I don't see where the GP changed their mind. They may not be ok with this particular action while still preferring the current administration to any alternative.
The problem is we dont believe him. There has been ample time to make a u turn. A decade at this point. Trump has never shied away from his corruption. He has been upfront about his intentions from the beginning. I just do not believe that this is the straw that broke the camels back when so many straws have come before.
Serious set of questions here from someone desperately trying to understand people who voted for Trump and how to have conversations with them that can be productive. None of them are meant to be insulting or insinuate anything.
To me, this sort of behavior just seems par for the course for how he has been acting since before his presidency. Did you follow his record in business and politics closely prior to voting for him? If so, what mitigating factors were there that let you still feel comfortable in voting for him?
Is this an isolated source of issue with him? Part of a broader trend? In either case, is it/these a big enough deal for him to lose your support moving forward? For the rest of the political party supporting him?
If there has been a shift in your ability to support him, what is it that broke the camel's back?
It is remarkably simple. There are countless meals on the menu but people get to see only the two on the front page. Say, monkey brains and bull testicles. Few can really appreciate either. There is a little talk about the slugs on page 1. An abysmal small number will turn a few pages and look over the burgers and pizzas... but you can't really order a burger in a restaurant like this? Can you? So even they pretend they really like to eat testicles.
You could have literally opened a random page and order whatever is on there. It is perfectly safe to order the burger as you will most likely be served monkey brains anyway.
No one will rage at you for voting for Afroman. There are no dire consequences.
I just honestly feel like any attempt to equate the two is insane.
I can't really align myself to either party, and I am diametrically opposed to the Democrats on some issues, like gun control, and think that there are a lot of real issues that they push far to the extreme to the point that it is problematic, but... there's also only one party that attempted insurrection and overturning the election, campaigned on all sorts of insane shit, pushes a narrative of needing the military to deal with protestors, etc.
It's not two shit sandwiches, it's a pot of live pit vipers vs a pot of boiled unseasoned kale and spinach. I'm not going to enjoy the latter, but it's probably not going to harm anything more than my taste buds. The other might kill me.
The magic is this: there are no other candidates who can win because you didn't vote for any of those in previous elections and there won't be in the next because you won't now.
It is like you ask someone to chose between death by fire, death by drowning OR finding the love of your life. Then they respond with: I don't want to drown! Or worse, they ask what other people chose.
Imagine yourself making your own choices. Picture it for a moment, doesn't it sound terrifying?
One should also look at it from the perspective of the other candidates. I mean those not part of the uniparty. Imagine making an effort to convince people to vote for a sanity riddled election program. The level of insult people sink to in order to NEVER even consider it.
Not OP but I reluctantly voted for Trump because of the direction he proclaimed he wanted the country to go. I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
J/w: what direction does it seem to you that Democrats want? At least judging by its elected officials and internal leaders, it seems like a pretty directionless party to me.
When did your ancestors immigrate to the country? What was the process for immigration then?
For the majority of the history of the country it has never been anything like it is today. Until 1819 you basically literally just showed up. After that, ships had to include passenger manifest and pass that along to the state, and then state's handled immigration - but none there did more than try to charge 'head fees' to keep the truly destitute out, but not all states even did that. 1875/1876 there were laws that changed this - largely banning Asian immigrants and making immigration federal purview. The next couple of decades things got more formalized, but if you were a normal human being capable of supporting yourself you basically got held for a basic check and then were let in. <1-2% got turned away most years. It wasn't until 1921/4 that anything resembling our current immigration system was put into place, and while it saw significant revision in 1965 to how the caps and quotas were organized, we've not seen anything major change.
The Democrats want significant immigration reform, true. They want a path for people that have been living here as productive members of society to stay here. They want them to be treated like human beings.
This is not "flooding" the nation.
> and given them our tax money
This talking point seems to be repeated a lot, but it's just not true. Illegal immigrants pay more taxes in to the system than they receive in benefits - largely because they are ineligible for the vast majority of benefits. If you want to increase our tax revenue, more illegal immigrants is better than less. We effectively rip them off. It's like the claims that the shutdown is over giving illegal immigrants free healthcare - not a dime of the funding being discussed would go to them. You're being lied to.
