this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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With the billionaires backing him, it's going to be on us as individual Americans to make sure Trump doesn't end up in the White House again. That means not just voting but talking with people around you, volunteering and donating

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[–] Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world 166 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Our bosses donate our stolen wages to Trump because if justice is on the market then anything, further, goes.

[–] TTH4P@lemm.ee 34 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] Pronell@lemmy.world 22 points 3 months ago

And they are so damned short sighted.

Trump wants to be Putin.

He wants his half of the US economy. Including half of what they have now.

And they fund him while being obsessed with the pennies he will save them.

[–] stevedidwhat_infosec@infosec.pub 23 points 3 months ago

You bet your ass. And then they tell their underpayed staff that it’s the dems fault.

Crooks.

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 74 points 3 months ago (7 children)

I remember when, if a former president and current major party nominee for the next presidential election was a convicted felon, that person's political career would be over.

[–] psvrh@lemmy.ca 51 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I mean, Howard Dean talked into an unadjusted microphone one time. That's totes just as bad.

[–] mojo_raisin@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Didn't Kerry lose in part for looking like a dork in a tank?

https://fortune.com/2016/03/08/michael-dukakis-john-kerry-7-political-gaffes-mitt-romney-the-course-of-u-s-history/

I have a feeling, these events were just things the media could use to manipulate the narrative on the Democratic candidate, otherwise would've been ignored.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Also, the "liberal media" seemed to really play that up. IIRC, there are some questions about just how loud his whoop really was.

Also, though: he is a Democratic candidate. None of this applies to the cons. The way things are conducted by the liberal media are that everyone affiliated with the Democratic Party must be as pure as the driven snow, not look silly, make zero gaffes, and so on (and even then - what was said of Hillary was that she was "overprepared" - wtaf - so even when Democrats don't violate the rules, they'll make up a new set of criteria that Democrats have supposedly violated to play the 'both sides" card). Republicans can do just whatever the fuck they want; it's expected that they'll be off the rails; cons will be cons and all that.

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[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 32 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The wild part is that Trump isn't the only candidate with a felony conviction: Kennedy has one for heroin

[–] dhork@lemmy.world 19 points 3 months ago

It turns out it was the brain worm who did all that heroin....

[–] slurpinderpin@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago (2 children)

We've fallen so far. We've created an environment where people can create their own realities and make up things they want to believe, and ignore the facts that are presented to them as "rigged". There is no Truth anymore

[–] Nougat@fedia.io 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There is no Truth anymore

The fuck there isn't. There's just a whole lot of people who are willfully ignoring it.

[–] slurpinderpin@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

I probably should have made it more explicit, there are no more consensus Truths. For example, we actually have people who think the world is flat

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[–] GluWu@lemm.ee 8 points 3 months ago

YeeeAAAaahhh

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[–] oxjox@lemmy.ml 36 points 3 months ago (4 children)

That means not just voting but talking with people around you, volunteering and donating

Honestly, I give up. If you've already decided you're voting for Trump, you do not exist in the same reality as me. There is absolutely zero redeeming quality about the person or his politics. He literally does not care about the United States, the Constitution, or the people voting for him. A vote for Trump isn't a vote for president, it's a vote for a cult leader. I'm not equipped to fix what's broken in your head.

[–] MagicShel@programming.dev 15 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Some day we're going to find out the entire Republican Party was co-opted by a geopolitical rival, and once they got enough traction, they just need to hit the gas every once in a while and we do the rest to ourselves.

The only way we can truly have a democracy is by containing the income gap, which we have utterly failed to do since the 80's. The wealthy aren't part of our world. The truths which dominate our lives simply aren't true for them. The idiom is "death and taxes" but the truth is it's just death.

[–] djsoren19@yiffit.net 13 points 3 months ago

We know they were, it's Russia, they've been co-opted by Russia. We've been screaming it from the mountaintops since 2015, Donald Trump is a stooge for Putin and has infected the rest of the party. Nobody cares.

[–] oxjox@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 months ago

The wealth gap is certainly an issue. Typically, Americans are more prosperous under Democratic presidents and while that may be true on paper in select areas, it's apparent that most people are still hurting. On paper, Biden has been a remarkable president and has saved Americans billions if not trillions. Saving money is different than putting money in their pockets though. To say, yeah - but it could have been so much worse, means nothing to most people.

