People were struggling while Biden was in office, sure. But Americans need to learn to wake up, examine the rest of the world, and realize that post COVID economies were struggling everywhere, and Biden had actually done a pretty good job mitigating the damage.

Just because it wasn’t great, doesn’t mean he didn’t do a decent job at making it much less worse that it might have been under the policies, and damage set up by Trumps first term.

Things like tax breaks, legislated to make things harder for the working class after Dems retook office, not because of what the Dems did, but close enough for them to blame the Dems.

And it worked. It always works.

Something something felon…

You have it backwards. Trump is the useful idiot by which the religious extremists are getting their agenda successfully implemented.

Or maybe we give up on an economic model that requires unending population growth? Since you know, we live on a finite planet?

We have to find a path to degrowth. Stop repeating talking points that imply population growth is our only path forward.

You aren’t wrong.

We’re stuck with the first past the post electoral system which is following the same route of falling into the 2 party trap. Corporations are buying those two parties and they are both further right than I think a lot of Canadians want, but the left leaning parties are a hard option to vote for, out of fear of the rightmost party getting the seat of power.

Trudeau did get elected originally on the promise of electoral reform with the NDP, but that promise was one of many he broke, and who knows how long before we can get it back as a voter issue.

Right now no one can get past the fear of economic uncertainty, which is being used by both the Liberals and Conservatives to ignore things that are much bigger in the long run, like climate change, and electoral stagnation.

From the perspective of a non-influential Canadian citizen, you need to clean house before trust can be restored.

You don’t trust a crack addict because they told you they’re clean. Trust needs to be rebuilt and it takes a lot of time and effort.

Your democracy is sick, and Trump is the symptom, not the problem.

The GOP is fully to blame.

They sell the American public on the idea that any taxes are bad, no matter what they are meant to fund. When they are in power they cut public services, give tax breaks to corporations, and schedule tax raises to occur when they’re out of power.

When they aren’t in power they yell about taxes nonstop to make sure democrats are too scared to re-fund them, so they don’t get voted out.

Cycle after cycle, and now there’s no money to give the teachers.

Smaller local convenience stores in Canada, often had a CC charge added probably 20 or more years ago.

I think it has more to do with people not talking about him trying to nationalize the elections. Using ICE to intimidate voters in democratic centers, Usng the SAVE act disproportionately disenfranchise groups more likely to be democrats: women, people of colour, low income, or young voters. These are key issues which need pushback on this year.

Yes, because that is how the administration uses it, knowing the trials would not be fair or just.

Im in Canada and have friends who believed his second term would be mostly as feckless as his first.

They didn’t understand how project 2025 meant he was going to be coming out of the gate with someone else’s agenda with all of the key players, including scotus in his back pocket. It all lined up to mean shit was going to go down fast and hard.

Look where we are one year in. 3 more years to subvert or nullify the next election.

By making the American poor people pay them, they transfer more wealth to the captital class by contracting out jobs to their buddies. Also, it huts sales for the exporters, so its win win for him.

No, the whole system found a new way to block it, so now Trump could say ‘Release the files!’ without worrying about it actually happening.

This way his thralls can point to him being ‘open and transparent’, and no evidence is ever released.

The grift never ends.

I don’t know for sure, but I imagine settling out of court, specifically avoids setting a precedent. Which in this case means if they want to run it, they’d not have the precedent to protect them, but also have to choose settling, or paying to fight an overtly partisan court system right up to the supreme court.

They’ve capitulated enough for us to know that was never going to be N option.

No network is going to do more to draw the attention of the administration, than allow late night hosts to make jokes about him, and even that isn’t going to last much longer I expect.

He does care about the law, just in the conservative way.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

• Frank Wilhoit

The problems the US faces don’t die with him.

Unless you use that 6 seconds to work with the ref to rewrite the rules of the game such that passing the ball to a second quarterback resets the time, along with a bunch of other rule changes.

Yeah, of course. But only one one can best.

Peaceful protests are vulnerable to being incited to violence.

And in late stage capitalism, government is only listening to capital holders. Money speaks way louder to capital holders than the inconvenience of a protest.

General strike is way more effective

I love your optimism.

But at some point, you have to look around and say this isn’t business as usual anymore right?

Maybe we’re not there for you yet, but have you set up your own lines where you can say, once they’ve crossed that line, it’s not okay?

My lines were way back when he promised to chase down dangerous criminals, and they started rounding up day labourers. When they tried to pretend due process was unnecessary and undeserved by the people they didn’t like.

When they deployed military units in domestic cities under the completely bogus claims of emergencies.

Nothing they say is true, because the only thing they treat as true, is whatever is most expedient to them in any given moment.

There is no legal or traditional way of running the government that is safe from their perverting intentions.