Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?
Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed, protect reproductive rights and chose a pro labor, pro education running mate.
Yet, she’s either barely leading or ties in most polls with a guy that:
Is a convicted felon.
Liable Sexual Predator.
Gets sentenced in November.
Has several more pending cases.
Increased Drone Strikes by 300%. (Joe Biden dosent use drones anymore).
Illegally killed an Iranian General unprovoked with a missle strike.
Increased tensions in Israel/Palestine with the Abraham Accords.
Wants war with Mexico (his words).
Tried to coup Venezuela.
Will bend the knee for Netanyahu’s potential war with Iran.
Lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% (lowest in history).
Obvious tax cuts for the rich.
Told people to drink bleach during the pandemic.
Is the main driving force for America’s current division.
Constantly attacks marginalized groups.
Tried to steal the 2020 election (Find Me 11,000 votes in GA).
Did Fake Elector Slates to pressure Mike Pence to not certify the 2020 election.
Caused a riot on the capitol that lead to his OWN supporters dying.
Just got washed by Harris in the last debate, was completely unprepared on anything but immigration (“I have concepts of a plan”).
And so much more. So seriously what is it? Is it just the attraction to bigotry/racism? Is it to end “wokeness”. Is it because Kamala is a woman of color? You can’t use the both sides argument like Hilary or Biden, Kamala is the obvious better choice. Could you imagine if Kamala had as much baggage as Trump? The media would lose their minds.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
You're in a media bubble. It feels like there's no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don't understand how you could believe what you do.
For everything you said they
don't believe happened
think it was a deep state plot
believe it's good actually and believing anything else means you want to kill babies or destroy the economy
have never heard of it
Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don't live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.
I live in Taiwan and met a guy yesterday who is moving to Taiwan because Austin is a "liberal hell hole".
When pressed on any issues about Trump, his answer was that Biden is worse than Trump. When I asked about Harris, he just mentioned she will just copy Biden.
The funny thing is that Taiwan is by far more liberal and more progressive than Austin Texas. He seemed to like the universal healthcare and the many social services. He didn't mind the high corporate taxes companies have to pay.
My assessment is that he is only basing his vote on vibes and feels alone. Judging from the conversation, he is more of a Bernie supporter.
If you're a republican then you're going to vote for your guy. They see everything he does as just bullshit and bluster. "He says things to rile up the lefties but that's just his brand." They see the legal issues as politically motivated, or "maybe he's a bit dirty, but all politicians are".
I think it really is that simple. The vast majority of the population is not making a decision of whom to vote for based on their research regarding each party's policies. They will just always vote the way they've always voted.
Many other comments here have a share in the reasons, but a huge reason is he’s looking at more state and federal charges, and more lawsuits (which haven’t going well for him).
He NEEDS to run and WIN so he can make all these cases go away for good.
People have been lied to for decades and we all know it's going to get worse in the future. The democrats are neoliberals who will continue to exploit people. The news media and social media are all owned by oligarchs. Wealth inequality is getting worse. Climate change won't be solved and will make all things worse. Why should people vote for the status quo? Work hard, get fucked? No solidarity, no rational action, no plan. And nuclear war when?
Fascism and nationalism is not just something to break this but also has the better story. Something the stupid masses can believe in again. Trump is telling them everything they want to hear.
I remember the summer of 2016, when I was playing Pokemon Go in the parks and people I had never talked to and that lived nearby were playing it next to me. We were all celebrating when we caught a pokemon when we were after, and comparing which ones we'd caught with each other.
At the time I thought...who would buy Trump's conman routine? Who actually thinks that the country is in a terrible enough place that we need to elect this person who seems to actively hate the country and seemed to want to set the entire thing on fire?
I left my Californian home and went back to my original state to visit my family. We went to several different areas of the state in fall of 2016 because my wife was from a rural area and I originally grew up in a slightly more suburban area. I saw the signs in the yards, I saw the discontent, and I saw how people did not seem to be reacting the same way to his craziness. I saw how casually they would put on his rants in the background while talking about other issues. I saw how some of them were amused by his antics. It had been a couple of years since I had last been back and it once again struck me how much worse the area appeared to be from the last time I was there. I was in a rural area when the "Access Hollywood" tape dropped. People seemed to visibly shrink at even the mention of the news. I thought he was done for, and that this was a bridge too far for his supporters to cross. That people would vote third party, or not vote at all. I did not get the sense that my thoughts were shared by those around me.
When I came back to California, people were talking about the debates. It was sunny and nice out, and people would talk about the projects they had going on in their houses, or they'd talk about work related affairs. People were sometimes amused by Trump's antics, but everyone uniformly thought it was impossible for him to win the election. Having seen what I had seen in the weeks prior, I was no longer one of these people. "They'll never let him win", one of my co-workers said. I was stunned....who are "they"? Does the rest of the country actually believe this?