I'm not sure how this played out but there was a plan...

A study by the liberal Institute of Taxation and Public Policy predicts Mr. Biden's plan would increase by more than $100,000 a year what someone in the top 1% of earners pays Uncle Sam. President Obama in 2013 raised taxes on that same group by $83,000. President Trump in 2017 cut their taxes by about $50,000 a year.
The top 1% of Americans earn about 20% of all income in the U.S., but they pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes. The Biden plan will put even more of the tax burden on the wealthy. "It's time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share," he said Wednesday in his speech to Congress.

And wages are up compared to inflation for the past year. But eventhough inflation is still at a comfortable-ish sub 4%, the future looks questionable.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/

But to the greater point, when people are struggling to put food on the table and upgrade appliances or save for the future, they're going to get stressed. They're going to become afraid and they're going to search for answers - even if those answers are wrong, it's what they want to hear. Keeping this wage gap wide, keeping the middle class down, gives politicians power.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

I would have thought your someday was when a bunch of them went to Russia for the Fourth of July.

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The convincing needs to be aimed at people who don't vote, of which there is an absurd amount, particularly among young people. Trump could be prevented if people on the left vote en masse, and perhaps even gain strong majorities in both houses.

[–] c0m47053@feddit.uk 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm not in the US, so maybe I'm wrong on this, but I would imagine trump has pushed a lot of people who would have voted republican into non voters. These would be the group I would be having conversations with, trying to convince them that voting democrat is a bigger protest than abstaining, and to do anything else is to risk an anti democratic felon becoming president.

[–] oxjox@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago

That certainly seems reasonable and maybe you're right.

For similar reasons, people are (rightfully) protesting Biden due to his policies with Gaza. I know that in the presidential primary in my (super blue/Democrat) county last month, 10% of the votes cast by Democrats (16,216) were write-ins and 90% of those (14,625) were for non-people ("uncommitted", etc). As it turns out, practically the same number of people cast protest votes as votes for Trump (14,740). Biden still got 144,000 votes so losing 14,000 to Trump isn't so much of a concern. My greater concern is about how easily people are being manipulated - across the board, across the world - and how people are losing sight on the possible crumbling of the country they live in. Not to mention only 20% of my county even bothered to vote.

Totally unrelated.. actually, maybe not totally, this conversation has me going back and checking on some voting records. The 2020 election was the highest voter turnout in Philadelphia for 25 years. It was also the highest turnout in the United States for a century. So when Trumpers claim 'the election was rigged because Trump got more votes than any other president. How is it possible for Biden to get more votes than him?', they're ignoring the verifiable facts that the election had a record high turn out. It's been all downhill since they've been denying these election results.

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[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 33 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Unhappiness with President Biden is one reason. Trump’s tough-on-immigration, low-tax, regulation-shredding stance has been a big draw for billionaires who may be calculating that an endorsement or donation now will reap a bigger return if he wins in November. Another possible calculation: backing Trump at a low point could amplify that return even more.

This is why moderates keep moving to the right, which drives republicans even further fiscally.

Even being more conservative than dem voters on immigration, tax rates, and industry regulation, he'll never be more conservative than trump. All it does is make trump go twice as far so the rich can overlook his negatives.

And the more Dems do it, the more it costs to convince Dem voters to vote for them.

They're both chasing donations instead of voters.

Bill and Obama didn't even have to chase voters, they were so charismatic that voters chased them.

But Hillary and Biden are nowhere near that charismatic, so they chase donations like Republicans and hope if they pay enough for televisions ads that will suddenly start mattering again.

We can't beat republicans at convincing billionaires to give our politicians money.

But if our politicians focused on getting votes, they wouldn't need the 2 billion dollars Biden's campaign is estimating for this election.

Money in politics never stopped being a problem, we just stopped talking about it because everything else caught fire too.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 30 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Biden is conservative on regulation?

He rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, revoked the Keystone Pipeline permit, created a 13 million acre federal petroleum reserve for Alaskan wildlife, greatly increased oil site lease cost, signed $7B in solar subsidies, and enacted the Inflation Reduction act to support clean energy.

Biden is conservative on immigration?

