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I think it's a mistake to dismiss Trump in this way. I see Biden as a very safe and strong choice. Trump was extremely well-liked by his base. I think he is the

I think it's a mistake to dismiss Trump in this way. I see Biden as a very safe and strong choice. Trump was extremely well-liked by his base. I think he is the most magnetic candidate that Republicans have fielded since Regan. It took a huge effort, a strong and widely palatable candidate, a safe platform, a great campaign, a pandemic, mail-in voting, all the pooled power of the tech companies, and a lot of luck to take him down. Seeing how difficult it was just cements it for me that I am in a bubble and that tens of millions of people have very different worldviews and values than I do. It is very hard to admit to myself that my core values might not be widely shared by others.

bra-ket 6y ago
Trump has been blatantly slandered by the mainstream media as racist evil orange man, it was 4 years of '1984' style brainwashing by the left. Everything else is secondary when the media controls the masses like 'Ministry of Truth' in some dystopian novel. Just watch real-time CNN headlines when president Trump speaks on ANY subject. One of the big reasons for voting Trump was standing up against this propaganda machine, lies, censorship and intimidation. 70M people thankfully did just that, which gives hope in the future of this country.
- Freestyler_3 6y ago
  And it worked, and all the media outside the USA ate everything up too. Thank you for speaking up.
- gnaritas 6y ago
  It's not slander when it's true, it's just reporting. 75M people thankfully see through his con man act, and override the 70 million rubes that can't see it and incorrectly assume the entire media is wrong and Trump is right rather than seeing the obvious, Trump is exactly what the media says he is. Nor is this a surprise, he's been a known con since the mid 1980's.
- dash2 6y ago
  Yes, but the media and the left also said that George W Bush was terrible. Trump was different: he really did say outrageous things, like "hell, yeah we should torture them", or saying "Mexicans are rapists", or calling McCain a loser for being captured. Or think about his dismissal of Covid. That's not propaganda. Or his self-dealing in the White House. None of these things were invented. There's a liberal mainstream establishment in the US, which will always want to bash conservatives. Trump presented a very large target to them. They quite fairly took aim at it.
  - Daishiman 6y ago
    George W Bush started the Iraq war on a false pretext of lies and personal motives. I have no idea how you wouldn't say that's terrible.
    - dash2 6y ago
      That wasn't my point. My point was just that all presidents face attacks from the other side. Parent was talking as if Trump had been unfairly victimized.
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        Perhaps then the issue is you don't care that GWB started a war on false pretexts but other people do.
        dash2 6y ago
        No, I care about that and indeed demonstrated against the Iraq war :-)
  - treis 6y ago
    >They quite fairly took aim at it. Not really. They twisted his words into the worse possible interpretation and then took aim at that. Like your Mexicans are rapists quote. That's not what he said. Here's the quote: >The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
- hilbertseries 6y ago
  Trumps record speaks for itself when it comes to racism. Whether it’s his full page add in the nytimes condemning the Central Park five. His history of evicting people of color. His continual refusal to condemn white supremacy, or “very fine people on both sides”. He’s not a full blown white supremacist, he is willing to work with people of color when it suits him. But the idea that the media is lying about his racist tendencies is a refusal of facts. Which is a core trait of Trump, to refuse facts. That he won in a “landslide” despite losing the popular vote in 2016, he claimed today to have won the election right when it was called. Trump lies at such a high rate that you appear biased if you always correct him.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    He won an NAACP award.
    - sophacles 6y ago
      An NAACP award that had nothing to do with him being a racist or not: > Trump was among the first group of Americans to be given the award, which recognized people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who have made significant contributions to the country, Otto Coca, communications director for the Ellis Island Honors Society told The Associated Press Monday. But Trump was honored for his work as a successful developer in New York City and his German heritage, Coca said, not for helping inner city youth. From: https://apnews.com/article/2601590439 https://apnews.com/article/2601590439
      - formerly_proven 6y ago
        EIHS seems to be unaffiliated with the NAACP.
      - nemo44x 6y ago
        What does that have to do with it? Why would they give an award, or any recognition, to a racist? So you have to help inner city youth to not be a racist? Why would the NAACP give a racist anything?
  - 6y ago
- Daishiman 6y ago
  He wasn't slandered. It is an objective fact that he's racist and a person without moral compass or character. I wonder, have you ever actually listened to him? Have you seen and heard the things he himself has been proud of? Have you seen how he ran his own businesses?
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > He wasn't slandered. It is an objective fact that he's racist and a person without moral compass or character. Also grossly incompetent, ignorant, and incurious. It seems the only talents he ever had were inherited wealth and marketing himself.
    - krapp 6y ago
      > It seems the only talents he ever had were inherited wealth and marketing himself. One of those isn't a talent, but yes. Although he also married wealth, so that might be a talent of sorts. His business record is a string of failures, lawsuits and bankruptcies, his greatest cultural notoriety prior to election was playing parodies of himself on television, his greatest political accomplishment was running for President in 2000 as a Reform Party Candidate and losing, and he didn't even write The Art of the Deal.
      - ardy42 6y ago
