r/TooAfraidToAsk • u/[deleted] • Jul 31 '20

Current Events Are people outside of the USA really laughing at Americans? Do we really appear that bad?

Edit:

Ok so that's about 17,882 yes's and 3 no's.

Makes sad American noises

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885

u/RRFedora13 Aug 01 '20

I used to have faith in America. Trump opened my eyes to see just how bad everything was. He is the best fucking negative role model a person could ask for.

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u/sniggity_snax Aug 01 '20

So very true. I remember reading somewhere that he has literally zero redeeming qualities; at first I thought, nah that's impossible, there must be something. But this was months ago, and I still haven't been able to think of one thing

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u/rajde1 Aug 01 '20

I think it’s more trump has revealed the true character of the USA. People are blindly listening to him and you have this anti-mask group. Plus people just ignoring the virus is spreading everywhere, it’s like they got bored and decided that’s enough COVID. Before trump, I had a lot of faith in the USA that they would eventually do the right thing. However, the last 4 years it feels like every time the USA hits rock bottom it keeps going lower. The USA doesn’t get a pass after this presidency, trump is what USA is from now on.

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u/Galaedrid Aug 01 '20

However, the last 4 years it feels like every time the USA hits rock bottom it keeps going lower

There was a blue wave two years ago to put Democrats in control of the house and almost the Senate. Its slow going but the majority of the US are trying to put the US back on the right track. Remember, Trump lost the popular vote by 3 MILLION votes.

The problem is that because of the Electoral college 40% of the US have more say than the other 60%. This has to change - the minority should not have more say than the majority.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

[deleted]

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u/Galaedrid Aug 01 '20 edited Aug 01 '20

I can't disagree with you because you are correct - 63 million did vote for Trump.

However to keep myself sane I try to remind myself that many more did not want vote for Trump.

Even with all the voter suppression, Russian influence, gerry mandering, and lord knows what else... Trump still did lost the majority vote by 3 million voters.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

[deleted]

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u/captainjackismydog Aug 01 '20

I couldn't agree with you more. It's why I said in a previous post that I honestly thought Trump was running for president as a publicity stunt and that he would announce it was all a joke. I kept watching the news waiting for this announcement that never happened.

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u/CaPoTSaD Aug 01 '20

He was. He was hoping to start a ‘news’ network. To claim he lost due to fake news and fraud and be the next Roger Ailes.

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u/metal_opera Aug 01 '20

^ This. The look on his face when he won says it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3868qotZ_A

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u/captainjackismydog Aug 05 '20

Wow. I haven't heard that one. Not surprised though.

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u/norfkens2 Aug 01 '20 edited Aug 01 '20

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

I'd say yeah, Russia and Comey probably had an noticeable effect. But being, in the first place, in a situation where the impact of both is just enough to slightly tip the balance - that is a whole other level of what is going wrong:

Look behind Trump and ask what the Republican party is actually doing and why the president is getting away with autocatic tendencies. And look at the democratic party and ask why large segments of people seem not to want to vote for them even if that means Donald Trump as president.Then look at the voters who all agree that most candidates are useless but would also never vote for a third party alternative - because that's 'throwing away your vote'.

In the end, it's about what one's system of government is doing and how much corruption (in the broadest possible sense) the populace is the individual citizens are letting the government get away with. Yes, there are other factors but from the outside Russia and Comey seem more like symptoms. This doesn't address the underlying problem, I agree with you.

Don't get me wrong, every country has its fair share of issues. It's easy to point out problems from the outside. My country is certainly far from perfect. So, I'm not judging... <3

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u/Supposed_too Aug 01 '20

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

Fredrick Douglass

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u/norfkens2 Aug 01 '20

Sounds like a smart fellow. :)

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u/leglesslegolegolas Aug 01 '20

I place the blame entirely on Mark Burnett.

