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What the hell is even going on at this point?
(piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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It's been 9 years since he started politics and I never understood why anyone ever backed him.
He matches their hateful energy.
They believe he will hurt the right people (to them); marginalized people.
They are largely happy that he is, and many are completely willing to accept massive sacrifice to get this.
This is incorrect.
People backed Donald in 2016 because, at that time, they'd had enough of the disappointment and impoverishment brought to them by Obama's politics and the promise that those politics would continue under Clinton. It was the same under Biden/Harris, where consumers watched their basic needs double and triple in cost and their response was 'just be joyful about it'.
Donald, in both cases, was the change candidate, and the majority wanted change more than anything else.
There is a smaller contingent that, yes, did back him because of his hateful energy, but not the majority. The majority just want to be able to pay their bills without having to work 100 hours a week.
Yes. It was shortsighted and naive of them, but while there are some people who voted for mass deportations because they hate immigrants, far more people voted for mass deportations because he told them that they are the reason for the affordability crisis.
True, and they were lied to.
Not unlike when Democrats promised change in 2020 and then ignored the rising affordability crisis.
The point is the switch to Donald was economically-motivated in both cases.
They were lied to, yes. And I see the correlation you're making. I don't think you're super off-base, but I also don't think you're quite right.
The thing is, Trump in particular and the GOP in general are both lying about the problem. They're saying that the problem with people's bank accounts being empty is that the "illegals" are "taking stuff" (jobs, aid, low-cost housing) that "real americans deserve." They then proceed to follow up on the attack against what they (maliciously) claimed the problem was.
On the other hand, Democrats are by-and-large truthful (or simply silent) about the causes of the affordability crisis. They then are stymied by a terrorist majority-GOP congress (or minority GOP wielding the filibuster) into inaction, or make token bipartisan progress without addressing the root of the issue. Then, as re-election rolls around, they spin the tiny gains they've made as bigger than they actually are.
We saw this in the Harris campaign. Her plans were almost entirely about encouraging and supporting small businesses--which is, indeed, a valid way to push down prices, and likely to pass muster with Republicans! But it's not nearly enough, and voters recognized that (and, in fairness, they were also lied to about the fact that she had a plan at all by the conservative media).
In short, I think that while the GOP lies, the Democrats are just lazy. They think it's still 1998, and they can just figure it all out over drinks if given the chance.
I'm not sure if that really makes it better. But I do think it's different.
Wut? the same Democrats that came out and said "The economy is good akshually, you just don't understand".
Yes, it was dumb to think that the Republicans were going to fix the economy, but lets stop pretending that the Democrats ever had any intention of fixing it.
The Democrats act lazy, but in reality, they want the same thing that the GOP wants: Their donors to be happy. They only pretend to fight, until they can get the votes to keep their seats.
When did they say "the economy is good?" I remember Harris talking during her campaign about how they did a lot of work and made a lot of progress, but there was still a long way to go. True, they didn't make a huge deal out of it like Mamdani did, but I can't find any evidence of them saying "nah man, everything is ok."
Let's be clear: every employee is responsible for doing what their employer wants. Elected representatives made it into office through a convoluted hiring process, and so the people who got them into office are their employers. I'm not oblivious to that at all. When I say "the Democrats are lazy," it's reductive in the same way that "the people elect the president" is reductive. Actually, the people vote for electors and the electoral college elects the president. And so no, the Democrats aren't actually lazy; a less-reductive way to say it would be "the people that the Democrats see as their employers aren't telling them to fix the affordability crisis."
That may seem cynical, but the reason that this is notable is that, up until fairly recently in historical terms, the Democrats and Republicans alike treated their constituents as their employers, in at least some capacity. In some cases they weren't their only employers, maybe some particularly corrupt ones in safe districts didn't need to worry about the voters' opinions at all, but for most of them the "other employers" (that is, the donors) also wanted them to keep the voters happy because they wanted us to keep buying their stuff, and a happy population is a consumptive population.
Now, though, almost none of the elected officials in Congress consider their constituents to be their employers.
The Republicans consider Trump to be the one signing their paycheck; even though their money is still coming from their donors, Trump has (or at least had) such an outsized impact on their electoral chances, and therefore their lobbyist money, that he commanded essentially all of their obedience.
And the Democrats have decided that just not being MAGA is good enough for their constituents to keep electing them (and in fairness, if they were up against the opposition they had in 1998, it would've been), so they don't actually need to work that hard at following through as long as they just stay not-MAGA; so they've decided to put more effort into making their donors happy, and since their donors also supported Trump, their marching orders are just to not kick up too much of a fuss.
In the meantime, all of the donors have decided they're okay with all of us being too poor to buy their stuff now for some reason (my personal theory is that it's a really stupid game of chicken or some twisted prisoner's dilemma thing), so that part of the historical backpressure is gone too.
The way that ends up working itself out is the Republicans saying whatever Trump says, even if it's a lie, because he's their employer; and the Democrats being lazy, because their employers say to be.
So no, I don't think that Democrats are actually lying. They've just decided that they don't work for us anymore. Which means we need to fire them (primary each and every one of them who isn't doing what we want) to show them that, actually, they do; because if we hire the other guys, we already know who they're going to be working for.
it was very much UNLIKE that actually, he lies like a shark swims.
Both parties do.
That's how we got to this point.
Buddy, we got to this point thanks to fence sitters making excuses for the people pulling their fence to the right. Don't be that guy. Democrats might be useless, but Republicans are fuckiing evil, and there's no both sides to the shit they've done since the fence sitters handed them power.
Populism. He convinced everyone he was a billionaire outsider not beholden to anyone. The whole thing started from a fake rally to help him gain ratings for The Apprentice.
But like, his credibility is (and always was) total shit. How can there be 75 million people that gullible? To me, it couldn't have been more obvious he was lying if his pants had literally been on fire.
Trump didn’t create the grift. The system that enabled it was built long before he arrived.
Starting with Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” the Republican Party began reshaping political identity around grievance. After the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, partisan media like talk radio and Fox News grew without the obligation to present balanced perspectives. The Citizens United ruling in 2010 then opened the door to unlimited political spending, allowing well-funded groups to amplify fear-based messaging at scale. The Tea Party movement reinforced the idea that the threat came from within, not just from ideological opponents.
Over time, this narrative produced an ever-shifting villain: sometimes “liberals,” sometimes “socialists,” often just “them.” Orwell captured the mechanism in Animal Farm: “Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball.”
Trump didn’t invent that scapegoat. He inherited it, and then he turned the volume up.
To us, the grift is obvious. But for many, decades of messaging eroded trust in institutions and made the fear feel real. The lie works not because it persuades, but because it offers comfort.
Understanding that history doesn’t excuse it. It reminds us the machinery was built before Trump and will remain if we only confront the man instead of the system that produced him.
Bloom County cartoon strip roasted Trump as an asshole in the 80s. They even transplanted his brain into a cat.