        > One of those isn't a talent, but yes. I know. I was making a bit of joke there. > Although he also married wealth, so that might be a talent of sorts. He did? I was under the impression he just married models, who I assumed where in to him because of his reputation for being rich.
  - fairity 6y ago
    Trump being racist is not an objective fact. Calling someone a racist always involves a degree of mind reading that’s impossible to prove. You’re claiming that his racist remarks prove he holds racist beliefs. It’s possible that his racist remarks are driven entirely by his desire to appear blasphemous and be divisive.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  You are exactly right but in a way the election is as good as an outcome as one could hope. Regardless of his policies and how slandered he was, Trump was way too divisive and ego-centric for the country. It is a good thing he is going away. The woke culture police also got a licking, hopefully the democrats can abandon that poisonous garbage and get back to basics. If not, absent the gift of the most repulsive oponent maybe ever, they will absolutely be cruhed in 2024.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  I literally have only read and listened to Trump's words the last 4 years. I don't have cable and don't watch that news. His words speak for themself.
  - ookblah 6y ago
    Seriously, all these mental gymnastics of how the media is portraying him and what not is interesting. Like just reading his twitter feed with zero context and I can already tell.
- nullsense 6y ago
  >One of the big reasons for voting Trump was standing up against this propaganda machine, lies, censorship and intimidation. 70M people thankfully did just that, which gives hope in the future of this country. I'm not from the US, nor do I live there. As an outsider looking in I felt Trump and all his crazy ramblings to be a real fall from grace for America. I felt very much like "wow, America has really lost its way electing this guy".
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I'm not from the US, nor do I live there. As an outsider looking in I felt Trump and all his crazy ramblings to be a real fall from grace for America. I felt very much like "wow, America has really lost its way electing this guy". Exactly. I think Trump marked the end of America being seen as any kind of "shining city on the hill" (to use Reagan's phrase). He was and is a giant embarrassment for America, even if many Americans don't realize it or don't care. I say that as a relatively nonpartisan American with many immigrant friends.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      You are not out of the woods yet, but you came very close of being the richest, most powerful banana republic in history. And that's insanely dangerous, for everyone else too. BTW, they did change the launch codes, right?
- nemo44x 6y ago
  Perhaps but it isn’t like he didn’t pick a lot of these fights. He constantly delegitimized them, do you think they wouldn’t strike back and pour as much mud as they could on him? I actually liked a good deal of his policies and some I found ridiculous and others awful. But how you speak matters. He set himself up to be mocked and ridiculed. He picked fights as much or more as they came to him. I get it - he was “playing to his base”. But I don’t think he was. In fact I think it got to a point his base controlled him. He just couldn’t help being repulsive to a lot of people, media or not. It’s sad too because he could have been great. He was independent and free from obligations to either party. But he couldn't get out of his own way. He couldn’t act “presidential”. He should have picked his battles better instead of making everything into one. It gets tiring. And that is why he lost.
samiru 6y ago
I agree. I also have a hunch that you are in a very different bubble than I am, and the worldview that I convey from your bubble does not make sense to me at all. I think I used to be in ”your” bubble when I was a lot younger.
rbanffy 6y ago
> and values This, to me, is the deeply disturbing part. Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp is not something that's easy to dismiss. The US will have a difficult time. It'll get much worse before it gets better.
- lodovic 6y ago
  > Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp That is a really silly statement. What group are you talking about?
- loughnane 6y ago
  > Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp is not something that's easy to dismiss. There’s a high burden of proof for such a statement. Surely you don’t believe every single Trump voter would do such a thing.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Whoever votes for Trump is OK with the treatment given to immigrant and asylum-seeking children by the CBP and the ICE. They can't get Trump's economics without the abhorrent policies on human rights.
    - loughnane 6y ago
      Do you think we live in a world where every voter completely endorses every opinion and inclination of the candidate for whom they cast their vote? Certainly there is a contingent of his voting base that represents what you describe, but to ascribe those characteristics doesn't hold, not least of which because voters had two choices, not many. Direct your ire at Trump all you want since by definition he holds all the views you describe, but leave the stereotyping somewhere else.
- syshum 6y ago
  >> Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp Ohh please, you do realize the calling 70 million people nazi's is one of the reasons they reject the democrat party right? and it is delusional to believe. There is wide range of policies the people in the "evil red states" reject from the democrat platform that has nothing to do with race, sex, or sexual orientation no matter how much the identity politics people want to make people believe these are the only reasons they reject democrat polices how about you take the some time to step out of your bubble and learn about some of the actual reasons people reject democrats, as a start take a stroll over to Reason Foundation... Read a Few things, start with https://reason.com/2020/11/06/socialism-2020-trump-biden-rebuke-left/ https://reason.com/2020/11/06/socialism-2020-trump-biden-reb...
3131s 6y ago
> all the pooled power of the tech companies Here's a start. It's not an advantage to have these criminals try to tell everyone what to think. Anybody with half a brain wants to see them in jail, rather than in a position to curate our realities.

