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>world leaders don’t speak that kind of truth to a power like America unless they mean it. I mean the damage has already been done. By electing Trump a second

>world leaders don’t speak that kind of truth to a power like America unless they mean it. I mean the damage has already been done. By electing Trump a second time, Americans have sent the world a clear and unambiguous message that it wasn't a fluke: They clearly don't want our friendship or value the treaties they've signed. This is merely Carney calling a spade, a spade.

TacticalCoder 8mo ago
> ... By electing Trump a second time, Americans have sent the world a clear and unambiguous message That's how you read it. But the Trump election was americans sending other americans a clear an unambiguous message.
- roxolotl 8mo ago
  The other piece though is they sent an unintentional message to the rest of the world that American political system is hijackable in a way they ought to be concerned about.
  - user32489318 8mo ago
    Not American here. Reading your guys replies it almost feels like you are rejecting the existence of Trump supporters or invalidating their stance. Doesn’t this enforce their argument and created this situation in th first place?
    - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
      Correct. Trump is an accurate representation of the median American voter. Progressive anericans refuse to accept that. Why they won’t accept that is anyone’s guess.
      - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > Trump is an accurate representation of the median American voter On foreign policy? Probably not. Like, Biden wasn’t an accurate representation of the median American voter on e.g. transgender kids in school sports. That wasn’t just right-wing delusion.
        AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
        My point is that Trump is actually probably more representative of the median voter than Biden or any other previous president has been.
        JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > My point is that Trump is actually probably more representative of the median voter than Biden or any other previous president has been Why? You haven’t actually argued that point.
        AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
        Because he’s telling Americans exactly how he’s going to oppress and punish them, doing it publicly with no remorse and a patina of lying, and people still supporting
      - pianopatrick 8mo ago
        "median American voter" implies a distribution of views like a normal distribution, with a lot of people in the middle and a few people on extremes. If that is the distribution, then the median is representative of most people. I am not sure that is really a great way of thinking about American voters these days. It seems to me that American's views on many issues are tending to cluster around extremes, with fewer people in the middle. So I am not sure the median is as meaningful.
        AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    - bonsai_spool 8mo ago
      > rejecting the existence of Trump supporters or invalidating their stance I think the problem is that if you read what people say about why they voted for Trump, it becomes clear that an echo chamber is at least as salient to these voters as traditional Republican motivations. I am unsurprised about the 2024 election and it's exactly what you'd imagine from a purely economic perspective. The 2016 election, however, has been studied extensively, and it's clear that several aberrations (large contingent of Republican candidates, the first black president, Facebook, Comey) tipped things in a way that you wouldn't expect if voters are acting rationally. So as someone who genuinely wishes to understand how people think about things, I don't know what's going on here. I can't tell what new lie will be pushed next week to distract us from the recently-disproven lie of last week. Were I outside all of this, I would have very little hope. (edit: re sibling poster, Trump is not a representative of the median voter but instead a representative of the median electoral college elector. We can't have it both ways, rejecting the popular vote and then failing to acknowledge that our politics represent the electors and not the man on the street)
      - NamlchakKhandro 8mo ago
        > I think the problem is that if you read what people say about why they voted for Trump, it becomes clear that an echo chamber is at least as salient to these voters as traditional Republican motivations. same can be said about people on the opposite side.
        bonsai_spool 8mo ago
        > same can be said about people on the opposite side. This is not true - the things that traditional Democrats supported in 1992 are largely the same things supported now. The point is not the echo chamber. The point is that the echo chamber has changed the party orthodoxy.
        nailer 8mo ago
        > the things that traditional Democrats supported in 1992 are largely the same things supported now. No. See Bernie Sanders in 2015 talking about how America needs strong borders and illegal immigrants are used by big business to rip American workers off. See Obama’s speech on the same. See positions on trans identifying males in women’s sports. See open support for hiring based on sex and race. Many democrat positions from 20 years ago are now considered right wing.