I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken, and we have built our way of life off of exploiting a large amount of hardworking people that contribute a hell of a lot to our ability to live the way we do. Legalizing them, streamlining the immigration process, etc., is not at risk of bankrupting our coffers.
This country was a frontier in 1819. We needed labor to tame the wilderness. We don't need more unskilled laborers anymore.
We have immigration laws. The US is incredibly generous, and naturalizes more than 1 million immigrants each year.
The American people don't want a "path" for illegal aliens. We already tried that in 1986. All it did was incentivize more illegal immigration.
And what the last administration did was absolutely flooding the nation. They removed nearly every EO related to border security, and then complained that they needed more laws to "fix" the problem they created.
> I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken,
The current system is broken insofar as we are not enforcing the law thoroughly enough. We already have a system, it just needs to be followed. All illegal aliens have to go back.
> I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
I think a more likely scenario is that a citizen gets tired of being rounded up every other weekend or shaken down for ICE protection money and decides to put a stop to it, one way or another. And it would in many cases be legal too, because those iceholes don't identify themselves.
If somebody that is here illegally picks up a gun and fights citizens or government they are a foreign combatant on US soil. Fighting them is not civil war it is national defense and is the whole reason the federal government was established.
Now, if you are talking about citizens supporting an invasion against those that oppose it that is civil war. I agree that is a none zero possibility. However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
>However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
Whose money? Being given to which non-citizens?
Seriously. Be specific here. the words you used are all in English and are even fairly grammatical. But they don't model reality.
Undocumented folks, by virtue of being undocumented, are ineligible for public assistance of any kind, pretty much everywhere in the US.
What's more, in order to work, they need to provide an SSN and they need to use someone else's because they can't get their own -- because they're undocumented. But they and their employer must each still pay Social Security and Medicare taxes which pay for those programs -- but since they're undocumented, they'll never collect any of the money they paid into those programs in taxes.
So I ask again, specifically, what taxpayer money is being paid to which non-citizens? Please be specific here.
Just stop with that BS. I guarantee that "white nationalism" was the farthest thing from the majority of Trump voters mind. If you come out of the gate saying all Trump supporters are racist most people are just going to roll their eyes at you at walk away. You have already told them you dont like them and that you will most likely not even entertain their reasons as acceptable.
You're the one who was in another comment talking about how the dems ran on a platform of flooding our country with immigrants and giving them our tax money; sounds like you are, in fact, closer to the racist/white supremacist set than you might realize. At the very least, you share their goals or vision for America.
He said "I will be a dictator on day 1", and he meant it. It wasn't "a joke".
He's using US Military on US soil. Sending National Guard in where there is no legal justification for it. This is what the start of a civil war looks like.
That's such a vague response that it's difficult to respond with any specifics, but I will say that I can't imagine how you thought Donald Trump was the better of the two candidates to achieve either of these goals.
The primary reason you yourself gave was a view of "immigration issues" that is detached from the reality that Democrats have continually increased funding for CBP and ICE and increased militarization of the border with every single presidency since and including Clinton.
At the same time, your belief is that failure to enact a nativist crackdown will result in "a civil war". I thought it went without saying, but this is a very extreme view, to say the least...
The connection between nativist policy advocacy and white supremacist ideology in the US isn't new. It goes back to the very notion of "illegal immigrant"; the politician who shepherded the bill that criminalized unauthorized entry to the United States was an open an enthusiastic white supremacist who pushed this bill forward to advance his white supremacy: https://immigrationhistory.org/item/undesirable-aliens-act-o...
At the same time, this relationship is not ancient history. Indeed, nativist sentiments and white supremacist ideology are still closely linked today. See, e.g.:
> The correlation between immigration preferences and racial resentment was significant in every year. The steady correlation of 0.30 throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was impressively strong by the standards of opinion data of this sort. The rise from 0.30 to 0.50 by 2018 indicates an uncommonly strong relationship. [...] [E]very measure we have indicates that Whites' views of immigration are closely tied to their views of race.
There are many, many similar correlations between nativist beliefs and policy support and "racial conservatism", white supremacist beliefs, and Trump support (including support of Trump's extreme immigration measures).