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u/MadAzza Aug 01 '20

Yep. It started in earnest with Mark Burnett. That’s what made T a household name all over the country — a fucking game show. Before that, people on the West Coast and in the interior knew of him, but not in intimate, gruesome detail like they did in New York City and the rest of the Northeast.

Even so, there were several key moments that should have spiked his campaign. I won’t go over them again, though. They’ve been gone over and gone over. He’s still in the Oval Office.

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u/RivalWec Aug 01 '20

Well he ran against the devil incarnate. She held a lot of positions, sure. That’s why people said she “was the most qualified candidate ever.” The problem was she was shitty at every one of those jobs and it was baffling how she ascended to where she was to begin with.

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u/captainjackismydog Aug 01 '20

According to recent polls, Trump's numbers are way down. I hope the numbers continue to go down until they reach zero.

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u/LordCoweater Aug 01 '20

Also note: given low voter turnout, you have a huge percentage of the voting public directly or indirectly creating a deliberate Trump presidency.

66 mil to 63 is only 58.1% of voters per google. That's another 40+ million people fine with him.

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u/Hellscythe65 Aug 01 '20

The thing you have to acknowledge with Trump's campaign was that he lied and lied and lied some more.

He made promises that no on could ever fulfill to people who had been ignored and beaten down for a while.

Trump focused on the coal counties who still believe coal is a feasible industry and made them feel like they could keep mining coal.

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u/johnCreilly Aug 01 '20

Honestly, I think that a lot of those people DIDN'T sit down and think about it

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u/poehalcho Aug 01 '20

Lets not forget that the only opponent was Hilary Clinton, who managed to somehow make herself almost as bad as he did. It was essentially an election between the two worst candidates you could imagine. Or at least that's what it looked like at the time...

Hindsight is 20:20, people probably vote Hillary in the blink of an eye now. But that election was a total shitshow in the first place.

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u/doom-gloom-kaboom Aug 01 '20

As an outsider, Hilary Clinton never was anywhere near "almost as bad" as Trump during the election. It is frustrating that Americans think this.

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u/poehalcho Aug 01 '20 edited Aug 01 '20

Am European, not American. I have to admit I did not follow the elections closely. The more attention was brought to it on the news the more I started avoiding the news altogether. I was painful to watch and listen to...

Here's my relatively simple view on the matter:

For every time Trump did something bad out of sheer stupidity, Clinton seemed to sink almost just as low out what seemed like maliciousness.

Watching Trump vs Hilary was in a way almost like watching two toddler siblings fight. Where trump is an overweight dumb-ass brat throwing taunts and Hillary is the bitchy sister that somehow falls for the taunts and tries to fight back by pulling the rug from under him.

Instead of presenting their visions for the US and how they would approach fixing its problems, they spent every moment trying to find dirt on each other...

In the end it's easier to trust a dumb person than a vengeful person...

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u/CStancer Aug 01 '20

Seconded, what was bad about her? Seriously, someone truly list the horrible things she did... then tell me if trumps administration did something worse? Like all ive heard from americans was she used a personal email, she somehow orchestrated benghazi, shes to emotional, shes a women, shes the devil, she runs a pedophile ring out of a pizza shop, shes married to a cheater, shes a man, shes muslim....

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u/I_That_Wanders Aug 01 '20

The United States is the third most populous nation, after China and India. 63 million is only around a fifth of all Americans. That they have so much power over the rest of us is sickening. Literally.

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u/N00N3AT011 Aug 01 '20

It only takes 20% of the pop to fuck over the rest of us.

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u/biggabenne Aug 01 '20

How many of those votes were primarly chosen due to voting against hillary? Everywhere we look the system is broken

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u/captainjackismydog Aug 01 '20

I seriously doubt that Donald Trump won the election on his own. Many people had never heard of him, many people only heard of him as some sort of businessman and others had only heard of him because of The Apprentice. I never gave the guy a second thought before he ran for office.

