Rambling Lemurian

Well…. here we are. I should have expected this. In fact I did expect something like this back in June before Biden dropped out. It seemed inevitable that Trump would win pretty easily. Biden was not popular. Harris was not popular. Inflation is the least popular of all, and a lousy debate performance from Biden wasn’t going to overcome that no matter how terrible of a person, speaker, and leader Trump is.

And then Kamala took over and I got suckered in. I fell into the trap of the social media echo chamber. I had done a decent job of securing my twitter feed against the rising right-wing accounts and bots since Elon took over. But maybe I did it too well and lost touch with reality. It’s clear to me, as it’s been for a while, that I need to get off social media. It’s not healthy, it’s not productive, and it’s no longer as informative and truthful as it should be. All the memes and headlines about Harris’s rallies and Walz’s interviews on networks were just a mirage. Every scandal about Trump and his campaign, and his diminishing crowd sizes and mental abilities overblown for clicks. Every GOP-lifer un-endorsing Trump missed the fact that no sitting Republicans in the Senate or House publicly denounced Trump and the MAGA movement. It doesn’t matter what Dick fucking Cheney and other failed politicians and staffers think of Trump and his inability to govern.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for this result. Joe Biden had no business attempting to run for a second term. The Democratic Party should have forced him to keep his 2020 campaign promise and be a transition President. At the very least the Democrats should have held a real primary. By the time Biden dropped out, Harris was the only logical choice. And I suspect Biden only agreed to drop out if the DNC promised to back Harris and not hold a speed-primary or try to get someone like Gavin Newsom to take over. In hindsight, the end result for Harris was about the best we could have expected. She wasn’t a popular candidate in the primaries leading up to 2020, and wasn’t a particularly popular VP pick either. Her refusal to distance herself from Biden’s policies did her no favors. But even if she took a hardline stance against the genocide of Palestinians, or gave more detail about how her plans to fight inflation and corporate price gouging will be better than Biden’s, or how she can alleviate white people’s fears about immigration policy, I don’t think it would have mattered. She was always going to be held to an immensely higher standard than her opponent.

The country has shown repeatedly that it’s not ready for a woman President. It’s stupid. It’s misogynistic. But it’s true. Hillary Clinton spend 8 years in the White House as an active First Lady. Then served as a US Senator for 8 years. Then served as Secretary of State under Obama during his first term. I can’t think of anyone who had more directly related experience and was better qualified to ever run for President. Yet she still lost to a loud-mouthed, despicable, reality TV star who fell ass-backwards into the GOP nomination and probably wasn’t really that interested in becoming President. Yeah, Hillary was not very “likeable”. But you’re telling me her opponent was likeable? No, but he was a loud man, so he got the support and the benefit of the doubt from an ill-informed public and media.

I foolishly thought we’d learn our lesson after that. Trump’s first term was a disaster which culminated in the entire world shutting down in response to a pandemic his administration failed to adequately handle. Then after losing his re-election, he incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol and attempt to assassinate multiple members of Congress and his own Vice President. Surely, he’d gone too far. Even some top Republicans publicly toyed with the idea that maybe Trump was a threat. But it wasn’t enough. And it’s clear now, more than it ever has, that it will never be enough. Trump’s campaign has demonized immigrants and threatened to deport even those here legally. He supported calling Puerto Rico “garbage”. But he gained support among Latinos. The GOP and Trump fully support Israel’s assault on Palestinians, with Lindsey Graham openly musing on nuking, yet he still won the support of Arab-Americans. Trump has a blatantly racist history going back several decades and demonized the Black Lives Matter movement, but he still won support from Black voters. His core white voters looked past every scandal, every slurred speech, every terrible decision and stood by him like we should have known they would. And most importantly, the Democrat voters, despite all the social media enthusiasm, just didn’t show up. It’s not fair.

I’m not sure where we go from here. This wasn’t a fluke result. This was a mandate by the American people that this is what they want. The GOP controls everything now and they will for quite a while. The question will be how much of Project 2025 actually sees the light of day. Trump has distanced himself from it, but you can’t exactly trust him. Some of the stuff in Project 2025 is so extreme that I’m sure at least some of the GOP don’t want to go that far. At least not yet. So much of Trump’s first Cabinet have denounced him that it will be an entirely new regime, headlined by Vance, Musk, and RFK Jr. I suspect, maybe foolishly hope, that this administration will be staffed by so many clowns and self-centered opportunists that it creates power struggles steeped in incompetence. Maybe they don’t manage to get nearly as much done as we think. Or maybe the people pulling on Trump’s strings in the background will be able to keep them organized and managed to the point where they can enact their Christo-fascist dreams for America. I really don’t know. But I expect chaos one way or the other, the only question being how badly will it affect us.

