Yes and no.
Without Trump fucking shit up on a government level (the Supreme Court in particular), there would probably be less scary shit happening on that end. Would have slowed things down.
But the radicalisation of the Americans began before 2016. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The disease started spreading as early as 2008. The recession, the damp squib that was the Occupy Wall Street event was the inception of many political movements, both far left AND far right.
That’s the thing people don’t realise. Even if Donald J. Trump didn’t exist, the underlying social tensions mean that inevitably someone would show up to galvanise far right sentiments, and the political estabilishment would have boosted them, whoever they were, because when the common folk are getting angry about their lot, then to the people actually in charge, a fascist dictatorship is preferrable to the alternative.
No, it started with Nixon, and his Southern Strategy. Reagan and the Silent Majority–which was fundamentally about racism and the desire to segregate schools, even though abortion was their cause célèbre–made it worse. And Newt Gingritch and the “Contract With America” really threw gasoline on the fire.
I mean if you wanna dive that deep, it started when some religious extremists got kicked out of England for being too extremist (for the british empire!) and moved to the new world, killing the people who previously lived there.
… But up until 2008 shit more or less held together? Not pretending 'murica was ever good, but it was the 2008 recession that caused its structure, however fucky it had been from first principles, to really break down.
The modern far-right really got it’s first big taste of legitimacy with the Tea Party. Which, yes, would be 2009-ish, and a blood-relative to the election of Obama. (E.g., without Obama as president, the racist fears of the Tea Party would have fizzled out in the harsh light of reality.) But I look at all of this on a continuum; the only two conservatives I see in recent memory that have made an apparently sincere attempt to stop the crazy train have been John McCain (…although he took Palin as a running mate…) and Mitt Romney, and they both got crushed by Dems. Well, maybe Liz Cheney too. Maybe. But she was okay with everything except Trump, so I dunno. Anyway, point is - Nixon, Reagan, and Gingritch were all laying the foundations and drawing up the architectural plans that Trump has used, and is using now, to build his version of a fascist state.
The modern far-right really got it’s first big taste of legitimacy with the Tea Party
Thanks a bunch Koch brother (still quite happy at least one of them is dead.)
That is entirely an astroturfed “caucus” along with the freedumb caucus… Bought and paid for by the ownership class. Ever wonder why those assholes never go away no matter how horrible they are? They’re the Koch’s henchmen…
I think that electing someone as deranged as Trump — who basically would try anything and everything that a sane person wouldn’t risk out of self-preservation, we basically saw a speedrun of finding out all the weaknesses and exploits of our government, combined with proving that impeachment and removal is basically impossible as long as one party is in collusion with the president.
We might have gotten here anyway, but it might have been a decade or two rather than four short years.
And the Supreme Court wouldn’t look like it does and be doing what’s it’s doing, which is also now a speedrun of horror.
I’ll never forgive Americans for 2016.
Yeah. Pushing for nearly immunity of the president might turn out to be very costly when someone actually reckless comes to presidency. And I presume Trump will be a version of that someone, as he is getting old and there won’t be another term for him. Nothing to lose, all to gain. He will make th US a shit show.
There would be 2 fewer extreme MAGA judges in supreme court.
The same level of MAGA corruption and disinformation would not have been possible.
January 6 would never have happened.
Trump would not have the same legitimacy and platform to constantly scream his MAGA hate message.
Trump would likely have been judged much sooner for the crimes that were revealed during his first campaign. So he might actually have been in prison by now.
The widespread MAGA treasonous behavior to favor Putin and Russia and undermine USA would probably not be a thing.So since Trump has been THEE major driver of extremism and treason in USA for the past 8 years, I’d say no. USA would not be nearly as divided as it is now.
There would also be about a million less deaths in America since we would’ve had a competent president who wouldn’t fumble such an easy fucking task.
Not so much that he was incompetent, as it was pure unfiltered corruption.
He was recorded behind closed doors agreeing that people should mask, and get vacinated, and make sure space between people is adhered to.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut, if covid kills in NYC so easily because it’s condensed amount of people in a small space, and if all the major cities vote blue…then that means covid will kill the democrat voters and mostly leave the republican voters unharmed because they all live on farms and such!
That was his thought process, verbally expressed. Not mine.
Problem is, democrat voters didn’t fall for his bullshit. I remember one press conference where he would say things like “Covid will go away in the spring, it’s all a hoax” and then a scientist studying the virus since conception IMMEDIATELY followed it up with “Covid is NOT a hoax. Treat it seriously, or you may die”. Then Trump would say something like “We don’t need businesses shut down, we need to get back to work.” And immediately followed up by that same scientist saying “It’s not wise to encourage people to engage in public activities at this time. We must continue the quarantine”.