It turns out quite a few of them did. Many people thought there was just simply no way that Trump would win, because either the system was already rigged against him and would not allow him to win, or because the country was just not in dire enough straits to elect such a madman (as I once thought).
Hindsight is 20/20 but when I thought it was bizarre that he was even a viable candidate at one point in 2016, and I saw the decaying state where I grew up, I thought "if he wins the election, then we are in a much worse state as a country than I thought". And we undoubtedly are.
Of course he won, but the reason that I have this somewhat rambling response to this question is that the answer to "why is he still in the race?" ultimately comes down to the overall state of this country.
He is in this race because this is where we are as a country: barely able to imagine a possible future that is brighter than the present, because we are still caught up in degenerative non-sense that keeps us thinking that our broken down towns, and our poor social bonds are caused by some horde of "others" instead of their true causes: our ever-widening wealth inequality, our ever-decaying moral responsibilities to each other, and our national instinct to absolve ourselves of our responsibilities by claiming that not only is it correct to be forever self-serving, but that even the idea of altruism is a lie.
You have to remember that the voters are human beings, complete with areas of ignorance, prejudices, and logical fallibility. Trump certainly is aware of that and exploits it to the maximum extent.
...all that and you don't even mention that he's been an open russian asset for eight years?..
...the blunt truth is that he's in too deep, as are most of the remaining republican party, and the only way to keep their heads at this point is to double-down on seizing the apparatus of state to dismiss their criminal culpability...
Why is he still in the race or why are his supporters?
For him I think it's obvious. Narcissism and the fact that he has a lot of federal crimes in the courts that he can stop when he is elected.
His supporters are more complicated. He pretty decently still owns the GOP so even if they are getting cold feet, they don't seem to have a plan to overthrow him. I feel like they are planning on just stonewalling for 4 more years and then try to win the next one and cut the checks to the billionaires then.
I got nothing on his base though. I haven't understood them for 10 years now. Not sure I ever will.
Either lack of critical thinking or driven by greed.
You get the top to vote for you by ensuring they keep and/or increase their riches. That’s done by immediate things like tax cuts, or other long term strategies like cutting environmental protections and reducing the role of gov’t, allowing businesses to rape the planet and abuse their workforce as hard as possible to increase profits.
As for the rest of his supporters, the “MAGA” crowd, they’re kept in line by keeping them stupid, allowing you to more easily feed them propaganda and influence their emotions to fit your needs. Religion teaches them to be subservient from an early age and take a back seat to a higher power, whether that be god or the charismatic talking head at the alter or on tv, all the while leeching as much money from them as possible without leaving them totally destitute. This helps explain why conservatives/religious turds continue to attack early education (less chance of them learning to think critically and question things), school lunch programs (hinder brain development), libraries (access to other ideas/beliefs), sex education and abortions (keeping those accidental pregnancies from being stopped, thereby ensuring the already uneducated and poor families continue to have kids they cannot support financially and give a good education to). It’s all very sinister when you look at the whole picture. It’s why I detest religion, not so much the concept and practicing of religion, but how evil men have turned it into a weapon, and exploiting the very people they pretend to care about. A lot of the evil they push is all done under the guise of religious beliefs/freedoms.
What's keeping Trump in the race is the fact that most Americans are working 2-3 jobs to main a basic standard of living and have to actually look at their grocery, utility, and medical bills.
Crazy doesn't seem so crazy when the other candidate promised to make your life better and failed.
It's simple. Bigotry and greed. Trump plays to people's fears that "others" will soon have the same rights they do while also assuring his rich handlers that he will make them richer. He's convinced the poor to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Conservatism is a mental illness, it can't be defeated with logic and reasoning
If the race were between The Literal Devil (R) and Jesus Christ (D), the vote total would be 45%-55% just based on the letter they choose to run after their name.
Policy doesn't matter when people base their entire personality on their political party identification.
At one time it would have sounded like a conspiracy theory, but you don't get here without a massive disinformation campaign.
Trump's supporters have been so programmed to accept everything he says at face value or, in some cases, just to ignore what he actually said in favor of the party's updated spin. In all cases, they believe it is impossible that he could do any wrong, so any semblance of incongruity or poor leadership or any negative aspect of Trump at all must be due to lies of his opponents -- even if that means the entire system would have to be rigged against him to an extremely unlikely degree.