    - 1shooner 8mo ago
      > invalidating their stance This is perhaps true to an extent. But what is also true to an unprecedented extent for Americans is that this 'stance' is almost pure demagoguery. For many, there is no 'stance', their 'stance' is Trump, whether he hews close to a principle or completely contradicts it.
- wrs 8mo ago
  I have to say as an “other American” I’m still having a lot of trouble reading the supposedly unambiguous message. Was it “Hold my beer?”
  - PlanksVariable 8mo ago
    The first message is “don’t open the border.” People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else. If there weren’t videos of thousands of people streaming across the border every day during Biden’s presidency, we wouldn’t be dealing with Trump 2.0 today. Second, don’t announce to the world you’re limiting your VP search to Black women, or any other Constitution-violating hiring criteria. Americans are tired of identity politics. And you’ve done a disservice to your running mate because they’ll be labeled as a “DEI hire” instead of the best person for the job. Third, don’t nominate an idiot as your running mate. Fourth, don’t force the idiot running mate on the world as a presidential candidate because you hid the president’s cognitive decline until the last possible moment in a humiliating live TV debate. I could go on, but you probably get the message.
    - jeromegv 8mo ago
      If Trump only hires people best for the job, why am I only seeing old white men next to him 99% of the time? Are they the best of the best?
      - PlanksVariable 8mo ago
        Who said Trump hires the best people for the job? That’s not what I said.
        defrost 8mo ago
        The message sent, perhaps more accurately, was that the USofA electorate fully bought into the Trump / Project 2025 framing of the "problems" facing the USofA. eg: > People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else. And yet recently prior administrations famously did enforce contempory border protections and prioritised chasing down people with actual criminal records. Past administrations, eg. the Republican Eisenhower, have been in favour of open borders for the cheap labour and boost to the agricultural industry. His often cited border enforcement operation was undertaken at the request of the Mexican government who were losing labor to US agribusiness. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback All that aside, the USofA Democrat party has a messaging and PR problem of epic proportions and the USofA has spiralled into a two party Hotelling's Law cesspit despite the founders largely disliking party politics - a fundemental flaw in the forward iteration of an "adequate for now" electoral system centuries old.
- Paradigma11 8mo ago
  The US voters didn't care what the election meant to the rest of the world and the rest of the world doesn't care what it meant to US voters.
  - mlrtime 8mo ago
    I was thinking the same. It's just a hunch, but very few people vote on what the rest of the world thinks of the candidate that they vote for. They think, how this president will serve me and my family.
knubie 8mo ago
> They clearly don't want our friendship or value the treaties they've signed. Let's be honest, Europeans haven't valued their "friendship" with America since the end of the cold war.
- rfrey 8mo ago
  That's certainly Trump's claim, along with the Norway/Denmark joint government issuing Nobel prizes.
- dh2022 8mo ago
  Europeans volunteered troops in Afghanistan to help America fight Al-Quaida. When America was not right about invading Iraq, European nations tried to help America to see the truth. When America took on Libyan dictator Kadhafi European nations provided some air support. Europe helped America when they could and when they thought it was the right thing to do.
  - mlrtime 8mo ago
    After 9/11, America had a brief moment of world support that we royalty screwed up. But that was only because we were attacked. Besides that its all nations for themselves. And even today, if the UK or Germany [just examples] were attacked in the same way, America would send troops under the same circumstances.
- koonsolo 8mo ago
  Do you feel Europeans have a better friendship with Canada for example? I mean before Trump was elected of course.
PlanksVariable 8mo ago
The American people had two options in November: - Kamala Harris, a terribly unqualified candidate who was appointed by the Democratic Party without a primary vote, who couldn’t clearly communicate basic policy positions, and who served as “the border czar” while the Biden administration dismantled the border protection agency and ushered in almost four years of a de facto open Southern border, which was very unpopular with most voters. - Donald Trump, who was a known quantity, who riled people up and said things that were offensive, but didn’t actually do anything catastrophic in his first term and was mostly harmless by virtue of being ineffective. These were far and away the worst two candidates of my lifetime. But among the Americans who voted for Trump, I doubt many expected the administration to simultaneously be this much more unhinged and impactful a second time around.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > Both were bad options. Few expected a Trump administration would simultaneously be this unhinged and impactful this time around He led an insurrection against our Constitution. He went along with folks who legitimately aimed to murder Senators. Venezuela voted for Chavez. Gaza for Hamas. America for Trump.