I’ll be fine I guess. If anything a Trump presidency will likely be “good” for me as an individual. I’m a white, straight, male. I’m pretty much set. My stocks will probably go up for a while, my taxes might go down a smidge. Maybe even my health insurance premiums will go down once the GOP repeals the Obamacare. But it just sucks that as a nation, this is the guiding principle that leads to people voting for a convicted felon with no discernible qualifications or intelligence to warrant being the President. The average white/straight person will end up with maybe a few extra dollars in their pocket with this administration and that’s the most important thing to us, apparently. And this is assuming his tariff plan doesn’t actually happen since most people seem to not understand how bad that will be.

What happened to empathy? What happened to looking out for your neighbor and people with less than you? Why is it more important for my individual stocks to go up rather than ensuring that school kids get fed a decent lunch? Why is it more important for me to have my healthcare premiums go slightly down if it means that people who get diagnosed with cancer or diabetes get their coverage dropped? Why is it more important for me to pay a bit less in taxes if it means millions of hard-working, decent people are now at risk of being separated from their kids and deported back to war-torn countries? Why should I care if the GDP increases by an extra 0.3% if it means that gay and trans people have to go back into hiding?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because America isn’t a democracy anymore. It’s a corporate oligarchy. And the corporations and billionaires have been conditioning regular Americans the idea that we need to compete against each other to survive. It used to be that a man could work 40 hours a week at a factory with a nice pension and make enough to provide for his stay-at-home wife and 2.5 kids in a 4 bedroom suburban home. His kids could get summer jobs bagging groceries to pay for their upcoming college tuition. They could live a comfortable life and everyone was happy (except the blacks and gays and women in general, but that’s a whole other thing). But slowly the powers that be have stripped those things away in the name of corporate profits. Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” was a scam thought up by his corporate handlers, and the public bought it because he was a smooth-talking tough-looking man at a time when the Soviet Union was imploding. But with trickle-down economics, that financial security was taken away little by little from the average American so that the corporations could line their pockets. Suddenly the average American had to fight for jobs and promotions in order to pay for rent and groceries and healthcare. Real freedom starts with financial stability. So people started to feel like their freedom was being taken away as they were forced to serve the corporations and new billionaire class. We as a people simultaneously hated these elites but also looked up to them. Maybe if we work just a little bit harder and “grind” we can be like them. Those people even want to help us, they say. Vote us into office and we’ll help you. The problem isn’t us millionaires and billionaires. Give us another $5 so we can take control. We’ll fix the real problem. The real problem is that guy next to you. He wants the same job as you. And he’s an immigrant so that means he’s more desperate. More desperate means I can pay him less. I’ll give him less money than you’d be willing to take. But that’s not my fault. It’s just good business, right? You’d do the same if you were in my shoes, wouldn’t you? So the solution is we have to get rid of that guy. But not just him. He’s bringing in people from his old country. We don’t know who they are. They’re even more desperate than him, probably. Maybe even violent. No, don’t look at my hand that’s giving him the money you need. Look at my other hand instead and put another $5 in it. I need it so I can help you.

That’s who you are, America. You’re the fucking idiot scammed by that devil. You believed the billionaires are here to help you, as they’re fucking you over again and again and again.

But hey, maybe this is the wake up call we all need. Maybe the Trump 47 administration will be so fucking awful and incompetent that it will make Trump 45 look like FDR. Maybe this country, and the world with it, will go to shit so fast and thoroughly that a real political revolution will be inevitable and we can have real choices. No more of this two-party shit. This whole system is broken. We need real change and real choices. So I guess that’s what I’m hoping for with this new Trump administration. Something so bad that we have to start over as a society. Because otherwise this crap isn’t going away. Trump will die soon enough and some other dipshit fascist preying on the working class will take his place, whether they call themselves a Republican or Democrat, it won’t really matter. We’ll just go through this again and again. Maybe that’s cruel, since it will badly affect a ton of people. Many people would even die. Maybe wars will be fought to make it happen. Either way, it’s clear that just telling people to “VOTE!” doesn’t make a difference anymore. Is that the death of my own empathy showing? The sort of thing I was just ranting about? Maybe. Show me a better option that isn’t “Vote Blue No Matter Who”.

Fuck You, America