President Donald Trump has said he does not “give a damn” about potential criticism of his remarks boasting that the United States is making a “fortune” from high oil prices, as American motorists continue to face elevated gasoline costs.
Does anyone remember when politicians actually pretended to work for the people?
I’m older now, and the memory feels dim, but if I sit and think, I can just barely remember a time when politicians realized that they worked for the people.
Yes, I remember as a kid Carter getting elected. Didn’t understand the politics at the time, but he seemed a nice guy.
You know what is really interesting to watch? Look up old TV political debates from the 60s and 70s. Where they actually debated issues. It’s amazing.
You don’t even have to go that far back.
Citizens United was the point of no return. The people became powerless wage slaves with a mouse whisper voice to influence anything. Corporotacracy achieved adulthood and the people’s slide toward slavery crossed the event horizon.
You can’t realize something that isn’t true. If you can’t fire them, they don’t work for you.
Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East
When he says ‘our country’ what he means is ‘the ruling elite’… he says the same thing when talking about data centers. He says the reason we need data centers is because it’s making people so much money. He just never says which people.
And when he says: “Because of what’s happened”, he means “When I bombed a school full of small girls. Twice.”
I just did a rewatch of From and without too many spoilers this really reminds me of it.
One of the leaders got the group to accept something just because he said so. Later he is going to try it again and gets reality checked first.
Someone told him people didn’t accept it the first time, they just let it go because they had faith he had a reason even if he wasn’t explaining it
Between the two events, he had lost the people’s faith, and it wasn’t going to work again.
trump claiming this now, is more likely to drive support away than reassure his voters who are already doubting him.
He’s pushing too far because he thinks it’ll keep working, not understanding that even his voters have their limits.
I hope you’re right about people leaving him, but after everything he’s done and/or enabled, if these people haven’t left his circles yet, I fear they never will. He’s basically given them a pass to go mask off. Not only enabling, but encouraging their bad behavior. I don’t see them letting go of their “savior”.
Same here. Trump’s followers are mostly people who spent a lifetime accepting the contradictions of their religious beliefs. I don’t think they’ll have any trouble continuing to believe that he knows what he’s doing.
Fool me once, shame on you (and me, I obviously should have known better). Fool me twice, shame on me even harder because I’m obviously a dumbass. Fool me thrice, I’m a pedoloving brain damaged trump sucker who can’t be helped and am responsible for wrecking this nation but damn those libs who actually do care about me as a person are so owned!
Problem is he said “You’ll never have to vote again” and I think he meant it.
“The survey also found 63% of the public is pessimistic about the current state of the economy, including 35% of Republicans, a six-point point increase from July and the highest percentage of Republicans with negative views about the economy during either of Trump’s terms.”
2/3 of Republicans think he’s doing fine.
I hope no one reads that top-down and comes away with “Don’t vote. Delay today”. That’d be a silly way to read it.
At this point I wonder if there’s literally anything he could say or do to make his voters realize he doesn’t give a shit about them.
I’d say maybe steal their money straight from their pockets, shoot their kid dead, and hacksaw their pet to pieces.
Well he’s already done an awful lot of the first one, and ICE goons have the other two covered on his behalf.
So no, not even that does it.
There are two main things that change people’s minds: Peer pressure, and trauma.
We’re social creatures and we take cues from people we trust. The right wing has done an excellent (and horrifying) job of creating unified in-groups for their followers. They have fox news. They have talk radio. They have churches. They have also demonized their opposition - “ivory tower elites”, “coastal elites”, queers, commies, etc. Many people will struggle to change their mind when everyone around them hasn’t.
There was a thing I was reading about a while ago, about flat-earthers. A bunch of them got shown a lot of evidence to contradict their beliefs. They all stuck to their flat-earth nonsense, except one of them. The guy who’d started dating someone sane, and hanging out with her friends. He changed his mind. In large part because he no longer saw the flat-earth community as such a vital part of his in-group. Or so the author argued.
The other way is trauma. If something really horrific happens to someone, they might reevaluate. But if they’re still in the same social groups, they’re likely to fall back into their old ways.
In the book “Dying of Whiteness”, the author interviewed a variety of people. Among them were gun violence survivors. There was one passage where a woman said something like, yeah, easy access to guns is why her son died. Maybe he shouldn’t have been able to just go get a gun and shoot himself. But, she said, she would never say that to her peers.
So, in short: No, not really. The social groups carrying maga identity are self-reinforcing. They’re all looking at their peers, who are all still maga.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe is a good comic about some of the same ideas, too.
Hmmm… Massive tax cuts… Increased spending on gas/oil by the people… 401k not guaranteed to be invested in oil companies…
Who is getting rich here? I would doubt even the us government is seeing a meaningful income since we subsidize and cut taxes on the oil companies…
…oh right, Trump is highly invested in oil companies. The only person that matters. Right.
