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Drain the swamp for sure. At which point does the ordinary MAGA hat realize Trump isn't working for them?

• cssinate 2y ago
  It's gotta be tough! When you've made that your entire personality, it's hard to drop it. You've made friends, and perhaps lost others, by being this person. To just admit "I was wrong" potentially means alienating all of their friends and family. I'd imagine it's why so many people are still so vehemently flat earthers.
  • netsharc 2y ago
    And admitting it would mean bursting the bubble of "I'm an intelligent person." (and even "a good person"). It's easier to construct a virtual reality where you're still the one with the clue and everyone else are just utter morons. Also, with everything being written down nowadays (on your social media), changing your opinion means inviting mockery of past comments being dug up to be flung at you. Then again, the idiots in power seem to have developed a thick skin for this. A little over a month ago: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/g-s1-50605/conspiracy-theories-politics-family-alternate-realities https://www.npr.org/2025/02/26/g-s1-50605/conspiracy-theorie... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43194910
    • ziddoap 2y ago
      >"changing your opinion means inviting mockery of past comments being dug up to be flung at you." This has to be one of the most damaging things about social media, in my opinion. I never really understood why changing your mind about something as you get new information is looked down on and mocked, but it is.
      • freedomben 2y ago
        Seriously. I look at people who made big transitions in opinions with more respect than I do people who have never changed. What are the odds that you'll be correct with every opinion you form the first time? It's time people starting learning Socratic Wisdom again
    • ajmurmann 2y ago
      The social issue go much beyond this. The country to a large degree has sorted itself along party lines. Changing your political opinion in either direction will likely lead to arguments with people you are close to and might get you ostracized from your friend group or even family. For most people this is much worse than being ridiculed online!
    • matwood 2y ago
      > And admitting it would mean bursting the bubble of "I'm an intelligent person." (and even "a good person"). Or, "I do my own research".
  • acdha 2y ago
    It’s especially hard when those beliefs have lead you to justify treating other people horribly. If you’ve gone around accusing people of grooming children for abuse because they thought gay or trans people deserved basic human rights, if you’ve said supporting immigration means supporting rapists and murderers, etc. it’s much harder to come back from that than if it was more traditional policy differences like whether we should have a particular tax rate. I think that’s intentional in some cases, just as with cults where pushing extreme claims and breaking outside ties makes it harder to leave.
    • sorcerer-mar 2y ago
      Yes it is quite literally a cult. It has all the key characteristics including but not limited to the ones you mention.
  • sitkack 2y ago
    This is why you keep those friends, and instead of replacing your identity, you keep it and kick out the false profits. We need a Martin Luther moment in MAGA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
    • freedomben 2y ago
      Can you say more about what a Martin Luther moment in MAGA would be? You mean like a MAGA person willing to rise up and (figuratively) nail theses to the door, aka call out the bad parts of the movement? Some people have tried and they get bounced out pretty quickly. Trump is the master at ending people for criticizing him, even lightly
• willidiots 2y ago
  I literally had a 90 year old woman approach me at the dentist yesterday, complementing my Model 3 and telling me "I just love Elon. I had a dream about him last night!" For these types, it's a cult of personality, not logic or policy. I was also at the gun range last week and overheard a conversation between two Trump supporters. They were outraged by his behavior since taking office, and said outright "if we had to vote again right now, half of us wouldn't vote for him".
  • I_dream_of_Gen1 2y ago
    [dead]
  • freedomben 2y ago
    I've heard similar sentiments expressed as well, even from a person who was a vocal advocate for Trump in this last election. He is still hoping that this is 5D chess and just very temporary pain, but after the blanket tariffs from a couple days ago he's starting to openly admit that he isn't pleased. I guess time will really tell
• petee 2y ago
  When life gets tougher and the excuses no longer line up; nobody likes to be told they're wrong, even if its objectively obvious
  • giraffe_lady 2y ago
    The excuses haven't lined up at any point really that's why they so heavily prioritized creating their own entire separate media ecosystem over the last few decades.
• ziddoap 2y ago
  "I was wrong" is really hard to say at the best of times. I sometimes struggle with it when I make a little mistake at work. Trying to say "I was wrong" after years of making your whole life, social circle, etc. about whatever thing you were wrong about is incredibly hard. It takes a very strong mental to do that. And, I wager for some/most people who fall deep into any cult-like movement (whatever it may be: conspiracies, etc.), they didn't start with a super strong mental fortitude in the first place, making it even more difficult.
  • derbOac 2y ago
    I agree completely but the thing I also find puzzling sometimes is how the public discourse seems to have forgotten about the rampant misinformation that's been going on for the last several years. Basically huge numbers of people have been lied to for a long time. It's almost as if the scope of the corruption and incompetence is so extensive that there isn't enough time to reflect on the misinformation process that everyone was so focused on for so long. Obviously not everyone succumbed to it but even today the coverage in major outlets is completely distorted. Media just accept what the administration is saying as if it still has some kind of verdicality by virtue of power, a historically unprecedented example of the fallacy of appeal to authority. People constantly arguing that the Trump administration won't actually do this or that, that it's all a bluff, and so forth, are similarly misleading. The discussions about mandates is bizarre to me for this reason, not just because of the tiny magnitude and minority nature of the electoral win, but because Trump and his administration vehemently denied doing exactly what they are currently doing. They dismissed it as insane paranoid ramblings of a deficient left. It's not just that they are failing to keep an electoral promise, they are doing the exact things they denied that they would do, and criticized their opponents for claiming they would do. I guess I bring this up because it seems to me a lot of people have basically been lied to. Being a victim has its own shame and reluctance but it seems like a more tractable — and accurate in many cases — way to engage with some people than them being wrong.
