No Stupid Questions

TL;DR for Americans: American citizens are the biggest idiots on the fucking planet.

I think the reality is that the vast majority of US citizens are abjectly fucking stupid who have no clear understanding how absolutely anything works or any understanding of how consequences follow actions. They literally cannot piece it together. Kind of related to how often correlation and causation are confused by these bumbling fucking buffoons I'm surrounded by.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170519174502/https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/09/06/hussein-link-to-911-lingers-in-many-minds/7cd31079-21d1-42cf-8651-b67e93350fde/

Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, seven in 10 Americans continue to believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks, even though the Bush administration and congressional investigators say they have no evidence of this.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it at least likely that Hussein was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to the latest Washington Post poll. That impression, which exists despite the fact that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and independents.

I'm just so fucking tired. It's literally mentally fucking exhausting to be surrounded by this many fucking idiots for four decades. It's literally bad for my mental health and I can't escape it. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills and yet I'm the one who has to go to therapy to fix myself while all these idiots get to just blithely continue to be fucking idiots.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/trump-shutdown-voter-florida

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton told Mazzei. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Fucking eat shit Crystal Minton you fucking travesty of a human being.

I think you've already answered your own question. Trump's first presidency was very different from his second. And the key difference is his advisors. No one knew how to deal with Trump in his first presidency, and the overarching pattern above the chaos was his close advisors constantly working against him to protect the system.

In the break between his terms, he found people who would follow any of his directives, no matter how stupid or damaging. Or I should say, they found him. Trump is now being manipulated himself by a group of "loyalists" who stand to gain from the exact chaos Trump was thwarted from doing the first time around. These people know enough about how the systems work to be actually dangerous. And now that his advisors are philosophically aligned with him, he's actually doing what he says he's going to do. I would argue the 4 years of a Trump reprieve may have been the worst of all possibilities, because it gave Trump and his new in-group time to find each other and prepare.

But most people weren't paying attention. Many saw Trump in 2024 just like they saw him in 2016; the counterweight, spoiler, outsider set to upset Washington and get real changes happening. They thought Democrats weren't helping them enough, and so wanted to upset the apple cart and get someone different in the high seat. They weren't paying close enough attention to see that this time was actually radically different to all elections before, and I saw many, many people dismissing the warnings as "oh everyone claims their opponents are fascists, or are going to destroy the country."

So it's a combination of people not paying attention, as usual, and Trump actually changing how he's doing things this time in the worst way possible.

Those of us that voted for Harris are not surprised. I was aghast at my fellow Americans that voted for Trump / colluded with Trump's election subversion strategies.

Trump has also somewhat admitted to Elon messing with voting machines. And I believe that one of the DOGE persons had experience in hacking election hardware early in the 21st century.

The next congressional elections will likely be subject to more subterfuge.

A Million Americans, died, badly, choking on their own fluids, unable to be near, see, or touch their loved one's when they passed, from a purposefully inept United States Federal COVID19 response, where during one of the press conferences Donald Trump suggested to an eminent virologist on live TV, that citizens might be able to use interal light therapy, or inject bleach as a treatment. What would a sentient being over the age of reason think was going to happen if he ever got a chance to take the big chair again?

The problem is, most people in the world are used to politicians lying to get elected, or not able to follow through even if they want to.

We are used to broken campaign promises, so it’s a shock when a politician who was elected because he promised nasty things actually follows through. If at least he had promised beneficial things and followed through, that would be nice, but he didn’t. You’re getting the worst scenario of campaign promise fulfillment.

Most of what trump was on about sounded so ridiculous, his base just wrote it off as 'rattling the libs'. Dems wrote him off as 'theres no way an idiot like this would get elected', twice. Both got surprised in their own way.

There's some interesting theories in this thread, but I want to bring up one that I don't see talked about much; American democracy has been so dysfunctional for so long, the average American citizen absolutely assumes they're being lied to on the campaign trail. Nobody ever believes a politician is going to accomplish even a quarter of the things they campaign on here. This is a big part of what made Trump so popular, with the line of thinking being "he's an outsider, so he'll be different." The problem then becomes one of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, Trump being an outsider should be a reason to always take what he says at its face value. On the other, Trump is a politician now, and as established, politicians always lie on the campaign trail, so why would you expect him to keep his promises?

I'm not going to pretend to understand how the average American is able to do the mental gymnastics necessary to maintain these two contradictory ideals, but I think it's important to point out that a lot of his supporters grew up with zero faith in the democratic process ever helping them.

Trump during the campaign has said a lot of things during the campaign. Some very concerning, some things appealing broadly. Some things he has said polar opposite things at consecutive campaign rallies. (You can still see it happening now with the "Ukraine started the Russian occupation" then "Russia started the Russian occupation"). Some promises he hasn't done a thing to keep, such as make life affordable. I think a lot of people were holding on to that promise.

A lot of other things he didn't promise at all, he is doing, supposedly to bury the lede. Did he ever talk about Denmark, Greenland or Panama in his 2024 campaign? We know he likes tariffs but I think the 51st state BS came about after his election.

Because most Americans don't pay attention to politics. Like at all.

Give it 30 to 60 days and the Trump Presidency will collapse.

He’s pissing off too many people. He has the lowest approval rating at this point in his Presidency. He has MAGA stalwarts like the New York Post running front page articles against his dealings with Russia.

The stock market is starting to show cracks because of his malfeasance on tariffs and his treatment of allies.

He’s going after the FBI, CIA, and every other alphabet agency. Say what you want about them, they are filled with people who now fear for their jobs in a way they have never had to. That is not how a large agency runs long term.

Finally they need to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. All things Republicans have proven incapable of on their own. At some point they will need to come and ask the Democrats for help in doing this or the government will default on the Republicans watch. At that point it will be game over. Trump will look weak and impotent.

I don’t think Trump will have taken over enough of the government to overcome all of these challenges and hold onto power on his own.

If he slows down and consolidates power maybe there will be a different outcome. But that’s not what project 2025 outlines. They want to break everything in the first 100 days. Hopefully he will have broken his own base in the process.

When he said that he could grab women "by the pussy", he followed through with it when he raped E Jean Carroll. But when he said that he "could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody", I don't think that he has so far.

It seems that his voters are thinking that he's not serious about the murder thing, but it's okay if he's serious about the rape thing, when it's quite likely that he's serious about both.

He was entertainment to them. He's like the frat brother who suddenly says "Let's do a road trip to Florida!" (from NY) and everyone just laughs and goes "Ok, sure". Then they see him loading up the car.

Trump doesn’t lie about the shitty things he wants to do. He lies about anything he’s going to do for regular people.