For Joe Reeve, the midterm afterglow faded fast.
The London startup founder was among the wave around the Trump-weary world awakening to the stunning news that Americans had sharply rejected President Donald Trump’s fist-in-the-eye stewardship of the United States that had started a war with Iran, forged no peace in Ukraine or the Mideast and made gas and food so expensive.
Voters, Reeve saw online, had flipped control of both houses of Congress, handing the power to check the president to his rival Democrats. American democracy, 250 years on, had survived the Trump era.
But a deep and profound distrust of the United States had survived the vote, too. And from national leaders to aspiring American immigrants, no one seemed confident that change was afoot.
Please for the love of all that is good do not ever just trust us.
Make us fucking earn that trust, if you even want to entertain the idea.
Stop treating us like we are special, don’t enable us… it will help us recover from this crippling ‘American Exceptionalism’ we have suffered from for so very long.
You’d have to be a fool to trust the US again based on this. Getting the democrats to actually make progress on anything is not usually a winning bet.
You’d be a fool to trust the US again for generations, regardless of appearances.
Nah, mate, this isn’t enough, not even when you vote out Trump. You guys gotta clean up your corruption, actually punish the violators, and restore the institutions and policies they have destroyed, along with restitution to the victims, including the foreign ones.
Otherwise, why would we trust you not to do it all again?
Agreed. And I’m an American. It’s not the government. It’s the huge amount of people who have been MAGA, tea party, Reaganites, McCarthyists voting for it. This shit has been going on for decades.
Just because the midterms didn’t go Trump’s way doesn’t mean US citizens have changed.
Most people who voted Republican in 2024 and Democratic in this year’s midterms did so for economic reasons, not because the Republicans in power are fascists, not because they disagree with what Trump has said over the last two years.
Trump is not a disease that has befallen the US and everything is fine if it’s removed. US citizens voted for him. They wanted what he promised: to make America great again and let someone else pay the price.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-exit-polls-2026-midterms-democrats/
Nor should they. Not until we’ve shown real, sustained change. Trump is still in charge and like 30-40% of the country are apparently irredeemably awful.
What does this change?
Like 20 million people actually came out and voted, which is great, but the system is exactly the same.
So how can we trust the US when frankly, never in its history has the US punished their leaders or this tore off behaviour.
For a country that brags about checks and balances, I’ve watched your leaders sell pardons, pardon each other, and your Supreme Court decided the president is immune to consequences.
I lined the day one sober comment, but the US isn’t even sober.
Exactly.
Its much, much too early to celebrate American democracy. They haven’t actually unwound anything at all, and whether they can or will remains to be seen.
Trust won’t return until systemic changes that made Trump possible are in place, and accountability for those who raped people and this nation happens. These midterms were a good necessary first step along the way. That’s it.
US history both recent and distant taught me that the US was never to be trusted. Trump is merely the icing on a really shitty cake.
Why do so many US citizens believe their country was amazing until Trump came along? Read your own history FFS.
Relatively heavy levels of indoctrination.
Its easy to indoctrinate people into something that is nice to believe ‘this is the greatest country in the world, anyone can become anything here’, what a lovely fantasy. Who wouldnt accept this falsehood when presented with it? Who would willingly reject it if they could easily lie to themselves instead.
Tbf, they are far from the only country that does this, its hard to distinguish why it can seem so much more prevalent in Americans.
There are a few comments here making similar points, so I’ve just picked one to respond to, but it’s a response to all of them…
As some background, I’ve worked with many US citizens over the years, all over be world in different jobs, and all of them university-educated. Almost all of them liberals (not a term I use lovingly). I only ever met one who didn’t despise Trump.
What always struck me as tough to swallow was that although they could criticize Trump or the GOP, all of them appeared to love their country, and more annoyingly, to feel a palpable sense of superiority about being ‘American.’ I would often get made fun of for being where I’m from, and I’d ask them why exactly they were so much better than every other country.
Was it the corporate government masquerading as democracy? Was it the ability for their military to flatten peasant villages? Was it their long record of overthrowing democratically elected governments all over the world?
What, oh educated well-traveled ‘Americans,’ makes you so superior to the rest of us?
I’ve lived in dictatorships, in highly religious states, in places where children having shoes is a rarity, but I’ve truly never come across people so sure of their greatness and the greatness of their country as ‘Americans.’ It’s quite nauseating, whether as a colleague or simply as a tourist.
Indoctrination is surely everywhere. I’ve lived it myself and I’ve seen it in every country I’ve ever been. Try avoiding a Turkish flag in Istanbul, Hindu propaganda in India, or CCP everything in China. Despite all that, I’ve found the US inflated sense of importance is quite incomparable, especially when compared to the many other nationalities I’ve met outside their home countries.