"Racist" is not currently a label that many people in the United States are willing to openly embrace, even to themselves. It's not surprising that actual or perceived accusations of racism are received with defensiveness. But individual (and nominal) disavowal of "racism" is frankly less compelling than the entire history and presently observable empirical reality of nativism in the United States.
Just curious. Since you voted for someone who is a terrible President last time, what are you planning to change about how you make voting decisions next time? Are there particular people or media you plan to listen to less, and others more? Particular aspects you will weight higher or lower?
Thanks for all of the comments. I wasn't replying simply because I haven't seen them, but based on the comments I actually got: I feel like my words would be like yelling into a vacuum regardless of what I actually say.
If you’re not fine with criminals who get away with fraud, why vote for a well known fraudster? He’s been conning people since the 80s
He was clear about how he intended to run the country in his last term. And in the lead-up to the election. You are complicit in his crimes.
People are going to pile on you for not seeing this coming, but I really do appreciate your ability to change your mind and tell people about it.
People need space to make a U-turn. I hope you get some grace because it's a lot easier to say "I told you so" than "I was wrong."
I don't see where the GP changed their mind. They may not be ok with this particular action while still preferring the current administration to any alternative.
How wasn't his first 4 years enough time?
> People need space to make a U-turn
The problem is we dont believe him. There has been ample time to make a u turn. A decade at this point. Trump has never shied away from his corruption. He has been upfront about his intentions from the beginning. I just do not believe that this is the straw that broke the camels back when so many straws have come before.
Serious set of questions here from someone desperately trying to understand people who voted for Trump and how to have conversations with them that can be productive. None of them are meant to be insulting or insinuate anything.
To me, this sort of behavior just seems par for the course for how he has been acting since before his presidency. Did you follow his record in business and politics closely prior to voting for him? If so, what mitigating factors were there that let you still feel comfortable in voting for him?
Is this an isolated source of issue with him? Part of a broader trend? In either case, is it/these a big enough deal for him to lose your support moving forward? For the rest of the political party supporting him?
If there has been a shift in your ability to support him, what is it that broke the camel's back?
It is remarkably simple. There are countless meals on the menu but people get to see only the two on the front page. Say, monkey brains and bull testicles. Few can really appreciate either. There is a little talk about the slugs on page 1. An abysmal small number will turn a few pages and look over the burgers and pizzas... but you can't really order a burger in a restaurant like this? Can you? So even they pretend they really like to eat testicles.
You could have literally opened a random page and order whatever is on there. It is perfectly safe to order the burger as you will most likely be served monkey brains anyway.
No one will rage at you for voting for Afroman. There are no dire consequences.
I just honestly feel like any attempt to equate the two is insane.
I can't really align myself to either party, and I am diametrically opposed to the Democrats on some issues, like gun control, and think that there are a lot of real issues that they push far to the extreme to the point that it is problematic, but... there's also only one party that attempted insurrection and overturning the election, campaigned on all sorts of insane shit, pushes a narrative of needing the military to deal with protestors, etc.
It's not two shit sandwiches, it's a pot of live pit vipers vs a pot of boiled unseasoned kale and spinach. I'm not going to enjoy the latter, but it's probably not going to harm anything more than my taste buds. The other might kill me.
The magic is this: there are no other candidates who can win because you didn't vote for any of those in previous elections and there won't be in the next because you won't now.
It is like you ask someone to chose between death by fire, death by drowning OR finding the love of your life. Then they respond with: I don't want to drown! Or worse, they ask what other people chose.
Imagine yourself making your own choices. Picture it for a moment, doesn't it sound terrifying?
One should also look at it from the perspective of the other candidates. I mean those not part of the uniparty. Imagine making an effort to convince people to vote for a sanity riddled election program. The level of insult people sink to in order to NEVER even consider it.
Not OP but I reluctantly voted for Trump because of the direction he proclaimed he wanted the country to go. I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
But I knew Trump was shady and didn't like that he partied with Epstein in the 90s. A country takes a long time to change directions. I saw a chance for a smaller less restricting federal government. It was a gamble I was willing to take to at least get the ship turning around.
