I am sure there will be elections. Question is how fair they will be. Have a look at Russia's recent presidential election. Putin "winning" it was a given from the start. US voters need to be mindful of all the ways an election can be rigged.
IMO US elections have already been less-than-fully-democratic for a while, what with the voting registration and ID nonsense, as well as obvious gerrymandering and voter intimidation. At the very least, significantly less democratic than a number of other western countries.
Let’s stop applying copium to recent events and making excuses. The American people knew exactly what they were getting and voted for him anyway. He won a majority of the popular vote.
The Senate is 2 Senators per state regardless of the population and isn’t as susceptible to gerrymandering.
That being said, I don’t feel bad for anyone who voted for Trump and is having buyers remorse.
We are already seeing it with Arabs in Minnesota who thought Trump would be better for Arabs in Gaza and are now having regrets seeing how Trump wants to use US troops to “clear out Gaza” and Latin Americans who are appalled that he tried to remove birthright citizenship.
Next up will be all of the “rural American” voters who are going to bare the brunt of inflationary tariffs.
No it does not make me feel better. I’m rather disgusted by 70 million of my fellow Americans, including a few family members and newly former friends. However, I think it’s important that we pushback on the idea that the fascists have an overwhelming mandate to do what they are now doing. The truth still matters.
Putin's meddling all over the place including here.
To the extent that he has a role in this (certainly has publically claimed to!), he will in no way seek to make America a powerful allied country to Russia. There's no reason to assume he intends Trump or even Musk to actually be powerful in their own right.
Especially Musk. Musk must be mad to put himself in the position he's in. The only reason Putin would allow Musk to do what he's doing, is because it's patently obvious that Musk is undermining his own potential political base in every way, with every action. A widely hated man who's gone full Bond villain is no threat to Putin, politically. He's setting himself up to be demonized (Musk is) and doesn't even seem to register it.
> I think they're racing against the mid-terms next year.
This is the race. Historically the party in power loses the mid-terms, and I think we're already seeing huge portions of the population having buyers remorse. But, Trumps team knows this. I was waiting for them to attack the FEC, and here we are.
So it’s a delusion that the guy who tried to overthrow the vote last time will prevent the next election this time? Tyrants tried multiple times before succeeding in Athens, why not today?
The people whom Trump rallied and told to march to Capitol Hill went there for the express purpose of preventing the results of the people’s vote via the Electoral College from being accepted. This was proven in many courts of law. Not only did Trump prevent the military from responding to the putsch in his benefit until it was clear the effort had failed, he later issued a full pardon to all those involved in the attack on Congress.
I can’t remember any Democratic President or candidate thereof in the history of the republic doing anything similar. Can you provide examples?
But he didn't do that. Go and read his actual speech. The words he actually used. He encouraged peaceful protest.
Why were fiery riots presented as "mostly peaceful protests" while someone that encouraged people to peacefully protest is held responsible for that protest turning into a riot?
The whole "alternate electors" thing. That wasn't "just in case the court cases go our way and we turn out to have won the state". No, they were presented as the real electors. How did that happen? It wasn't just a random coincidence that seven different states did that. No, Trump orchestrated that.
There was the pressure campaign on Pence. He was told to approve the alternate electors rather than the real ones. Not just once - he was repeatedly told to do that.
It's easy for people to draw the wrong conclusion when part of the state of play in all this, is a network of foreign-adversary troll farms blanketing the internet and taking pains to seed public opinion with the assumption that all this is a fait accompli.
Every thing that has been attempted and failed or rolled back, so far, has had people out there stating as fact that it's permanent now and will never fail or roll back.
So, rather than take it as read that suspension of elections and total subversion of the process is guaranteed, instead take it as read that there will be people at work (literally) presenting that idea as if it is the only possible outcome, and getting a certain proportion of real people to agree with them. You'll always persuade somebody, no matter how odd your proposition is.
I personally think there'll be elections, that they'll be interfered with but perhaps not enough to truly alter the outcome, and that the real action isn't to do with establishing a functional dictatorship, but rather to do as much harm as possible while possible, so any political reversal will lead to the victors presiding over a gravely wounded country. I think that's a lot more probable than 'there will never be elections and the dictatorship will be all-powerful'. They don't look or act all-powerful, they just are very effective at putting sand in the gears. I think that sabotage is the real purpose here.
I remember Trump telling people at a rally to "march over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.". I remember a minority of the people there rioting and entering the Capitol building. I remember the Biden Department of Justice mistreatment of them and the over prosecutions. And most of all I remember before the than 2024 election, Trump explicitly saying that he would pardon every single one of them on day one.
Having won both the electoral and popular vote, I think it's fair to say the American people are in agreement.
> ... or that he is literally firing everyone in the FBI who investigated the participants - after pardoning them?
Yes and it's good that he's doing it. He ran on a series of explicit promises and one of them was to remove from Washington DC the people on board with the policies of the prior administration. I don't see how anybody that was an active part of the efforts to try to imprison Trump himself or his allies in a direct effort to influence the 2024 election could expect to work for him. That's ridiculous.
I also don't think that society is going to fall apart or that we will somehow not have elections in four years. What I think we'll have is a return to normalcy, a respect for individual rights (including both freedom of speech and the right to bear arms), and a significant paring down of unaccountable bloated government programs.
i'm curious to hear how the federal government has been infringing on your individual rights? especially your freedom of speech or right to bear arms since those seem like important issues to you
