.
Trump has openly stated that he plans to abolish voting
That started well before 2020.
“They’re not hurting the people they need to be hurting”
We are so going to be hearing this again.
Do not underestimate the allure of a man who offers you a boogeyman to blame all your problems on, while promising you that only he can stop it. That allure is very difficult for many people to overcome. One of the other problems with it is that even if they do see the consequences of their choices, it’s just as easy for Trump to convince them that those problems are the boogeyman’s fault too. It doesn’t have to make sense, and Trump doesn’t care if it does as long as it keeps the rubes in line and focusing their anger on anyone else but him.
This is a cult following. Any attempt to show them that their problems were caused by Trump will only cause them to MAGA harder.
Eventually the house of cards fails when things get bad enough. The ride is going to suck though.
it’s going to be funny watching them cry about it once the consequences of their actions start to impact their lives negatively.
Never going to happen. Or at least they will never admit it’s a consequence of the way they voted. Either Democrats are Rino’s will be blamed.
They won’t admit it, but they will still cry. I will know what caused it, and that’s sufficient for me.
As a fellow Canafian, I think we will have our own issues soon/currently, so I’m not going to have time for schadenfreude. Granted I live in Ontario and a folksy goon has been in power with no plans for so long that maybe I’ve lost my sense of humor.
Hopefully this election interference situation blows up in PPs face and the cons collapse.
I feel dirty hoping for such an outcome but it feels hopeless when someone like PP, who is obviously making a cynical power grab, has so much popularity. Canada is infested with fascists just like the US and I’m getting pretty worried about the future of humanity.
Unless Petey gets caught being boring or balls deep in a hog, I doubt it’ll move the needle. I hate to say that, there’s a lot I’d hope would move the needle at all, but in my own family it’s mask off, fuck “minorites”, give me more, so… yeah.
At this point even the Libs ditching Trudeau won’t shift things enough. We’re in exactly the same situation as the states; the corporatist, pro-capitalist centre-left party refuses to actually address the real problems that people are facing, so they turn to a right wing populist in the hopes that maybe they will.
I think leftists in Canada need to actively court the right.
Not in the way the democrats did by actively pivoting right, but by acknowledging their concerns, validating their beliefs that the liberals fucking suck, and trying to direct their frustration towards actual solutions, not a nazi like PP.
idk. It seems fucking stupid but I don’t know what other hope we have.
I actually completely agree. This is exactly the point Bernie was making when he said that the Dems brought their loss on themselves by abandoning the working class.
Canadian leftists need to really focus in on issues of cost of living, access to housing and education, the things that working class people are worried about.
I’m queer, and I’m married to a trans woman. I’m not saying the left should give up on talking about issues of inequality and social justice. But I am saying that we need a message that resonates with working class voters, not just people on the margins.
We need to make unions cool again. We need to get the rugged individualists excited about solar power (what’s more rugged and self sufficient than powering your home with nothing but the light of the sun?). We need to start talking about cutting those millionaire and billionaire elites down to size.
This isn’t easy. We’ll need to find careful ways to shape these messages, because there are a lot of thought terminating cliches that you’ll trip up on if you’re too direct. But I think the possibility is there. Even when you can’t talk about “socialism” and collectivism, you can still say things like “community” and “people having each other’s backs.” Appeal to the ideals that they want to think they believe in.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
The issue is, there’s not many places in the world that won’t be affected :(
More immigration! Turbo immigration! You think it’s bad now? Wait until the equator starts suffering wet bulb events
There won’t be more immigration. Quite the opposite. Get ready to see your friends, neighbors, and relatives deported. Get ready to see crops dying in the fields.
Yes there will, because you missed what he was saying about “wet-bulb” events.
If you wrap a wet cloth around a thermometer, and place it in air that has less than 100% relative humidity, the thermometer will read a lower temperature than an equivalent one without a wet cloth. This is because the evaporation of water wicks heat away from the thermometer; the lower the RH the faster the water will evaporate the heat from the thermometer and thus the lower the temperature will read. This is called the “wet-bulb temperature” and is how the human body cools itself when you sweat.
However, when the RH is 100% the wet-bulb and dry-bulb temperatures are the same, and the human body stops being able to cool itself by evaporation (since your sweat won’t evaporate because the air can’t hold any more moisture). In fact, thanks to physics not giving a fuck about how conservatives feel, there’s a point - thought to be above a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees C - where your body works in reverse and starts absorbing exterior heat.
This is fatal to the human.
The point is, the higher the RH, the less effective sweating is to cool humans down. Now what do you think will happen when people in equatorial regions- areas that have high humidity and temperatures to start with- see those temps go even higher thanks to climate change? They won’t have any choice but to move to higher latitudes, because just being outside for long periods of time will be lethal as their bodies slowly cook themselves.
You silly person, the climate crisis coming doesn’t care, and neither will the climate refugees. We are going to see unprecedented suffering in the next two decades
I didn’t say we wouldn’t see suffering. I said that they will arrive and the Trump administration will deport them or something worse.
You think the Supreme Court and court system as a whole is bad now? Just wait.
they don’t know what they want because the campaign was all about a dude saying bad words instead of any sort of real plan to fix anything. I’m tired of the spin. Harris adopted all the far right framing on immigration and bent over backwards for like half a dozen centrist republicans which lead to low turnout for like the obama voter crowd
It seems like the problem was turnout. In the last election liberals decided to come out and vote to remove Trump from office. This time they didn’t bother to vote.
no room for ambiguity or an “asterisk” in his legitimacy,
Except for that tidbit about people who attempt to overthrow democracy aren’t eligible to have their seat at the table, sure.
If that were the case Trump wouldn’t have even been on the ballot.
Yes that’s my point, a very large asterisk imo
We’re going to get it, and we’re going to deserve it
I hate this take so much. I have been a good person all of my life, went out of my way to think of others and their feelings, never been in trouble, always followed the rules, worked hard to get to where I am at, and you’re telling me that I deserve this bullshit? Makes it all feel so worthless to have dedicated my time and energy for something that apparently no one else can even muster sympathy. Fuck man.
It simply comes down to “it didn’t matter.” Not in the collective sense, not in the long haul. I have no doubt the people you impacted appreciated it, I appreciate you even, but to the rest it just wasn’t enough.