J/w: what direction does it seem to you that Democrats want? At least judging by its elected officials and internal leaders, it seems like a pretty directionless party to me.
Flooding the nation with immigrants and given them our tax money and berating anybody that questioned it. That is a 100% sure path to civil war.
When did your ancestors immigrate to the country? What was the process for immigration then?
For the majority of the history of the country it has never been anything like it is today. Until 1819 you basically literally just showed up. After that, ships had to include passenger manifest and pass that along to the state, and then state's handled immigration - but none there did more than try to charge 'head fees' to keep the truly destitute out, but not all states even did that. 1875/1876 there were laws that changed this - largely banning Asian immigrants and making immigration federal purview. The next couple of decades things got more formalized, but if you were a normal human being capable of supporting yourself you basically got held for a basic check and then were let in. <1-2% got turned away most years. It wasn't until 1921/4 that anything resembling our current immigration system was put into place, and while it saw significant revision in 1965 to how the caps and quotas were organized, we've not seen anything major change.
The Democrats want significant immigration reform, true. They want a path for people that have been living here as productive members of society to stay here. They want them to be treated like human beings.
This is not "flooding" the nation.
> and given them our tax money
This talking point seems to be repeated a lot, but it's just not true. Illegal immigrants pay more taxes in to the system than they receive in benefits - largely because they are ineligible for the vast majority of benefits. If you want to increase our tax revenue, more illegal immigrants is better than less. We effectively rip them off. It's like the claims that the shutdown is over giving illegal immigrants free healthcare - not a dime of the funding being discussed would go to them. You're being lied to.
I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken, and we have built our way of life off of exploiting a large amount of hardworking people that contribute a hell of a lot to our ability to live the way we do. Legalizing them, streamlining the immigration process, etc., is not at risk of bankrupting our coffers.
This country was a frontier in 1819. We needed labor to tame the wilderness. We don't need more unskilled laborers anymore.
We have immigration laws. The US is incredibly generous, and naturalizes more than 1 million immigrants each year.
The American people don't want a "path" for illegal aliens. We already tried that in 1986. All it did was incentivize more illegal immigration.
And what the last administration did was absolutely flooding the nation. They removed nearly every EO related to border security, and then complained that they needed more laws to "fix" the problem they created.
> I'm all for a system where we screen our immigrants for criminals, terrorists, etc. But the current system is broken,
The current system is broken insofar as we are not enforcing the law thoroughly enough. We already have a system, it just needs to be followed. All illegal aliens have to go back.
> I could not tolerate the direction the democrats were wanting to go as it seemed an inevitable path to civil war.
Trumps action with ICE will lead to waco situations. Undocumented immigrants can obtain guns in this country and will not continue to go quietly into the night. Seems to me that his actions are far more likely to lead to civil war
I think a more likely scenario is that a citizen gets tired of being rounded up every other weekend or shaken down for ICE protection money and decides to put a stop to it, one way or another. And it would in many cases be legal too, because those iceholes don't identify themselves.
If somebody that is here illegally picks up a gun and fights citizens or government they are a foreign combatant on US soil. Fighting them is not civil war it is national defense and is the whole reason the federal government was established.
Now, if you are talking about citizens supporting an invasion against those that oppose it that is civil war. I agree that is a none zero possibility. However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
>However, telling citizens to get fucked while taking their money and giving it to non citizens, to me, was certain to lead to violent conflict between citizens.
Whose money? Being given to which non-citizens?
Seriously. Be specific here. the words you used are all in English and are even fairly grammatical. But they don't model reality.
Undocumented folks, by virtue of being undocumented, are ineligible for public assistance of any kind, pretty much everywhere in the US.
What's more, in order to work, they need to provide an SSN and they need to use someone else's because they can't get their own -- because they're undocumented. But they and their employer must each still pay Social Security and Medicare taxes which pay for those programs -- but since they're undocumented, they'll never collect any of the money they paid into those programs in taxes.
So I ask again, specifically, what taxpayer money is being paid to which non-citizens? Please be specific here.