  - PlanksVariable 8mo ago
    “He led an insurrection against our Constitution” is extremely hyperbolic.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed The Electoral College is a Constitutional body. The Vice President, in his electoral duties, a Constitutional officer. These are limited roles with specific aims and they were directly, explicitly and violently attacked. The men who called for hanging the Vice President never repented and were pardoned.
      - deleted 8mo ago
analog31 8mo ago
A loss of the popular vote, followed by a near toss-up, was hardly a clear message. Roughly half of us didn't intend to send that message, and if polls are an indicator, even fewer now. I'm mad about the election and what it seems to say about us, but I still haven't completely lost faith in the American people.
- philistine 8mo ago
  Let me be clear; the rest of the world no longer trusts your type of American to fix your country. After Trump 1, maybe. Trump 2, that's it. We'll start to untangle our commitments to you and look elsewhere.
  - analog31 8mo ago
    What was my type of American supposed to have done? This is a sincere question, since I'm racking my brain over it. People debate this with one another constantly. We may have more common cause with you than it might seem on the surface. Also, what commitments? Since this is a tech centric forum, the easy guess would be breaking the dominance of the US tech industry. I'm a cheerleader for that effort.
    - aoeusnth1 8mo ago
      Nothing. American empire isn't yours to control - people can hate what America is doing without recommending any personal change to your involvement in it.
      - analog31 8mo ago
        That's fair, but I'm open to change. In fact, coincidentally, my wife and I were talking about it tonight. We feel frustrated that we might not have done enough.
        UncleMeat 8mo ago
        These are a few ideas. My guess is that people on HN make a lot of money. Finding effective places to donate it is useful. While this won't be able to directly influence international saber rattling, it can still help protect people from Trump's criminal presidency. Donate to organizations that provide legal information and legal defense to people at risk of abuse by ICE. Donate to organizations that provide food for people who are frightened to leave their homes because of ICE. Donate to organizations that provide food to people who are threatened by SNAP funding changes. Donate to independent media organizations that are willing to aggressively criticize the Trump administration. If thinking internationally, donate to organizations that target problems that USAID was targeting before being gutted. For political change we need two things: democrats to win in 2026 and 2028 and democrats to have the guts to dismantle the systems that enabled Trump and charge people involved for their crimes. Existing dem leadership is clearly not willing to do this. So we need involvement starting at the local level all the way up to replace dem leadership with people with guts. Find community groups involved in local elections. If you live in a region where ICE is highly active, document. Making their crimes undeniable to as many people as possible is what will shift public opinion so much that a new government will be forced to act.
palmotea 8mo ago
> I mean the damage has already been done. By electing Trump a second time, Americans have sent the world a clear and unambiguous message that it wasn't a fluke: They clearly don't want our friendship or value the treaties they've signed. Come on. Americans sent no such signal. No US election in my lifetime has been about foreign policy, including the last one. Domestic issues are by far predominant. What really happened was a lot of people were unhappy with a lot of different things, and enough of them rolled the dice on Trump again, because he was the only other choice (and the Democrats decided to rely on his negatives as their complete electoral strategy, which was stupid).
- honzabe 8mo ago
  > Come on. Americans sent no such signal. No US election in my lifetime has been about foreign policy, including the last one. Domestic issues are by far predominant. Guess what, we also care about domestic issues more. Except in smaller countries, your election might have a bigger impact on our fate than our own elections. We only want to live our lives and take care of our families... and then you elect the president who starts helping our worst enemy, and then even threatens our neighbor. Our soldiers bled and died for you in Iraq and Afghanistan. Please, try to put yourself in our shoes. Imagine you live in one of those small countries that always tried to be a good ally to the US, and you get stabbed in the back, and then you hear an American basically saying, “come on, we don’t care about you, we only care about ourselves”. How would you react?