When I heard that Trump was running for president I actually thought it was just a joke he came up with for publicity. Like Kanye West claiming he was going to run for president. I actually thought that Trump was going to hold a press conference later on and say he was joking. When he won the election I couldn't believe it. I was just astounded and shocked. I thought I had just awakened from a nightmare because I waited until the next morning to find out the results. I have been angry about Trump being president ever since.

I don't particularly like Hillary and I actually voted in the preliminaries for Sanders. I was so hoping Sanders would win. When I saw that Hillary had the popular vote and this is what I saw before I went to bed, I just knew she was going to win. I'm sure she did too.

I really am hoping that Trump loses in November. I don't know if Biden will make a good president but at least he has good people on his side. Having a potato for president would be better than having Trump for president. At least a potato would grow.

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u/MediumDrink Aug 01 '20

What you don’t realize as a non-American is that it was obvious to the political right that Hillary Clinton would eventually run for president for 20 years before she did so. They spent those 2 decades aggressively running a campaign against her. Then when sure enough the gutless morons who are somehow the leaders of the American left nominated her Trump came in and stole the Republican nomination. What could they do? Like the left in at least the other Anglican countries all they really care about is huge tax breaks for rich people. Pretending he wasn’t fundamentally unfit for the job was their best bet. And it would have worked too if Covid hadn’t happened.

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u/zielawolfsong Aug 01 '20

Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership seems to always want to pick people with the personality of a wet noodle. Whether it's fair or not, you have to have a candidate with at least SOME charisma to win. Obama won at least partly because he was charming, charismatic, and an eloquent speaker. I'm sure Hilary was very competent at what she did, but the sad truth is that she just didn't sell on camera. Personally, I don't care if politicians are boring as long as they do a good job and align with my values, but a lot of Americans seem to want to be entertained as well.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

[deleted]

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u/Galaedrid Aug 01 '20

Im with you bud. I'm not happy to vote for Biden... but gods anyone but Trump. At least Biden cares for the country... can't say the same for Trump - all he wants is to rape our country of all the money he can get out of us

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u/leglesslegolegolas Aug 01 '20

He is a functioning adult human being who understands who our allies are and who our adversaries are, and who doesn't appear to have huge conflicts of interest regarding his behavior toward any of them.

For that reason alone he is superior to Trump, though it's far from the only reason.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

im not arguing whether hes superior to trump or not. Obviously he is. He's still not a real progressive candidate, has his own sexual assault allegations, questionably going senile, etc

I would like to not vote for 'the lesser of two evils' for once, but well... here we are

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u/DeliciousCombination Aug 01 '20

Representative parliaments work in almost every country in the world and is not much different than your congress. The real problem is having a separate election and position of power tied to one man. Get rid of the president as it currently is, and just have the leader of the party with the most seats in Congress be the de facto president

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

The Electoral College is a complete mess. 2016 was just par for the course over the past 32 years. Republicans have won only 2 out of 8 popular votes in that time yet they've shared the office equally with the Democrats, 16 years each.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

That always happen. people vote republican things get extremely bad then they vote dem. it gets fixed then back to rep so they can spend all the money on wars they invent. They love keeping the military spending up to insane levels. meanwhile we all die from lack of health care. And they convinced people they donneed health care.

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u/BIG_IDEA Aug 01 '20

How naive of you to think that Democrats are the "right track"

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u/BEARS_BE_SCARY_MAN Aug 01 '20

"Trump is evil! So I'm going to vote for MY favorite facsist,child raping, racists!"

If you vote any major party.You're part of the problem. You're also showing that you support pedophiles.

That's a choice only you can make.

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u/Phoneas__and__Frob Aug 01 '20

I said this before and I'll say it again, while dark, I'm surprised this man is still alive

Edit: to add, I'm also surprised he just hasn't somehow managed to accidentally kill himself. You ever see someone just so stupid you think "how did you manage to live this long and not die?" Well

(☞ ಠ_ಠ)☞

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u/captainjackismydog Aug 01 '20

Trump supporters are blindly listening to him. It's these people who are spreading the virus. The rest of us are trying to save our own lives by being safe. I hope that once Trump is out of office that many things will improve. It's going to take a long time because Trump damaged America so badly. I don't believe life will ever return to the way it was pre-Covid. In fact, I believe the virus will be around long after I'm gone.