Basically Trump would spew some bullshit, and IMMEDIATELY be followed up with this scientist saying the exact opposite of what Trump said. All this while Trump is giving him a look of “WILL YOU SHUT UP??? YOU’RE FACT CHECKING MY BULLSHIT!!!”
I LOVE a good absurdist moment…but I prefer for the absurdity to be based in fiction. 3rd Rock From the Sun is amazing absurdist humor. John Lithgow is amazing in that role. However when the show ends, my country isn’t on fire with 1 million people dead.
So, I see this as corruption rather than incompetence.
Don’t forget Trump dismantled the Obama era pandemic response program shortly after taking office. He had a game plan all laid out and he threw it away out of spite and vanity.
Stop! PLEASE!!! I can only get SO erect…
Not at all, Trump’s presidency provided a false air of legitimacy for those fringe beliefs. And his success forced politicians to morph into his sycophants - if he’d failed the GOP would assume that going that extreme was unpalatable to Americans.
If Trump had lost to Hillary Clinton then people would make fun of him for not even being able to beat Hillary Clinton when there was a multi hundreds of millions of dollars hate campaign launched against her that was so effective that people still hate Hillary today.
I hate Hillary because she’s family friends with the man who killed my father and five million other people to get a job.
I can see Saturday Night Live doing an election special - I want to see a Clinton look alike get raucously drunk in celebration, yelling “ Hey Donald, grab this, ya pussy!”
Nope. The racist bastards would still be hiding under their rocks and you wouldn’t have an army wearing red dunce caps drooling while driving their ram pickups with flags in the back.
Edit: I have upset 3 Ram driving, flag flying, dunce cap wearing mouthbreathers.
Yes. The MAGA group probably wouldn’t be as large, but they would still be there and very angry.
I’d say it’d depend on the specifics of the result.
Taking the wind out of MAGA’s sails would take a blowout victory and Hillary wasn’t gonna get that without doing some serious full court pressing for the entire general campaign, like well beyond even the “she should have campaigned more in the rust belt!” ideas people have about where she fell short.
Yes and no.
You can bet that there would have been 8 years of propaganda against her. And we would have lost even more house/senate seats because people on the left historically decide to not bother to vote in midterms unless there is an active threat on CNN.
And… I am pretty sure we would have lost in 2020 because of COVID. Which would basically put us back to where we were in 2020 in terms of having a deranged fascist who nobody realized was too dumb to accomplish anything (not a problem this time. See Project 2025).
The main difference would be the Supreme Court. Yes, republicans did everythiing they could to protevent Obama from appointing anyone and I would not put it past them to have stretched that out for a full four years. But Scalia (Rest in Piss) would still be dead and so would Ginsburg (fuck her for putting us in this mess). Which would have made the math a lot tighter. 7 justices but the math would have been tight enough that Hilary likely would have gotten to appoint at least one moderate.
I think Hilary would have bought us the better part of a decade because, like her or not, she is an incredibly effective politician… when nobody thinks she is running for POTUS. She is/was even more generally liked by both sides of the aisle than Biden and would never have had to make concessions to sanders and The Squad for the 2020 ticket (Biden is an asshole but his platform is shockingly Left leaning by US standards…)…
And I think trump would have faded into nothing. But there are plenty of other people who were just looking for an excuse to become a magat on the republican side. And people like cruz and romney and even liz cheney would not be complete laughing stocks without trump. So, at best, we were looking at a ticking clock to the next “reagan republican” as it were.
Like, there are a lot of people who consider the day Ginsburg died to be the day the US collapsed. And we are seeing exactly the repercussions of that with shit like today.
trump is just a symptom of underlying problem in society that manifests itself all over the world.
populist politicians trying to appeal to nostalgy for “good old times”, ability to weaponize social media and craft customized lies to every minor group, russian bot networks spewing out propaganda… it is something that creates problems everywhere and it will not get better.
recent eu parliament elections are shining example.
A bit less divided.
If they don’t win now, they will come back for a rematch.
From my limited view, I think not much would be different… The US was already down this path. I think we have to look back further to the Bush/Gore election. That election initially sowed distrust in the election process with hanging chads and SCOTUS involvement in politics. This laid a blueprint for the success Trump and the Republicans have had.