bra-ket 6y ago

Trump has been blatantly slandered by the mainstream media as racist evil orange man, it was 4 years of '1984' style brainwashing by the left. Everything else is secondary when the media controls the masses like 'Ministry of Truth' in some dystopian novel. Just watch real-time CNN headlines when president Trump speaks on ANY subject. One of the big reasons for voting Trump was standing up against this propaganda machine, lies, censorship and intimidation. 70M people thankfully did just that, which gives hope in the future of this country.

Freestyler_3 6y ago
And it worked, and all the media outside the USA ate everything up too. Thank you for speaking up.
gnaritas 6y ago
It's not slander when it's true, it's just reporting. 75M people thankfully see through his con man act, and override the 70 million rubes that can't see it and incorrectly assume the entire media is wrong and Trump is right rather than seeing the obvious, Trump is exactly what the media says he is. Nor is this a surprise, he's been a known con since the mid 1980's.
dash2 6y ago
Yes, but the media and the left also said that George W Bush was terrible. Trump was different: he really did say outrageous things, like "hell, yeah we should torture them", or saying "Mexicans are rapists", or calling McCain a loser for being captured. Or think about his dismissal of Covid. That's not propaganda. Or his self-dealing in the White House. None of these things were invented. There's a liberal mainstream establishment in the US, which will always want to bash conservatives. Trump presented a very large target to them. They quite fairly took aim at it.
- Daishiman 6y ago
  George W Bush started the Iraq war on a false pretext of lies and personal motives. I have no idea how you wouldn't say that's terrible.
  - dash2 6y ago
    That wasn't my point. My point was just that all presidents face attacks from the other side. Parent was talking as if Trump had been unfairly victimized.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      Perhaps then the issue is you don't care that GWB started a war on false pretexts but other people do.
      - dash2 6y ago
        No, I care about that and indeed demonstrated against the Iraq war :-)
- treis 6y ago
  >They quite fairly took aim at it. Not really. They twisted his words into the worse possible interpretation and then took aim at that. Like your Mexicans are rapists quote. That's not what he said. Here's the quote: >The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems. Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
hilbertseries 6y ago
Trumps record speaks for itself when it comes to racism. Whether it’s his full page add in the nytimes condemning the Central Park five. His history of evicting people of color. His continual refusal to condemn white supremacy, or “very fine people on both sides”. He’s not a full blown white supremacist, he is willing to work with people of color when it suits him. But the idea that the media is lying about his racist tendencies is a refusal of facts. Which is a core trait of Trump, to refuse facts. That he won in a “landslide” despite losing the popular vote in 2016, he claimed today to have won the election right when it was called. Trump lies at such a high rate that you appear biased if you always correct him.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  He won an NAACP award.
  - sophacles 6y ago
    An NAACP award that had nothing to do with him being a racist or not: > Trump was among the first group of Americans to be given the award, which recognized people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who have made significant contributions to the country, Otto Coca, communications director for the Ellis Island Honors Society told The Associated Press Monday. But Trump was honored for his work as a successful developer in New York City and his German heritage, Coca said, not for helping inner city youth. From: https://apnews.com/article/2601590439 https://apnews.com/article/2601590439
    - formerly_proven 6y ago
      EIHS seems to be unaffiliated with the NAACP.
    - nemo44x 6y ago
      What does that have to do with it? Why would they give an award, or any recognition, to a racist? So you have to help inner city youth to not be a racist? Why would the NAACP give a racist anything?
- 6y ago
Daishiman 6y ago
He wasn't slandered. It is an objective fact that he's racist and a person without moral compass or character. I wonder, have you ever actually listened to him? Have you seen and heard the things he himself has been proud of? Have you seen how he ran his own businesses?