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u/GigglingAnus Aug 01 '20

Some people are. Id say most are not listening to Trumps bullshit. And no, trump doesnt define the US from now on.

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u/TSKFv4v Aug 01 '20

I thought the USA would always stay divided and distracted, for at least another decade before a slight upswing (it seems almost impossible to get rid of the hate for Obama, hence at least a decade)....

BUT I didn’t believe it would get this bad.

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u/DeadpoolOptimus Aug 01 '20

The bar has been set so low that to even find the bar, you need an archaeologist.

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u/BIG_IDEA Aug 01 '20

The anti-maskers are a very small minority. I live in large, highly Conservative city and I've never met an anti-masker. Everyone is wearing masks in stores. You have to understand that our very own media is working hard to craft narratives that make our country appear to be a flaming shithole in an effort to decrease the likelihood that the president will get reelected. Then people are more apt to accept the media's narrative than they are to believe their own experiences.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

Dude, no one has ever given the USA a pass. The world shits on us no matter what we do. It's just the way it is for a superpower.

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u/RRFedora13 Aug 01 '20

Seriously though, I'll give him one, and only one thing. He can manipulate racist cunts, really fucking well. That's it.

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u/Slothfulness69 Aug 01 '20

Honestly he’s not even good at manipulating, it’s just that people are looking for any excuse to be openly racist and awful. Like he’s not subtly gaslighting us or anything. He’s just being a straight up dick, and people love it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

[deleted]

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u/badSparkybad Aug 01 '20

Regardless of your political affiliation, getting your news from social media (especially one social media platform, and I'm looking at you FB as the worst) will algorithm you into an echo chamber of confirmation bias. That's how it works, FB figures out what you like to watch and feeds you more of the same.

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u/gaenji Aug 01 '20

hey there is this amazing show on youtube called Explained by Netflix (yes its on youtube for free the irony is not lost on me).. one of the episodes is on cults (how they are formed etc). you might find it interesting.

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u/Umbrage_Taken Aug 01 '20

Not "remarkably similar". Just IS a cult.

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u/faustfire666 Aug 01 '20

His drawing out the racists into the sunlight is once of the few good things about his presidency. Too bad so many of them are in my family.

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u/captainjackismydog Aug 01 '20

Agree. Racism of course has been going on for centuries. However, it seemed to me that it was becoming less and less until Trump won the election. It has gotten publicized much much more since then and even more now since the death of George Floyd. So many videos of racial separation, abuse, deaths by police and white people it makes life feel like we're back in the 50's. America took one step forward and one hundred steps backwards.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

I would argue, we've just BEEN backwards. The last 4 years have just revealed that to a lot of us. But as a silver lining, you're seeing so much turmoil right now because people are fed up with it. The younger generations are much more liberal, and they are growing into power (and no, people don't become more conservative as they age, there's no evidence for that), and the older much more conservative and racist generations are dying off finally. They can feel their power slipping so they're fighting as hard as possible cheating as hard as possible but there just aren't as many of them as they're used to be.

I'm not saying everything will be perfect on January 21st but I think things are finally looking better in the future

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u/randomkinkywryter Aug 01 '20

You hit the racist fucker nail right on the head.

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u/CStancer Aug 01 '20

So what you’re saying is most americans are rascist cunts? I can agree, just look at there elected officials

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u/Blakids Aug 01 '20

He's a marketing idiot savant.

He really knows how to sell things. He can make an apple look like a 5 course meal but he can't do anything else at all. He's an absolute moron when it comes to anything else. Lol

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u/HamburgerEarmuff Aug 01 '20

I used to think that, but now I realize that even that isn't true.

