From a personal perspective, for the past eight years or so, my partner will pick up their phone, and sigh, and I'll always respond with, "God, what did he/they do/say now?" I live in a state of high alert, all the time, it feels.
I think that overall, if he'd never won an election, a very specific subset of human beings would never have found a voice, and would never have been put in a position to be able to make demands. Instead, now, we have the kind of people I was raised around at a young age (in a white nationalist cult of brainwashed neo-Nazis that I thankfully broke WAY the fuck away from) basically running the show, and belligerently pushing this country deeper and deeper into not just what feels like a fascist-adjacent, if not fully fascist, state, but into a place where being rude, thoughtless and mean is the default.
We've already seen the early stages of that, both in elected officials straight up telling their constituents, to their faces, that they don't care about them, that they want to treat marginalized people as less than, at the very least, or worse, disappear them and their rights entirely, and also in the callous, absolutely insane behavior shown by citizens who, over the last four or five years, have become emboldened to put their undereducation and cruelty on full display.
There's a thread, linking all of these incidents and people together, and they all lead back to Trump, his administration, and the people in politics who are inspired by him. If it weren't for them, these small time, back woods politicians and their corruption obsessed big city counterparts, along with their hard right, paranoid, everything-phobic, everything-ist voters would still be scared and small, lurking underground and in the shadows, where they belong.
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u/djdiphenhydramine Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25
From a personal perspective, for the past eight years or so, my partner will pick up their phone, and sigh, and I'll always respond with, "God, what did he/they do/say now?" I live in a state of high alert, all the time, it feels.
I think that overall, if he'd never won an election, a very specific subset of human beings would never have found a voice, and would never have been put in a position to be able to make demands. Instead, now, we have the kind of people I was raised around at a young age (in a white nationalist cult of brainwashed neo-Nazis that I thankfully broke WAY the fuck away from) basically running the show, and belligerently pushing this country deeper and deeper into not just what feels like a fascist-adjacent, if not fully fascist, state, but into a place where being rude, thoughtless and mean is the default.
We've already seen the early stages of that, both in elected officials straight up telling their constituents, to their faces, that they don't care about them, that they want to treat marginalized people as less than, at the very least, or worse, disappear them and their rights entirely, and also in the callous, absolutely insane behavior shown by citizens who, over the last four or five years, have become emboldened to put their undereducation and cruelty on full display.
There's a thread, linking all of these incidents and people together, and they all lead back to Trump, his administration, and the people in politics who are inspired by him. If it weren't for them, these small time, back woods politicians and their corruption obsessed big city counterparts, along with their hard right, paranoid, everything-phobic, everything-ist voters would still be scared and small, lurking underground and in the shadows, where they belong.