Yes. Just because trump lost doesn’t mean conservative propaganda hasn’t been spewing hate and lies for decades. Even before obama, I knew people that hated Democrats but could never tell me why. Their propaganda has labeled Democrats enemies for quite a long time now. They started this shit back in the 50s-70s. Republicans have been brainwashed and somehow they’re proud of that fact.
Can’t say for sure, but Hillary is an old-school politician who tries to create consensus. Trump is a fire breather who thrives on controversy.
Yes. This was longer in the making than just one cycle and democrats like Clinton have been the ones enabling the GOP.
I read a lot more about US politics in 2016 than I do now (sorry, now that Trump has been president once, I know what it’s like when that happens and don’t worry that much about it anymore). I can tell you that back then it already seemed very divided from my (non-US) point of view.
now that Trump has been president once, I know what it’s like when that happens and don’t worry that much about it anymore).
That sounds disturbingly like you aren’t all that concerned about what a second Trump presidency would be like. It sounds like you think the first one wasn’t as bad as people thought it would be and the second one will similarly be better than people think. Am I misreading your words?
This isn’t too far off. In 2016 many people I read thought a Trump presidency would literally be the end of US democracy, possibly the end of the world because he would start a nuclear war. Those are not things that ended up happening, so I do not predict that they will happen if Trump wins this year either.
In 2016 many people I read thought a Trump presidency would literally be the end of US democracy
And it almost was. Remember, he lost an election and tried to send fake electors in to declare him president. When that didn’t work, he worked up his cultists into attacking the capitol in order to threaten pence into not certifying the election. It was so dangerously close to a constitutional crisis that Republicans and Democrats banded together to say that the VP does not have this power.
Also trump nominated three members of scotus, and it was that majority that just opened the door for the president to commit all kinds of crime with immunity.
The pain of his last presence is still playing out, and it doesn’t look good.
I’m more concerned that if he wins again, he’ll complete gut the government and even if he does step aside when his term is up, the damage will be done and we will have no ability to tackle some of the biggest issues facing us: namely climate change.
There’s a reason why Trump 2016, though it caused a lot of damage, wasn’t nearly as bad as it was thought to be.
Trump was probably the laziest president in US history. He had no clue what to do at the start of the presidency, and many of his requests were met with resistance by employees in the executive branch because they were stupid or illegal. This is because the executive branch has a small chunk of president-appointed positions relative to the merit-based chunk.
Many of his successes came about later in his term, as he got plenty of help from well-funded right-wing organizations to find people to appoint to various positions, including the 3 Supreme Court justices who helped remove federal abortion protections.
If you look forward to now, the same right-wing organizations have prepared a document (Project 2025) serving as instructions for Trump’s first 180 days. It calls for reclassifying every merit-based position in the executive branch into political ones, replacing the people who serve in those positions with Trump loyalists, then dismantling organizations like the FBI, EPA (environmental regulation), NOAA (meteorological organization; helps detect hurricanes), DOJ (sues entities for reasons like antitrust), and more. The only entities that could intervene in this case are the Supreme Court, which is very comfortably on Trump’s side, and Congress, which is very unlikely to be controlled by Democrats in a way that will matter.
Tl;dr, Trump didn’t know what to do during the first term. For his second term, he was handed a step-by-step tutorial on how to dismantle the FBI and everything else in the executive branch.
I see. So what has happened over the last 8 years as a direct result of his election isn’t concerning to you?
There could have been better worlds, probably would have been if Clinton had won in 2016, but it isn’t anywhere near as catastrophic as some people predicted.
There could have been better worlds
So… because Trump didn’t get unhinged to the point where he started a nuclear war, you aren’t worried.
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How did you feel about refusing to concede in the 2020 election and creating uncertainty and doubt about the electoral process among a not insignificant minority of voters?
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How about inciting an angry mob to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th?
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How did you feel about hoarding and hiding classified documents so that he could show them off to impress his friends and guests? Maybe even sell them if times are tough?
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How about strong-arming the Republican party and installing his family to run it?
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How do you feel about how his SCOTUS has changed the fundamentals of the US government?
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The Chevron deference?
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Bribery?
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Presidential “immunity” for official acts?
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How do you feel about the loss of the right to have an abortion?
Do you think Trump, with the powers newly granted to the office he’s again running for, will act in his second term? Where is your line?
About half of those (esp. those that involve the Supreme Court) would have happened under any generic Republican president too. They are not specific to Trump.
The first two, I agree with you, really are horrible; but they are also proofs that the American democratic system works because Trump didn’t end up succeeding with them.
[How] do you think Trump, with the powers newly granted to the office he’s again running for, will act in his second term?
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They’re probably not worried because they don’t live in the US.