- ardy42 6y ago
  > He wasn't slandered. It is an objective fact that he's racist and a person without moral compass or character. Also grossly incompetent, ignorant, and incurious. It seems the only talents he ever had were inherited wealth and marketing himself.
  - krapp 6y ago
    > It seems the only talents he ever had were inherited wealth and marketing himself. One of those isn't a talent, but yes. Although he also married wealth, so that might be a talent of sorts. His business record is a string of failures, lawsuits and bankruptcies, his greatest cultural notoriety prior to election was playing parodies of himself on television, his greatest political accomplishment was running for President in 2000 as a Reform Party Candidate and losing, and he didn't even write The Art of the Deal.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > One of those isn't a talent, but yes. I know. I was making a bit of joke there. > Although he also married wealth, so that might be a talent of sorts. He did? I was under the impression he just married models, who I assumed where in to him because of his reputation for being rich.
- fairity 6y ago
  Trump being racist is not an objective fact. Calling someone a racist always involves a degree of mind reading that’s impossible to prove. You’re claiming that his racist remarks prove he holds racist beliefs. It’s possible that his racist remarks are driven entirely by his desire to appear blasphemous and be divisive.
zarkov99 6y ago
You are exactly right but in a way the election is as good as an outcome as one could hope. Regardless of his policies and how slandered he was, Trump was way too divisive and ego-centric for the country. It is a good thing he is going away. The woke culture police also got a licking, hopefully the democrats can abandon that poisonous garbage and get back to basics. If not, absent the gift of the most repulsive oponent maybe ever, they will absolutely be cruhed in 2024.
whateveracct 6y ago
I literally have only read and listened to Trump's words the last 4 years. I don't have cable and don't watch that news. His words speak for themself.
- ookblah 6y ago
  Seriously, all these mental gymnastics of how the media is portraying him and what not is interesting. Like just reading his twitter feed with zero context and I can already tell.
nullsense 6y ago
>One of the big reasons for voting Trump was standing up against this propaganda machine, lies, censorship and intimidation. 70M people thankfully did just that, which gives hope in the future of this country. I'm not from the US, nor do I live there. As an outsider looking in I felt Trump and all his crazy ramblings to be a real fall from grace for America. I felt very much like "wow, America has really lost its way electing this guy".
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I'm not from the US, nor do I live there. As an outsider looking in I felt Trump and all his crazy ramblings to be a real fall from grace for America. I felt very much like "wow, America has really lost its way electing this guy". Exactly. I think Trump marked the end of America being seen as any kind of "shining city on the hill" (to use Reagan's phrase). He was and is a giant embarrassment for America, even if many Americans don't realize it or don't care. I say that as a relatively nonpartisan American with many immigrant friends.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    You are not out of the woods yet, but you came very close of being the richest, most powerful banana republic in history. And that's insanely dangerous, for everyone else too. BTW, they did change the launch codes, right?
nemo44x 6y ago
Perhaps but it isn’t like he didn’t pick a lot of these fights. He constantly delegitimized them, do you think they wouldn’t strike back and pour as much mud as they could on him? I actually liked a good deal of his policies and some I found ridiculous and others awful. But how you speak matters. He set himself up to be mocked and ridiculed. He picked fights as much or more as they came to him. I get it - he was “playing to his base”. But I don’t think he was. In fact I think it got to a point his base controlled him. He just couldn’t help being repulsive to a lot of people, media or not. It’s sad too because he could have been great. He was independent and free from obligations to either party. But he couldn't get out of his own way. He couldn’t act “presidential”. He should have picked his battles better instead of making everything into one. It gets tiring. And that is why he lost.