TacticalCoder 8mo ago

> ... By electing Trump a second time, Americans have sent the world a clear and unambiguous message That's how you read it. But the Trump election was americans sending other americans a clear an unambiguous message.

roxolotl 8mo ago
The other piece though is they sent an unintentional message to the rest of the world that American political system is hijackable in a way they ought to be concerned about.
- user32489318 8mo ago
  Not American here. Reading your guys replies it almost feels like you are rejecting the existence of Trump supporters or invalidating their stance. Doesn’t this enforce their argument and created this situation in th first place?
  - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    Correct. Trump is an accurate representation of the median American voter. Progressive anericans refuse to accept that. Why they won’t accept that is anyone’s guess.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > Trump is an accurate representation of the median American voter On foreign policy? Probably not. Like, Biden wasn’t an accurate representation of the median American voter on e.g. transgender kids in school sports. That wasn’t just right-wing delusion.
      - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
        My point is that Trump is actually probably more representative of the median voter than Biden or any other previous president has been.
        JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > My point is that Trump is actually probably more representative of the median voter than Biden or any other previous president has been Why? You haven’t actually argued that point.
        AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
        Because he’s telling Americans exactly how he’s going to oppress and punish them, doing it publicly with no remorse and a patina of lying, and people still supporting
    - pianopatrick 8mo ago
      "median American voter" implies a distribution of views like a normal distribution, with a lot of people in the middle and a few people on extremes. If that is the distribution, then the median is representative of most people. I am not sure that is really a great way of thinking about American voters these days. It seems to me that American's views on many issues are tending to cluster around extremes, with fewer people in the middle. So I am not sure the median is as meaningful.
      - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
  - bonsai_spool 8mo ago
    > rejecting the existence of Trump supporters or invalidating their stance I think the problem is that if you read what people say about why they voted for Trump, it becomes clear that an echo chamber is at least as salient to these voters as traditional Republican motivations. I am unsurprised about the 2024 election and it's exactly what you'd imagine from a purely economic perspective. The 2016 election, however, has been studied extensively, and it's clear that several aberrations (large contingent of Republican candidates, the first black president, Facebook, Comey) tipped things in a way that you wouldn't expect if voters are acting rationally. So as someone who genuinely wishes to understand how people think about things, I don't know what's going on here. I can't tell what new lie will be pushed next week to distract us from the recently-disproven lie of last week. Were I outside all of this, I would have very little hope. (edit: re sibling poster, Trump is not a representative of the median voter but instead a representative of the median electoral college elector. We can't have it both ways, rejecting the popular vote and then failing to acknowledge that our politics represent the electors and not the man on the street)
    - NamlchakKhandro 8mo ago
      > I think the problem is that if you read what people say about why they voted for Trump, it becomes clear that an echo chamber is at least as salient to these voters as traditional Republican motivations. same can be said about people on the opposite side.
      - bonsai_spool 8mo ago
        > same can be said about people on the opposite side. This is not true - the things that traditional Democrats supported in 1992 are largely the same things supported now. The point is not the echo chamber. The point is that the echo chamber has changed the party orthodoxy.
        nailer 8mo ago
        > the things that traditional Democrats supported in 1992 are largely the same things supported now. No. See Bernie Sanders in 2015 talking about how America needs strong borders and illegal immigrants are used by big business to rip American workers off. See Obama’s speech on the same. See positions on trans identifying males in women’s sports. See open support for hiring based on sex and race. Many democrat positions from 20 years ago are now considered right wing.
  - 1shooner 8mo ago
    > invalidating their stance This is perhaps true to an extent. But what is also true to an unprecedented extent for Americans is that this 'stance' is almost pure demagoguery. For many, there is no 'stance', their 'stance' is Trump, whether he hews close to a principle or completely contradicts it.
wrs 8mo ago
I have to say as an “other American” I’m still having a lot of trouble reading the supposedly unambiguous message. Was it “Hold my beer?”
- PlanksVariable 8mo ago
  The first message is “don’t open the border.” People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else. If there weren’t videos of thousands of people streaming across the border every day during Biden’s presidency, we wouldn’t be dealing with Trump 2.0 today. Second, don’t announce to the world you’re limiting your VP search to Black women, or any other Constitution-violating hiring criteria. Americans are tired of identity politics. And you’ve done a disservice to your running mate because they’ll be labeled as a “DEI hire” instead of the best person for the job. Third, don’t nominate an idiot as your running mate. Fourth, don’t force the idiot running mate on the world as a presidential candidate because you hid the president’s cognitive decline until the last possible moment in a humiliating live TV debate. I could go on, but you probably get the message.
  - jeromegv 8mo ago
    If Trump only hires people best for the job, why am I only seeing old white men next to him 99% of the time? Are they the best of the best?
    - PlanksVariable 8mo ago
      Who said Trump hires the best people for the job? That’s not what I said.
      - defrost 8mo ago
        The message sent, perhaps more accurately, was that the USofA electorate fully bought into the Trump / Project 2025 framing of the "problems" facing the USofA. eg: > People don’t want an open border. Not in America, not anywhere else. And yet recently prior administrations famously did enforce contempory border protections and prioritised chasing down people with actual criminal records. Past administrations, eg. the Republican Eisenhower, have been in favour of open borders for the cheap labour and boost to the agricultural industry. His often cited border enforcement operation was undertaken at the request of the Mexican government who were losing labor to US agribusiness. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback All that aside, the USofA Democrat party has a messaging and PR problem of epic proportions and the USofA has spiralled into a two party Hotelling's Law cesspit despite the founders largely disliking party politics - a fundemental flaw in the forward iteration of an "adequate for now" electoral system centuries old.
Paradigma11 8mo ago
The US voters didn't care what the election meant to the rest of the world and the rest of the world doesn't care what it meant to US voters.
- mlrtime 8mo ago
  I was thinking the same. It's just a hunch, but very few people vote on what the rest of the world thinks of the candidate that they vote for. They think, how this president will serve me and my family.

