I don’t know what’s more sad, that guy or that half of your country is stupid enough to vote him
It’s more like a third rather than half. But our busted system gives outsized representation to people who live in sparsely populated states.
He’s polling at about 45%. The third is his base but there are a lot of independents who plan to vote for him, and they’re the ones who decide elections.
The latter.
There have always been despicable people like Trump, and I’m certain that, as horrible people go, he’s not even in the top thousand of horrible people alive today.
It’s far more sad that so many people in the US are willing to overlook his faults; even if you discount his rabid base, it’s especially sad that close to another 20% of Americans who are more or less centrists (for Americans) are willing to overlook the fact that he admits that he’s working toward a dictatorship. This is the most depressing thing, for me.
Trump never won the popular vote and he’s more unpopular now than he’s ever been. Never has half of this country voted for him, not even close, and it isn’t true now either
But I read everywhere that it’s close between the two candidates, is that not true?
It can still be close but that is close between the people that vote. More than half of all Americans do not vote consistently. We don’t have mandatory elections, so if half the country doesn’t vote and its close between the two candidates, then its close between two quarters of the population, not half. And it seems maybe a little pedantic, but those half of people who don’t vote are either disenfranchised or implicitly choosing neither candidate. Half the voting population is not half the population; those non voters are actual people. Maybe if they were treated as an important part of the electorate, they would vote. Maybe they wouldn’t vote for a republican or a democrat, in which case it is also in the dems best interest to disenfranchise voters, although that certainly isn’t the conventional wisdom, nor is it the mission of the millions of volunteers who work to sign people up to vote on important issues.
I hate that I’m numb to this level of stupidity from a former, and potentially future, President. But this will only be like, the 20th dumbest thing he says this week. It’s not even the most outrageous thing he’s said about California in the last week (that would be withholding money for fire fighting if Newsom doesn’t bend the knee). It’s so patently stupid it doesn’t deserve a response, but that’s exactly what they’re counting on.
This is why I have genuinely no respect at all in the world for Trump voters and supporters. If you’re smart enough to understand that this is bullshit, then you’re with him because he’s enriching you at the cost of everyone else or because you actively want his bigoted policies to hurt innocent people just for the sake of it.
If you’re not, then you’re not only a complete fucking idiot, but you’re willfully a complete fucking idiot. “Complete fucking idiot” doesn’t even begin to describe it, though; it’s too generous. There aren’t words in an English dictionary to capture it. I could say “brain-damaged”, but I would genuinely expect someone who just awoke from an insular ischemic stroke to be a better critical thinker. “Brainwashed”, I mean I guess that’s the closest thing there is, right? Straight-up cult behavior. But it even somehow feels dumber than a traditional cult.
It’s like necrotic chunks of grey matter are sloughing off their brain in real time. Their stupidity is bottomless because they’ll believe literally anything when they’re told to, and after that it’s impossible to amass enough evidence to talk them out of it because they’re not just too braindead to understand the evidence; they’re too braindead to understand the concept of evidence. Flat Earthers have more respect from me as critical thinkers and as human beings. I would trust a group of 500 unmedicated, severely sleep-deprived paranoid schizophrenics to decide on policy before I would 500 Trump supporters.
Aliens eating cats, a giant faucet that would solve water problems. He’s watching cartoons from the early nineties and thinks that’s reality.
Southwestern USA had drought periods lasting hundreds of years in recent history. That’s normal for the region. And we think we should pack a few tens of million people there and treating ground water as infinitely renewable.
Solar power + desalination en masse or gtfo …
Or Vote for me and Project plowshare is back! I will use nukes to build canals! They were paid with your tax dollars gotta use then!
You know I’m super shocked Trump has not said it yet. Like really shocked. He’ll nuke a hurricane but a canal? Noo.
Meanwhile, farmers in the Central Valley, which would be a desert without irrigation, keep planting more almonds, alfalfa for export, and other cash crops that require substantially higher water inputs than crops primarily intended to feed people. All while complaining that they aren’t being allowed to drain rivers to the point of irreversible damage, like salinization, and pointing the finger at residential users who pay much higher rates and consume a fraction of the water.
Jon Oliver has a piece on that issue. IIRC Farmers have to use all the water they are allocated or they could lose the rights to it, so they have to plant crops that require a lot of water. It’s a policy issue that the farmers had to adapt to