samiru 6y ago

I agree. I also have a hunch that you are in a very different bubble than I am, and the worldview that I convey from your bubble does not make sense to me at all. I think I used to be in ”your” bubble when I was a lot younger.

rbanffy 6y ago

> and values This, to me, is the deeply disturbing part. Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp is not something that's easy to dismiss. The US will have a difficult time. It'll get much worse before it gets better.

lodovic 6y ago
> Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp That is a really silly statement. What group are you talking about?
loughnane 6y ago
> Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp is not something that's easy to dismiss. There’s a high burden of proof for such a statement. Surely you don’t believe every single Trump voter would do such a thing.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Whoever votes for Trump is OK with the treatment given to immigrant and asylum-seeking children by the CBP and the ICE. They can't get Trump's economics without the abhorrent policies on human rights.
  - loughnane 6y ago
    Do you think we live in a world where every voter completely endorses every opinion and inclination of the candidate for whom they cast their vote? Certainly there is a contingent of his voting base that represents what you describe, but to ascribe those characteristics doesn't hold, not least of which because voters had two choices, not many. Direct your ire at Trump all you want since by definition he holds all the views you describe, but leave the stereotyping somewhere else.
syshum 6y ago
>> Knowing 70 million people would happily drive me to a concentration camp Ohh please, you do realize the calling 70 million people nazi's is one of the reasons they reject the democrat party right? and it is delusional to believe. There is wide range of policies the people in the "evil red states" reject from the democrat platform that has nothing to do with race, sex, or sexual orientation no matter how much the identity politics people want to make people believe these are the only reasons they reject democrat polices how about you take the some time to step out of your bubble and learn about some of the actual reasons people reject democrats, as a start take a stroll over to Reason Foundation... Read a Few things, start with https://reason.com/2020/11/06/socialism-2020-trump-biden-rebuke-left/ https://reason.com/2020/11/06/socialism-2020-trump-biden-reb...

3131s 6y ago

> all the pooled power of the tech companies Here's a start. It's not an advantage to have these criminals try to tell everyone what to think. Anybody with half a brain wants to see them in jail, rather than in a position to curate our realities.