He repealed Title 42 and the Muslim ban, allowing an open border policy for most of his term while pressing for congressional immigration reform. Congress failed to provide reform as a partisan play. With pressure from overcrowded sanctuary cities, only then was was Biden forced to issue an Executive Order to reduce the flow of immigrants.

Biden is conservative on taxes?

His tax plan doesn’t go into effect until next year, when Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy expire. It reduces taxes for working class by increasing the corporate minimum tax rate to 21% to align with the global minimum tax rate, implementing a Billionaire Minimum Tax of 25% on the wealthiest taxpayers to ensure the top 0.01 percent pay taxes on their income, raising the tax rate on corporate stock buybacks from 1% to 4% to reduce the differential tax treatment between buybacks and dividends and encourage businesses to reinvest profits in their workers and in the company’s growth, and denying corporate tax deductions for employee compensation in excess of $1 million paid to any employee by both publicly and privately owned C corporations.

Give it a rest with your unsubstantiated nonsense, would ya?

[–] Eldritch@lemmy.world 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's not even mentioning Biden's NLRB ruling. Basically the largest labor victory in the last 100 years. Combined with the Biden Administration FTC ruling squashing non-compete agreements. Which is the second biggest win for labor in the last 100 years. Or the billions in student debt his administration has forgiven.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)
[–] Eldritch@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Heh, told ya we often agree. Even though I'm not a fan of Democrats or biden. It's hard to say his administration hasn't been consequential in many good ways. There was only one Democrat I remember liking less than Biden in 20. And that was culty Gabbard. I've honesty been surprised. No small d democratic government can be perfect. Outside of some Optical missteps surrounding current events in Israel. His administration has been surprisingly decent.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You’re right. I also haven’t voted for a Democratic President that I couldn’t criticize. They’re just better than Republicans. Obama addressed the housing market bubble by bailing out the banks when he could’ve issued the same relief to those who were exploited. It would’ve addressed the issue while leaving the future interest losses as the predatory lenders’ problem. Clinton jacked corn farming by renewing overproduction incentives that led to high fructose corn syrup undercutting the price of sugar. He also signed the US - China Trade Agreement that redefined American consumerism to its current state of poorly made plastic junk filling our homes and landfills.

However, if we could keep turnout high for multiple consecutive Democratic wins, we’d see some more progressive candidates compete in the primaries. It would likely have the added benefit of pulling Republican candidates off the cliff to capture more of the moderate votes.

[–] Eldritch@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The bank bailout started before Obama was elected or even took office. I absolutely agree that he shouldn't have just continued the policy. And that he should have pushed more to get relief to the actual people hurting it and not just the banks. But again it comes down to the fact that the president is largely a diplomatic figurehead. Without a lot of power outside of War etc for the executive branch in general. When it comes to things like that he had to do what he could as fast as he could with the Congress he had. He absolutely should have at least vocally pushed for it though.

This I agree with though. Never in my lifetime have we had multiple consecutive Democratic presidencies. Excluding things like two-term presidents. I'm talking like Reagan bush Etc. For the record it's been nixon/ Ford, Carter for 4 years, Reagan for eight and Bush for another four, Clinton 48, Bush for eight, Obama for eight, Trump for four, and now Biden for four. Every 4 to 8 years we tend to flip fascist and people wonder why no progress is being made. Because we're having to fix the damage the fascist did before we can even try to improve things and it's a hole that just keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper every 8 years.

The worst part of it, so many people are solely focused on presidential elections. Which don't get me wrong the presidency is absolutely nice to have. If you had a majority Democratic House and Senate there is still a major amount a president Trump could block. But we struggle so hard to even have the presidency let alone solid control of the house or Senate for any length of time. And all of it arises from people allowing perfection to be the enemy of achievable.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

I couldn’t agree more. Besides presidential election turnout directly impacting downballot success, the attendance for midterm elections is abysmal. The highest turnout group is consistently retirees, who are all at the conservative “got mine, screw you” point in their lives.

With that being said, we do an embarrassingly poor job of educating the youth on the function of our government. Most can’t name the three branches, let alone tell you what they do, or articulate the difference in Federal vs. state oversight. They just blame the president for repealing abortion rights, keeping marijuana a criminal offense, high gas prices, expensive fast food, and unacceptable behavior of local police. None of which are under the oversight of POTUS, and most of which could be affected by actively participating in voting in local, state, and congressional elections.

