To hope that Donald Trump doesn’t win the election

[RosaMoline]

….it’s getting closer.
I was hoping that Kamala would be a shoo-in for the presidency, but looking at the betting odds, I’m feeling quite pessimistic.
It’s incomprehensible to me that a convicted felon, racist, rapist, liar and misogynist who spurred on an insurrection - after everything that’s happened - is running for office again and may very well win.
It’s comforting to read though that fellow Brits DON’T support him.
Apart from Reform. Obviously.
yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50752-who-did-britons-want-to-win-the-2024-us-presidential-election

Not allowed by whom?

And how

I actually am dyslexic and there's nothing about it which renders autocorrect or a spell checking app somehow useless.
I'm inclined to think a beverage or three are more likely causes of the multiple errors.

😄

FFS. It's not any kind of theory. It's an actual policy document.
Read it yourself. It's available online.

Lots of accusations have been thrown around over the years. It used to be the Democrats who didn't accept the Republicans legitimately won.

Deep state though, obv.

I'm not dyslexic but I frequently get their and there wrong. So yeah, feel free to laugh at me I have no excuse. Unless that's aleism too because you are discriminating against me for not having a disability. It's a minefield. Anyway, there's serious stuff to discuss. Which deceased golfer do you think has/had the biggest willy?

I don't know about golfers, but they didn't call Lyndon Johnson Jumbo for nothing. Horrible man. Had a habit of unzipping and displaying it in front of his advisers. I guess it was supposed to make them jealous.

Great article in the Atlantic about Trump's dehumanizing language;

www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-authoritarian-rhetoric-hitler-mussolini/680296/

This has been done for years by the Tories and right wing press and was responsible for the riots.

He seems to be suggesting that he's going to use the military to assist with mass deportation. Is this realistic or just rambling?

It's not realistic at all and he's talking through his ass as per usual.

Could he invoke The Insurrection Act?

Normally I would presume there would need to be an actual insurrection in order for him to do so, but who knows what would happen with Trump at the helm. It's why he's so dangerous.

But he's instigated an insurrection in the past.

I've been listening to some international experts on this. The real worry is how it will embolden the far right across Europe, and the impact it'll have on climate change world wide to have a climate change denialist and conspiracy theorist in the White House.

Very, very worrying.

Democrats have long pointed to extreme gerrymandering in red states.

They've also pointed to the anomaly that's the Electoral College.

But they've never remotely tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

They might end up with a situation in the USA where the majority of voters are Democrat voting, but Trump wins because of the electoral college, allowing him to push through a radical right wing agenda of swingeing public spending cuts in healthcare, social security and education plus mass deportations and what's effectively a federal abortion ban - all this with the help of the supreme court which is now majority conservative. That may well end up being a threat to public order. Women won't tolerate a complete loss of access to reproductive care. Young people won't tolerate all police being given complete immunity from prosecution for acts of violence - as Trump has hinted at. LGBTQ people won't tolerate losing marriage and other rights, which is part of the Project 2025 agenda.

I listen to the Americast podcast today and found it more worrying than I'd expected.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p07h19zz

You've obviously read very little about Vance. Yes, he's a very bright guy. A Yale trained lawyer - he's very slick, and that was on full display when debating Walz. If you'd really paid attention to what Vance was saying in the debate, and you knew more about him, you'd have known that he was profoundly dishonest and slippery in the interview. He refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election, despite the fact he knows that Trump lost the 2020 election. That alone is a major red flag - the fact that he's willing to push a conspiracy theory that's so profoundly damaging to trust in the democratic process. It's genuinely appalling. In relation to the abortion debate - he supports a complete federal ban on abortion, no exceptions. He's referred to this repeatedly in other interviews. In the VP debate he refused to acknowledge this and talked about the Republican party needing to do more to 'gain women's trust'. Slippery, dangerous, disingenuous.

When he was at Yale he was close friends with a trans woman who was on his degree course. Now he's a spokesman for a party which is spending tens of millions on running aggressively transpohobic political ads during football games.

In 2016 he describe Trump as “reprehensible,” “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler.” Trump has got worse since then. More openly racist. More enthusiastic about autocracy. But now Vance is all in because he's had a sniff of power.

Vance is even more dangerous that Trump, because he's slicker. Doesn't change the fact that he's a Christian nationalist and a misogynist.