I suppose it’s the cliché of the “ugly American” I find so irritating. None of them I met, not one, ever took time to even try to understand my story as someone whose greatness could not measure up to theirs, so it certainly doesn’t come naturally to me to feel as if they’re all poor victims who I need to be patted on the head and smile at. Their smugness doesn’t inspire that.
I was indoctrinated. We all were. If you’re an educated adult in the 21st century, all the historic info one would ever need is out there. To instead choose a default superiority-mode seems simply ignorant to me.
And again, I’ve worked with dozens upon dozens of educated ‘Americans.’ I’ve also traveled all over the US more than once, not that I ever would again.
Anyway, I know enough to differentiate between some everyday ‘American’ and a rabid MAGA fascist, yet that inner core of “we’re better than you” seems to exist in the overwhelming majority of them that I’ve met, even the ones I call friends.
Not making excuses but just so you know why so many of us are so ignorant of our history: Texas was, until a few days ago, completely controled by unhinged conservatives. They insisted on getting batshit crazy textbooks. For example, people in the US get textbooks describing the Civil War as “The War of Northern Agression” and portray it as not about the South fighting to keep slavery and force Northern states to enforce their runaway slave laws but rather some other complete bullshit. Texas is the biggest textbook consumer in the country so publishers try to put as much of the Texas appeasement as possible into books for the wntire country, rather than incur the expense if maintaining multiple editions. Tens of millions (maybe hubdreds of millions) of kids over the last few decades have been taught absolute crap at school. It’s sad and scary and frustrating and I’m hopeful that it’s finally hoing to change.
What you are describing can be summed up as propaganda. American life is thick with it. And for a country that can’t shut the fuck up about freedom, it’s despicable.
Yup. And our radio and TV and internet and schools are throughly polluted.
Well, it’s because the kids are indoctrinated to believe that the US is the best. Having to stand up at the start of the school day to do the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance.
And the history books like to go over the good parts. The not so good parts, like the Nullification Crisis, the fuckery from the US where they threatened to blow up Japan’s shit if they don’t allow trade, the colonization of the Philippines and operation to quell the associated rebellion, and the routine bullying of Haiti tends to be glossed over.
I didn’t trust the US government even before trump
I certainly wouldn’t trust US quite yet.
What are they even talking about? Tariffs are still there, EU passed laws that force countries to buy European weapons, they are finalizing a deal with Canada. Foreign policy is like a container ship, not a sports car. It took a lot of time to turn it around and it will not turn again anytime soon. The world is not going to just “trust America again”. It will take years to sign new deals and pass new laws and it will start only when US shows they are willing to seat at the table and talk which won’t happen in the next 2 years.
Also what has America done to gain trust? Votingnin blue is not even a beginning because it looks like they’ll just maintain the status quo.
We are at least two years from anyone being able to START to trust our country again. In order for that to happen, we will have to not only have to give the government over to the Dems, but we have to make sure that MAGA can never rise again.
It is clear that MAGA is an ongoing, enthusiastic National Security Threat, and that’s BEFORE we embark on the next two years, in which PeeWee Himmler is going to unleash unspeakable violence on the American people in an attempt to crush us, and eliminate elections.
When we get our country back, we will have to prohibit MAGA from existing, and anyone associated with MAGA must be purged from our government. They are Domestic Terrorists, by their own admission, and our elected officials take an oath to protect us from all threats, “Foreign and Domestic,” and MAGA is exactly what they mean by Domestic.
When we’ve purged MAGA, and passed laws that will shore up the weaknesses in our government that MAGA exposed and exploited (like increasing SCOTUS), and we start acting responsibly toward the rest of the world, then maybe the rest of the world can start to trust us.
We’ve got a lot of work to do to restore America’s reputation and place in the Free World.
Good, they elected a known child-rapist and 37-time convicted felon, ffs.
Why would anyone trust us? We elected Trump, elected someone else, and elected Trump again. We’ve already demonstrated that a good election or two is no reason to trust us. Gotta wait until we’re actually rid of the rot
We haven’t actually done anything yet. We have picked people we believe will do the exact opposite of what the last batch we picked are doing.
The big question is if the new batch waiver or foolishly think they will survive the decade if they follow the standard Democrat Party playbook of empty promises, appeasement, and spinelessness.
The bulk of the other politicians in 1930s Germany didn’t have a good time after letting a psychotic minority party seize control.
MAGA is a violent but relatively tiny party inside of a smaller political faction that survives through gerrymandering and exploiting our anachronic election system. The Nazis gained control because no one opposed them. The question is if the existing politicians will get out of the way and accept the mandate of the people.
Yeah, and it’s unfortunately deserved. Why make any long term deals with America when someone unhinged could get elected and take a sledgehammer to everything anyway. It will take DECADES for America to regain the trust of the rest of the world