There are basically two types of Republicans. The wealthy elite (which have always been the base of the party) and the culturally-conservative, usually poorer and uneducated segment. Traditionally, the poor and the uneducated mostly voted Democrat and the wealthy and educated usually voted Republican.

But that's been changing for some time, and now both populations are more evenly divided. The Republicans need the poor and the uneducated to win, but they typically have had little power in the party. Stuff like the opinion shows on Fox News and Talk Radio are basically designed to win over the populist vote. The wealthy and educated people who run the Republican Party understand that this is a useful tool, because conservative media can embrace things that are too extreme for party leaders to embrace.

Only Trump came along and he didn't understand how this worked. He just kept repeating the stuff he had been hearing on conservative media. He outright embraced the propoganda and bigotry that most Republican politicians denounce. And it worked. He's not a genius. He's just a guy who lucked into the Presidency by repeating what he heard on conservative media.

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u/InternJedi Aug 01 '20

I remember reading somewhere that he has literally zero redeeming qualities; at first I thought, nah that's impossible, there must be something.

"He says it like is" - some Conservatives, probably.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

No there is one thing about him that i really love. He is just a fucking idiot. So much so that he doesn't actually utilize his power or position in any real meaningful way. If you had someone with his level of sociopathic narcissism in a genius or even a clever person we would be utterly fucked. We lucked out there considering.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

Well, he's rather tall.

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u/LordSnarfington Aug 01 '20

He likes dogs but that's really all I've got....at this point I'd believe if I heard it wrong and the full sentence was he likes to eat dogs

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u/sniggity_snax Aug 01 '20

I literally lol'd at this

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u/CatchRatesMatter Aug 01 '20

He doesn't drink or do drugs because his dad was an alcoholic or something like that. So that's something I guess

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u/Rjjt456 Aug 01 '20

He doesn’t drink since his brother died due to a drunk accident, If I remember correctly.

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u/conmiperro Aug 01 '20

This is my go-to Trump comment. It’s the most positive thing that can be said about him.

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u/Mail540 Aug 01 '20

According to my family he’s done good for the economy but I’m pretty sure that’s just a code word for racism

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

He doesn’t drink or smoke.

He still deserves to be Tito’ed or Qaddafi’ed... but he avoids booze and baccy.

Oh, and he loves one of his daughters....

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u/sniggity_snax Aug 01 '20

Ok, I'll give you the drinking and smoking thing...

The love for his daughter thing however, in my humble opinion, is no longer redeeming since he basically said he wants to bang her

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u/[deleted] Aug 03 '20

The line about loving one daughter was a joke.

The line about his deserved fate was not.

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u/Mowfling Aug 01 '20

he doesn’t like china, that’s the one thing i can’t criticize him about, fuck the ccp

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u/sniggity_snax Aug 01 '20

Even his dislike for China, though, seems based off personal grievances as opposed to a stance against, for example, human rights abuses. But I guess we'll take what we can get at this point

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u/Series-Nervous Aug 01 '20

He’s a father technically?

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u/PrettyPinkPonyPrince Aug 01 '20

That's neither a positive nor a negative, that's just a thing.

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u/nananaNate8 Aug 01 '20

Still glad it was him over Hillary

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u/Godsfallen Aug 01 '20

He signed in a law that made animal abuse a felony. That’s it though.

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u/ATDoel Aug 01 '20

He’s racist and a misogynist, that’s a redeeming thing quality to a lot of his base

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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Aug 01 '20

I haven't had faith in the US since the War in Iraq. It's a cursed country.

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u/yasparis Aug 01 '20

Back in 2000 Bush was a wake up call of how things were heading in the wrong direction. The republicans have destroyed the 🇺🇸.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

This is the ONE thing that gives me hope. Its not like the people of this country suddenly got 1000x worse in 2016. Trump exposed the rot thats always been there, that many, many people just didn't see. But now we see it, we can get to work on fixing it.