• belter 2y ago
  MAGA - Make America Go Away
  • travisgriggs 2y ago
    Man At Gaslight Again
• UncleMeat 2y ago
  My aunt shares AI-generated memes about hispanic and palestinian people crying as they are rounded up by ICE. Her key motivation above all others is making particular groups of people she hates suffer. Everything else is acceptable as long as she gets that. It's a concerning vision for the country.
  • giraffe_lady 2y ago
    Yeah it's unpopular to point this out right now but racism is a key political motivator for a lot of people, with varying degrees of awareness of that. He is working for them.
    • mrguyorama 2y ago
      The people who threw rocks at the Little Rock Nine, the first black kids let into an alabama "White's only" school are barely retired. They still vote. They never changed their mind.
      • williamscales 2y ago
        Damn, I never did the math on this. I have always been of the opinion that racism drives a lot of political behavior but this really drives home how close my US is to an even darker racist past.
        • giraffe_lady 2y ago
          The last confirmed klan-connected lynchings in the US happened in the early 1980s, so possibly within your lifetime depending on age. If not then almost certainly your parents'. We mostly stopped using the term around then, but they didn't stop happening then either.
        • mrguyorama 2y ago
          The south had plenty of politicians in open defiance of desegregation and integration, explicitly saying they would resist the tyranny of the federal government. The tyranny of being forced to treat black people equally. Countless communities across the US chose to destroy their infrastructure and amenities (specifically community pools) rather than allow their families to mingle with black people. There's an entire, well documented era of "white flight". It's a common refrain by conservative voters that "The democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", but note they've been saying this for decades, so the ones that claim "identity politics" are the reason are wrong. Meanwhile they adored Reagan's fiscal policy, which was adopted wholesale by democrats after Reagan's landslide election proved any other fiscal policy was unacceptable to Americans. So nope, that also can't be what people mean by "abandon blue collar workers". If you follow those claims back, they are from the civil rights era. When people say "Democrats abandoned the blue collar worker", whether they realize it or not, they are saying "Democrats abandoned the WHITE blue collar worker by supporting black equality and integration". This is evident if you look at the Democrat politicians who moved to the Republican party between the civil rights era and Reagan, and why they did so. They specify the civil rights act. Strom Thurmond openly switched to the republican party claiming that the Democrat's support and passing of the civil rights act and voting rights act meant they "no longer represented people like him" This is also clear if you understand the history of black people in the south. It was a core part of southern "heritage" and history that white people were inherently superior to black people. It was a common topic of Sunday sermons during the civil war era for pastors to remind their congregation that it was God's Will that the black man be enslaved by the white, since they were barbarians and the White man was supposed to guide them. This is not an exaggeration. "History not hate" is a contradiction, because the history WAS hate. Casual, institutional, systemic hate. Republicans and conservative states have endeavored to not teach this, for decades. People in the south are genuinely taught that the North started the Civil War (outright false), that slavery wasn't the issue (False, several states explicitly submitted documents saying their reasoning for secession was to protect the institution of slavery), and that it was a "state's rights" issue (False, the slave states did not care about states rights, as they attempted to enforce Slave Catching laws in Free states by using federal authority, ie the exact thing they were critiquing the north for, and more importantly, the Confederate government openly talked about dropping the Facade of "states rights" now that they had their own government and could just install an authoritarian system that guaranteed slavery as an institution). You can read all these Confederate government documents yourself. They were not shy about their intentions because it was a genuinely held belief that the white man was better than the black man.
• reverendsteveii 2y ago
  Consider how many people never realized that Jim Jones didn't have their best interests at heart and now consider that we've fully automated the process that brought those people to that point.
• wil421 2y ago
  They don’t care. I sent someone a link about NIH cutting funding for the place that created the cancer killing treatment that saved his Wife last year. “They know what they’re doing.” Is all I get from this baloney.
  • I_dream_of_Gen1 2y ago
    [dead]
• bad_user 2y ago
  Consider that we're living in a post-truth world, so you may not like the answer. With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.
• scarface_74 2y ago
  He is working for them. He hates the same people they hate and he is saving Isreal so that Jesus has some place to come back to…
• myvoiceismypass 2y ago
  It’s really embarrassing to admit when you get worked over. So, never.
• jmull 2y ago
  I would guess never. Everything bad is blamed on the "others", and the solution is more Trump. We can only hope enough of the rest of people who supported him will figure it out eventually.
• amelius 2y ago
  When the RDF loses its power, of course.