For anyone who's genuinely interested this is good at putting Trump in context:

https://amzn.eu/d/jjrkaRZ

Alt America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump

"Just as Donald Trump's victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked the world, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white supremacists, xenophobes, militia leaders, and mysterious 'alt-right' figures mystifies many. But the American extreme right has been growing steadily in number and influence since the 1990s with the rise of patriot militias. Following 9/11, conspiracy theorists found fresh life; and in virulent reaction to the first black US president, militant racists have come out of the woodwork. Nurtured by a powerful right-wing media sector in radio, TV, and online, the far right, Tea Party movement conservatives, and Republican activists found common ground. Figures such as Stephen Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alex Jones, once rightly dismissed as cranks, now haunt the reports of mainstream journalism. Investigative reporter David Neiwert has been tracking extremists for more than two decades. In Alt-America, he provides a deeply researched and authoritative report on the growth of fascism and far-right terrorism, the violence of which in the last decade has surpassed anything inspired by Islamist or other ideologies in the United States. The product of years of reportage, and including the most in-depth investigation of Trump's ties to the far right, this is a crucial book about one of the most disturbing aspects of American society."

Trump is a fascist.

The orange man is an ageing TV presenter and starfucker/social climber who is put in power to do increasingly bizarre capers for attention from the media while the Republicans get on with passing tax cuts and putting activist judges in place at every possible level of the legal system.

I do get that an ordinary American might be pretty fed up with selling arms prolonging two horrible wars. I'm not sure they would like the outcome if Putin and Iran get what they want though.

There's clearly a chunk of Republicans now who find Trump so awful (to give them their due, mamy were genuinely shocked at the orange idiot managing to create a really shit but nonetheless dangerous and deadly riot in a bid to seize power illegitimately) that they've decided that as long as they regain the Senate, they cam strangle Harris's administration like they did Obama's.

I will be stunned if Trump wins. The momentum seems to be 100% with Harris.

Do you know many Americans? Because I know quite a few and they can't stand Harris. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Trump won.

It's odd how invested people in the UK are so invested in Orange Man Bad.

Bet you also accuse people of suffering from 'Trump derangement syndrome'.

Trump is a documented, repeated liar. A outrageous misogynist. An adjudicated racist. A demagogue. A fan of autocracy. A racist. A fascist.

The fact you frame absolutely valid, evidence based criticism of Trump as as knee jerk antipathy - which is what you're inferring by 'Orange Man Bad' - is evidence that you've been suckered into his cult of personality.

Wake the fuck up. History will not judge people like you kindly.

Do a google of 'warning signs of fascism'

This is literally Trump's entire electoral schtick made flesh

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
2. Disdain for human rights
3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
4. Rampant sexism
5. Controlled mass media
6. Obsession with national security
7. Religion and government intertwined
8. Corporate power protected
9. Labor power suppressed
10. Disdain for intellectual and the arts
11. Obsession with crime and punishment
12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

Then go read the wikipedia entry on Project 2025

The entire planet's interests are caught up if America chooses to put an elderly conspiracy theorist, climate change denialist and friend to dictators in the Whitehouse.

This is a good listen

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/americas-crisis-is-the-worlds-crisis/id1593634121?i=1000662414117

Discusses the threat of another Trump term to global security:

"The US is currently suffering a crisis in democracy, and its effects are far-reaching. But how does it relate to the global rise in authoritarianism and conflict? In the wake of compounding concerns created by the recent Supreme Court immunity decision and increasing calls for Joe Biden to step down from the Presidential nomination due to his age, This Is Not A Drill assesses the stakes at play for global security.
America is in turmoil after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. But worrying developments – from a Supreme Court decision that conceivably puts the US President above the law, to the Democrats’ paralysis in the face of Biden’s declining powers – point to a deeper crisis. If America can’t function as a democracy, where does that leave the peace and stability of the world?"

Vance is a practising Catholic. However Pope Francis has publicly said that Americans face a ‘terrible choice’ because ‘one must vote’ and there is no truly pro life candidate. He has stated that the Trump-Vance attitude towards immigrants is a ‘grave sin’, just like abortion and thus voters should follow their consciences.

This was given good publicity in the NY Times and other major media. One suspects the Pope’s aim may have been to weigh in before conservative priests had the chance to urge their parishioners to support Trump.