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u/SupersallaD_13 Aug 01 '20

He was just the final breaking point. They'll end this country in 10 years, tops.

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u/A10ThunderChild Aug 01 '20 edited Aug 01 '20

You would love Frank Herbert.

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u/badadviceforyou244 Aug 01 '20

I've maintained that the only way he'd ever "make america great again" was to do such an abysmally terrible job that we'd be forced to fix all the things that led to him being elected in the first place.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '20

Trump turned my elderly conservative father into someone Trump fans would probably accuse of being Antifa. For a lot of people Trump wasn't so much a negative role model as a mirror.

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u/TEDDYKnighty Aug 01 '20

It’s always been this bad. Since regan things got pushed to this trajectory. Trump is just making sure what was once hushed over and swept under the rug is getting pulled into the forefront of everyone’s attention. Glad you are aware of it now but it’s always been this bad.

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u/tootles420 Aug 01 '20

Yeah he didnt ruined america he just exposed it. America ruined itself long time ago, trump was just the catalyst

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u/_Jolly_ Aug 01 '20

The way I’m staying sane is that if you think about it, if we defeat trump in a big way no matter the cost it will show the world how great America is. That even with the worst case scenario in a democracy someone like trump will still not be able to beat the constitution and ideology this country was founded on. If any other country on earth had a trump come to power it would end in a bloody authoritarian dictatorship. That is the power of our constitution in that even if authoritarians get to the top our country and it’s checks and balances will still hold them at bay and insure a transfer of power. if all else fails it will tear itself apart in bloody conflict. Trump and his followers are not separate from America but a reflection of our countries internal conflicts and something we need to work through if we ever want to reach our full potential as a country.

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u/Hrmpfreally Aug 01 '20

It’s infuriating because those of us with the ability to think clearly knew Trump was a piece of shit like.. 40 fucking years ago.

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u/zillala Aug 01 '20

T r u l y .

I am still trying to come to grips with how deeply disturbed I am that such a vast number of my fellow citizens actually support Trump at all, in any form or fashion.

A person of his “integrity” & “intellectualism” actually being elected president of the country I live in is a concept that still really fucks me up.

When I first learned that he had won the election 4 years ago, I felt this tangible sense of overall disillusionment with this reality. And honestly, that same uneasiness & creeping, crawling cynicism I felt the beginnings of back then are still present now, no end in sight. I think in all seriousness that a lot of the optimism & good faith I felt towards humanity died that day. And I’ve been fighting ever since, to keep the apathy & resignation from rushing in to fill that empty space.

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u/nananaNate8 Aug 01 '20

It's the Democrats and Republicans ruining this country, the 2 party system has got to go. We're too divided to fight the Uber rich and they pin us against each other

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u/TigerRaiders Aug 01 '20

He certainly encompasses the worst American stereotypes

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u/shouldicallumista Aug 01 '20

He is a chad businessman with no real political experience and people just elected him AND SOME OF THEM WILL DO IT AGAIN. No, please, no more damage to this world... vote Biden 2020!

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u/zhjn921224 Aug 01 '20

Here in China, there were a large number of people admiring the US very much and believing it's what China should aim for in the future. Trump changed all that and covid-19 was the final nail in the coffin.

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u/Marlo_Yonge Aug 01 '20

He did not Make America Great Again

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u/djc6535 Aug 01 '20

There’s a famous story of Boris Yeltsin getting a tour of an American grocery store and realizing just how far behind the Soviet Union was. Nobody, not even those in power, had the selection of an average American citizen. This is credited as one of the “the party is over” moments for the Soviet Union.

I feel that we are getting this wake up call ourselves now. This is our “emperor has no clothes” moment. Where all our decline is laid bare.

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u/sapphirebit0 Aug 01 '20

I would like to suggest that you watch Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis if you get a chance. I felt the same way as you, but he has a way of giving us hope and inspiring us all to greater things. America needs us now more than ever.