Illegal aliens are eligible for the following benefits:
Federal Benefits
* Emergency medical care
* School meals
* K-12 education
* WIC nutrition program
California State Benefits
* Full-scope Medi-Cal
* Cash assistance (CAPI)
* In-state college tuition
* Disability and Family Leave
FYI emergency medical care is not a federal benefit. You and your health insurance provider are on the hook for whatever it costs.
You knew who he is, and you voted for him anyway. You really didn't see this kind of rampant corruption coming from his 2nd term?
Well, you voted for it. Were you not capable of critical thought when you entered the voting booth?
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If you think this is wrong, please, I implore you to do something about it.
Your reps (or likely preferred choice of reps, if they didn't win their district) are enabling this, and don't give two shits about anything I say.
Trump is the most openly corrupt leader in american history. How can you vote for him while claiming to be against corruption?
Because he’s giving them the one thing they really care about “white nationalism”
They will overlook everything else he does. Everything
Just stop with that BS. I guarantee that "white nationalism" was the farthest thing from the majority of Trump voters mind. If you come out of the gate saying all Trump supporters are racist most people are just going to roll their eyes at you at walk away. You have already told them you dont like them and that you will most likely not even entertain their reasons as acceptable.
You're the one who was in another comment talking about how the dems ran on a platform of flooding our country with immigrants and giving them our tax money; sounds like you are, in fact, closer to the racist/white supremacist set than you might realize. At the very least, you share their goals or vision for America.
What exactly did you think you were voting for then? Because everything he's done has been extremely predictable.
A chance of making the federal government smaller and less overbearing. Also a path that didn't inevitably lead to civil war.
He said "I will be a dictator on day 1", and he meant it. It wasn't "a joke".
He's using US Military on US soil. Sending National Guard in where there is no legal justification for it. This is what the start of a civil war looks like.
That's such a vague response that it's difficult to respond with any specifics, but I will say that I can't imagine how you thought Donald Trump was the better of the two candidates to achieve either of these goals.
The primary reason you yourself gave was a view of "immigration issues" that is detached from the reality that Democrats have continually increased funding for CBP and ICE and increased militarization of the border with every single presidency since and including Clinton.
At the same time, your belief is that failure to enact a nativist crackdown will result in "a civil war". I thought it went without saying, but this is a very extreme view, to say the least...
The connection between nativist policy advocacy and white supremacist ideology in the US isn't new. It goes back to the very notion of "illegal immigrant"; the politician who shepherded the bill that criminalized unauthorized entry to the United States was an open an enthusiastic white supremacist who pushed this bill forward to advance his white supremacy: https://immigrationhistory.org/item/undesirable-aliens-act-o...
At the same time, this relationship is not ancient history. Indeed, nativist sentiments and white supremacist ideology are still closely linked today. See, e.g.:
https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/150/2/40/98317/Immigrati...
> The correlation between immigration preferences and racial resentment was significant in every year. The steady correlation of 0.30 throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was impressively strong by the standards of opinion data of this sort. The rise from 0.30 to 0.50 by 2018 indicates an uncommonly strong relationship. [...] [E]very measure we have indicates that Whites' views of immigration are closely tied to their views of race.
There are many, many similar correlations between nativist beliefs and policy support and "racial conservatism", white supremacist beliefs, and Trump support (including support of Trump's extreme immigration measures).
"Racist" is not currently a label that many people in the United States are willing to openly embrace, even to themselves. It's not surprising that actual or perceived accusations of racism are received with defensiveness. But individual (and nominal) disavowal of "racism" is frankly less compelling than the entire history and presently observable empirical reality of nativism in the United States.
> Hi, Trump voter here. I'm NOT fine with this.
Welcome to the resistance!
Just curious. Since you voted for someone who is a terrible President last time, what are you planning to change about how you make voting decisions next time? Are there particular people or media you plan to listen to less, and others more? Particular aspects you will weight higher or lower?
Just to be clear, I'm not part of any "resistance". I don't know what that is. Sounds awfully tribalistic - something I go out of my way to avoid.
Thanks for all of the comments. I wasn't replying simply because I haven't seen them, but based on the comments I actually got: I feel like my words would be like yelling into a vacuum regardless of what I actually say.
Honestly, why did you vote for this then?
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