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[–] Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Obama addressed the housing market bubble by bailing out the banks when he could’ve issued the same relief to those who were exploited.

I've read his autobiography focusing on this period, iirc according to him his advisors said there were basically only three options.

  1. Bail out the banks who had a part in causing the issue and subsequently failed. (His least favorite but what he ultimately picked)

  2. Bail out the mortgages of the people who were at risk of foreclosure. (His favorite option)

  3. Complete nationalization of failed banks with extra actions like forgiving all at risk mortgages (He was tepid on this)

The problem was that those solutions are in order of increasing expense and decreasing likelihood of Congress's will to pass. Meanwhile the economy was burning down and his advisors were saying we could have another great depression if action wasn't taken immediately.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That’s interesting. I may read his autobiography myself. Personally, I’d have preferred to see him try to pass mortgage relief through Congress and fail, than to go right for the bank bailout. I can see how timeliness was his priority, but our unhoused numbers and housing market would look very different had mortgage relief passed.

[–] Bernie_Sandals@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I can see how timeliness was his priority, but our unhoused numbers and housing market would look very different had mortgage relief passed.

Oh yeah in hindsight most people would say they'd prefer the mortgage bailout rather than the bank bailout. But when you're a young president in your first days of office and people with economics degrees are screaming about how it's all burning down..

I understand why he did what he did, should've definitely still tried to of gotten way more mortgage relief afterwards though.

I just wanted to note that it wasn't exactly the sneering "Yes let me fuck over the working class as much as possible for my neoliberal values" as some people claim.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I was unaware of the motive, and assumed it was related to the Citigroup members of his cabinet. It’s nice to know the inside track. I’m still critical of the decision, but at least I understand it better now. My previous perspective always conflicted with my understanding of his leadership.

[–] slurpinderpin@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago
[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well yeah, him being in more debt means he is more for sale

Fun fact if you go to join the police in the UK they will check how much debt you have as you’re more likely to be open to bribes etc.

[–] GiddyGap@lemm.ee 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] Prior_Industry@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I'd love to read a breakdown of how American culture got here. Outside of Trump a section of America just loves a grifter / cult leader. From Elon Musk to leaders of mega churches, there are just Americans seemingly willing to be conned.

Of course this is true in all cultures but America appears to execute grift to maximum profitability. Mega church pastora with 6 jumbo jets, etc.

[–] skyspydude1@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago

Culturally, we also sadly don't seem to have many other measures of success aside from wealth, and a poor social support structure that requires people to seek out their own forms of support. Add in the pervasiveness of the "prosperity gospel", where the more good you are, the more money you have, and people flock to these conmen because they can't possibly believe someone that wealthy could be bad.

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[–] maculata@aussie.zone 8 points 3 months ago

Because they are evil and cynical?

[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 3 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Donald Trump is the first sitting or former president to be convicted of a felony in U.S. history, after a jury ruled that he falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal with a porn star that could have sunk his 2016 campaign.

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who will co-host a San Francisco fund-raiser for Trump next week, called it a “sham trial” and said that the former president had lots of supporters in the tech world who were afraid to admit it.

Ron DeSantis of Florida, and die-hard critics of Biden like Elon Musk slammed the trial, with the tech entrepreneur saying the ruling damaged the “public’s faith in the American legal system.”

Skydance is now viewed as the front-runner in the race to merge with Paramount, which owns MTV, CBS and the movie studio behind “Top Gun,” after Sony and Apollo backed away from a rival $26 billion bid.

Shares in chipmakers Nvidia and AMD fell in premarket trading following a Bloomberg report that the Biden administration was slowing the licensing of high-end chips to the region for fears they could fall into the hands of Chinese companies.

Earlier this week, Lenovo, the Chinese tech company, said it would sell $2 billion worth of bonds to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and build a research and development hub in Riyadh.


The original article contains 1,755 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] Prior_Industry@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

They are worried that if Trump can experience justice they might just be next.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Can’t not see that as a picture of him air dicking.

[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

That's him with Putin and Murdoch

[–] Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Given Trump's track record for keeping contracts, let alone promises, I doubt he has a good track record with returning favors.

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