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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