knubie 8mo ago

> They clearly don't want our friendship or value the treaties they've signed. Let's be honest, Europeans haven't valued their "friendship" with America since the end of the cold war.

rfrey 8mo ago
That's certainly Trump's claim, along with the Norway/Denmark joint government issuing Nobel prizes.
dh2022 8mo ago
Europeans volunteered troops in Afghanistan to help America fight Al-Quaida. When America was not right about invading Iraq, European nations tried to help America to see the truth. When America took on Libyan dictator Kadhafi European nations provided some air support. Europe helped America when they could and when they thought it was the right thing to do.
- mlrtime 8mo ago
  After 9/11, America had a brief moment of world support that we royalty screwed up. But that was only because we were attacked. Besides that its all nations for themselves. And even today, if the UK or Germany [just examples] were attacked in the same way, America would send troops under the same circumstances.
koonsolo 8mo ago
Do you feel Europeans have a better friendship with Canada for example? I mean before Trump was elected of course.

PlanksVariable 8mo ago

The American people had two options in November: - Kamala Harris, a terribly unqualified candidate who was appointed by the Democratic Party without a primary vote, who couldn’t clearly communicate basic policy positions, and who served as “the border czar” while the Biden administration dismantled the border protection agency and ushered in almost four years of a de facto open Southern border, which was very unpopular with most voters. - Donald Trump, who was a known quantity, who riled people up and said things that were offensive, but didn’t actually do anything catastrophic in his first term and was mostly harmless by virtue of being ineffective. These were far and away the worst two candidates of my lifetime. But among the Americans who voted for Trump, I doubt many expected the administration to simultaneously be this much more unhinged and impactful a second time around.

