When you hate your friend’s new friend

Trump isn't a new friend he's more of an abusive ex who gaslighting you into taking him back

@AmericanButterfly That is, unfortunately, the best way to put it. I'm seriously worried we won't weather the abuse this time.

@AmericanButterfly

I'm not even sure we took him back.

Almost everyone I know (and I know a looot of people, moved around a lot) voted against him. It seems like a 20:1 ratio of people who voted against him vs for him.

Yet, somehow, he "won", and I know the Russians were pouring nearly everything they had into election interference... and that was just kind of ignored?

@LilithRose i'm from a red state, South Dakota so i knew the 3 electoral collage votes were going to him but I still voted for Kamala Harris, along with 34.2% of the SD population

also 1.7% South Dakotan voted for Robert Kennedy like dudes he dropped out

@LilithRose so on the things like election interference, the in last few weeks especially I'd noticed a massive increase in pro-trump comments and dis-information in comment sections of a lot of the youtubers that I watch and such. A lot of these channels are very openly left, as are their fanbases, and while they'll occasionally get troll comments, the comment sections tend to be friendly and somewhat wholesome at times. The videos I'd noticed the comments being inundated with the pro-trump stuff were all content to do with their thoughts on the US election and trump. It's almost like there are bots set to scan for content mention trump in a negative way and signal to chatbots and trolls to come do their thing.

Now, look back across this comment section at how man comments have a down-vote and what they're about. Most comments for these comics don't even get an up-vote, let alone a down-vote... but going back to look at older comics that also mention trump, there's always at least one person there making desparaging remarks in his favour.

Dear the rest of the world,

As a representative of Sister America, I would like to apologize for the racism, sexism, outright cruelty, and ignorance of over seventy-four million of my neighbors. I would like to apologize for the lethargy of more than twenty-eight million of my neighbors who were eligible to vote and didn't. The rest of us care about issues such as human rights and the environment more than our own personal, selfish interests. We've been on this merry-go-round before- but until it directly impacts their lives in a tangible, personal fashion, people don't learn.

Some of us are going to be apologizing for our country for the next four years. It hurts my soul to see more than half my country so deluded as to put him in office again.

@StormyWeather, clever phrasing. While no more than about 30% (roughly) of eligible voters actually voted for Trump, almost 40% chose to not vote at all.

From the saner part of the US, I'm sorry this is coming to pass. We thought we were better than this. We are not all like that fucking guy and his cronies. Gods save us from the mistake we've become.

I never wanted to renounce my citizenship before this week...

@Gnomon You have the right to renounce it. Are you going to do so, or just saying for the drama?

@rtlstien "You have the right to renounce it."

... wait, you mean, *unconditionally*? As in, no requirement to have or acquire the citizenship of another nation (beforehand, or in a quid-pro-quo exchange)? Oh well, yet another area where the U.S. choose to ignore international practices, I suppose ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statelessness#Renunciation

@Gnomon To back to the the joke from last time.. Maybe O Canada will be the most popular song in the US again....

Did y'all see what happened in Amsterdam the other day? Yeah, a lot of us over here were voting against that...

Trump never should have been on the ballot in the first place after January 6 and taking documents to Maralgo and other thousands of reasons also felonies but no he was allowed to run and he won, and way fewer people voted, to be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if half if not most of the mail-in votes weren't even counted because people are suspicious, I guess people rather deal with trump again than try someone new who would actually make a decent president but because the richest man in the world is trump fan she lost,

Americans are not SAFE..

@Dessertedway

I fear that directly or indirectly that applies to most of the people in the world. Between his links with the fossil fuel companies and his apparently too friendly relationship with Putin I can see a lot of problems ahead.

That's fair. I can't deal with our antics, either.

there's a ton of people here worried about this. There's talk of fraud of course and even some supported evidence but no ones going to do anything about it. Things are just gonna get worse.

@TDR Everyone talks about fraud every election. Trump complained about fraud in 2020 and everyone laughed about it then. I don't see why this time is any different. American politics is just a giant hamster wheel.

@Nova81194 Because in the last election, Trump and his cronies were actually caught trying to change the results of the election to indicate that he won. Combined with the number of Republicans in office around the country who said that they would refuse to certify results that did not give the win to Trump, his landslide victory is highly suspicious.

@ShoggothOnTheRoof

I think the big puzzle to me, as an outsider, is the drastic drop in the vote that has been reported. The Republicans took less votes than they did 4 years ago but the Democrats too a lot less so instead of being millions ahead on the popular vote they were actually behind the Republicans. Given how heated the campaign was and also how many moderate Republicans were purged from that party it does seem strange. Either a lot of Democratic voters stayed home or something fishy occurred in 'losing' or 'redirecting' votes but have heard no evidence of that.

We may never know what has happened as to why the voting profile changed so much. Or possibly something will emerge some years or decades down the line.

@stevep59 Yes, there are a considerable number of questions that should be asked, but they almost certainly won't be because the political party in the position to investigate those questions has a vested interest in not letting the truth come to light.

@ShoggothOnTheRoof

I suspect they will be asked but somewhat more quietly than similar questions asked in 2021 and will be dismissed with a lot less attention played to them which will only increase the division and mistrust between the two groups.

@stevep59 Corruption is unfortunately a big possibility. But then again, "never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system." If both parties had a drop in turnout, I think that points to a rise in political apathy in the population. Why vote when in most states your vote doesn't matter? And why vote if you can only choose between the lesser of two evils in a self-perpetuating two-party system where both parties claim to stand for the same things? (I read a good chunk of the voter pamphlet, and indeed, many competing candidates had the exact same platform.)

@Nova81194

I actually heard something on the News today that the significant drop in the vote was at least partly because given the nature of the US system, a federal one with many states and even counties having different electoral methods the claims were made when a lot of votes were still uncounted.

It was apparently 1st made by pro-Trump sites who claimed it suggested that the markedly higher vote in 2020 was a suggestion that there was fraud there - raising that old chimera. Some Democrats have seen argued in turn that it suggests a lot of votes have 'disappeared' in some way in this months election.

The overall summary to the BBC radio article was that there was a drop in the total electorate voting, which could well be partly for the reasons you mention but that it wasn't as much lower than the turn out in 2020 as initially thought.

@Nova81194 trump did more than complain. he actually tried to overthrow a free and fair election. guess you missed that part?

@celticnoir I rolled my eyes at the whole fiasco since similar incidents have happened before. The government is designed to operate even if Russia nuked DC. I highly doubt a bunch of hooligans are gonna do anything. I'm just saying Trump is one of many bad actors taking advantage of a very flawed system. It's not like we would magically be saved from ourselves if he lost.