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> Both were bad options. Few expected a Trump administration would simultaneously be this unhinged and impactful this time around He led an insurrection against our Constitution. He went along with folks who legitimately aimed to murder Senators. Venezuela voted for Chavez. Gaza for Hamas. America for Trump.
- PlanksVariable 8mo ago
  “He led an insurrection against our Constitution” is extremely hyperbolic.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed The Electoral College is a Constitutional body. The Vice President, in his electoral duties, a Constitutional officer. These are limited roles with specific aims and they were directly, explicitly and violently attacked. The men who called for hanging the Vice President never repented and were pardoned.
    - deleted 8mo ago

analog31 8mo ago

A loss of the popular vote, followed by a near toss-up, was hardly a clear message. Roughly half of us didn't intend to send that message, and if polls are an indicator, even fewer now. I'm mad about the election and what it seems to say about us, but I still haven't completely lost faith in the American people.

philistine 8mo ago
Let me be clear; the rest of the world no longer trusts your type of American to fix your country. After Trump 1, maybe. Trump 2, that's it. We'll start to untangle our commitments to you and look elsewhere.
- analog31 8mo ago
  What was my type of American supposed to have done? This is a sincere question, since I'm racking my brain over it. People debate this with one another constantly. We may have more common cause with you than it might seem on the surface. Also, what commitments? Since this is a tech centric forum, the easy guess would be breaking the dominance of the US tech industry. I'm a cheerleader for that effort.
  - aoeusnth1 8mo ago
    Nothing. American empire isn't yours to control - people can hate what America is doing without recommending any personal change to your involvement in it.
    - analog31 8mo ago
      That's fair, but I'm open to change. In fact, coincidentally, my wife and I were talking about it tonight. We feel frustrated that we might not have done enough.
      - UncleMeat 8mo ago
        These are a few ideas. My guess is that people on HN make a lot of money. Finding effective places to donate it is useful. While this won't be able to directly influence international saber rattling, it can still help protect people from Trump's criminal presidency. Donate to organizations that provide legal information and legal defense to people at risk of abuse by ICE. Donate to organizations that provide food for people who are frightened to leave their homes because of ICE. Donate to organizations that provide food to people who are threatened by SNAP funding changes. Donate to independent media organizations that are willing to aggressively criticize the Trump administration. If thinking internationally, donate to organizations that target problems that USAID was targeting before being gutted. For political change we need two things: democrats to win in 2026 and 2028 and democrats to have the guts to dismantle the systems that enabled Trump and charge people involved for their crimes. Existing dem leadership is clearly not willing to do this. So we need involvement starting at the local level all the way up to replace dem leadership with people with guts. Find community groups involved in local elections. If you live in a region where ICE is highly active, document. Making their crimes undeniable to as many people as possible is what will shift public opinion so much that a new government will be forced to act.

palmotea 8mo ago

> I mean the damage has already been done. By electing Trump a second time, Americans have sent the world a clear and unambiguous message that it wasn't a fluke: They clearly don't want our friendship or value the treaties they've signed. Come on. Americans sent no such signal. No US election in my lifetime has been about foreign policy, including the last one. Domestic issues are by far predominant. What really happened was a lot of people were unhappy with a lot of different things, and enough of them rolled the dice on Trump again, because he was the only other choice (and the Democrats decided to rely on his negatives as their complete electoral strategy, which was stupid).

honzabe 8mo ago
> Come on. Americans sent no such signal. No US election in my lifetime has been about foreign policy, including the last one. Domestic issues are by far predominant. Guess what, we also care about domestic issues more. Except in smaller countries, your election might have a bigger impact on our fate than our own elections. We only want to live our lives and take care of our families... and then you elect the president who starts helping our worst enemy, and then even threatens our neighbor. Our soldiers bled and died for you in Iraq and Afghanistan. Please, try to put yourself in our shoes. Imagine you live in one of those small countries that always tried to be a good ally to the US, and you get stabbed in the back, and then you hear an American basically saying, “come on, we don’t care about you, we only care about ourselves”. How would you react?