The last time the world saw these tactics used to such an extreme extent and with such success required a widespread campaign of so-called "denazification" after a very prolonged war.
metacognitive myopia explained why people didn't/couldn't update their beliefs about the existence of "weapons of mass destruction etc".
dogwhistling the threat of sexual revolution "comrade kamala" (i.e., he's implying hypocrisy when he doesn't understand what lenin's use of the term "prostitute" meant).
playing the fool until you can't (i.e., making his base feel insightful and "seen" as playfully serious, homophilically/mimetically charismatic; e.g., his base feels like their inference-making is being promoted based on linguistic sympathy through the aura of charisma).
from (3) somewhere in his administration they're letting the would-be "fool" base do the grunt-work and creating cover; see "Optimal Team Formation Under Asymmetric Information".
Many Conservatives have been conditioned to stop looking for facts and believe what the TV tells them. Trump admitted as much during the debate. When challenged on the cat thing, he dismissed the reporter's research and said that he believes it because he saw it on TV. His voters will, too.
Roger Ailes was Nixon's media consultant during Watergate, and the lesson he learned was that if the media was on Nixon's side, he could have gotten away with it. Ailes went on to run Fox News. That is no accident.
The left didn't invade rightwing spaces, the spaces that have been propagandized to since 2014, and present credible arguments against the propaganda on a consistent basis.
So what you have is a decades backlog of brainwashed people Russia and others were paying to spread propaganda to.
It's not that complicated, and it will continue - even after Trump is gone. Koch, Musk, Thiel, Dan and Ferris Wilks, Zuckerberg, American billionaires are in this too, paying nominally conservative people to believe Libertarianism, tax evasion and defunding the nation in the name of "owning the crazy libs" is patriotism.
It's nuts. America is under constant attack, and don't expect the Establishment Liberal majority to fight back outside of election season.
Seriously, how the f*** is this guy still in the race?
Some very deep pockets.
People want to say it's just racism, but we have to stop ignoring how much of this is happening because of obscenely wealthy media moguls who don't give a damn about the future of the country and are only worried about ratings, and holy shit, Trump brings in ratings. The crazy fucks who vote for him are deeply influenced by this media, like Trump, they believe everything they see on TV.
“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”
-Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ABC in 2009
These fucking dinosaurs did fuck nothing for twenty fucking years while the internet ate their lunch. The only idea they ever had was doubling down on insane shit to grab views. They never once considered becoming a better source of news or providing any kind of real local value to communities.
It's the money, especially the money in traditional radio and television media, that is propping him up. He's truly the last gasp of a dying generation, desperate to keep control over people who are way more informed than ever before and the only tool they have in their toolchest to fight that is misinformation and disinformation.
The same deep pockets that were able to kick Joe Biden off the ticket. They didn't give a fuck when people like you and I said Biden was too old, but once the folks with the money started talking about it being an issue, Biden got curbed.
Unlike Biden, conservatives are in a cult and losing Trump would lose their voters. They're attached at the hip and they can't dump him in the same way without essentially just admitting they will lose hard this year.
Her campaign is not flawless, and I just have to know what you all think about the RINO Republicans coming out in support of her? Congrats, the Democratic party is now the party of Dick Cheney. Hope you're all proud.
A cult of fanatics who worship him due to his ability to let them display their complete lack of empathy as well as their extremely racist and misogynistic views.
I would look into the “polls” and how realistic they actually are and who has paid for them.
Also don’t forget that the media has great interest in trump since he creates so much news with his bullshit. Newspapers don’t sell with headlines like “politician does something normal and expected”.
Fuck the mainstream media, they will love a trump administration and its utter depravity.
Best thing I’ve heard all week is Swift siding with Harris. If the young actually vote, whatever this form of the Republican Party is will be dead.
It's a race between junk food vs. an actual meal. Junk food is easy and self indulgent, real food requires time and effort. It doesn't matter that junk food is a terrible value and lacks any nutrition. The Trump people choose junk, conservatives choose Trump people because the Trump people are mathematically mandatory to maintain their caste.
Welcome to the post truth era. Nothing matters except the way it makes you feel. Ignorance is strength and rage is fuel. If it feels good it's true, if it challenges your paradigm, it's fake news. This phenom is not exclusive to Republicans but they sure do excel at it.
"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled"
After someone has been convinced of something, it's very hard to convince them that they were wrong because now their ego is on the line. And the longer amount of time they've believed what Trump says then the harder it will be to convince them that he's a lying con man, because they'd have to admit to themselves and their community that they were massively conned. And they would to some degree have to even question whether their entire worldview is wrong.
Questioning your own ideas and trying to determine if you've been wrong about something takes a lot of openness maturity and emotional intelligence, which are things conservatives statistically are not good at
In 2010 a group of unelected theocrats decided that billionaires can put however much money they want into propaganda. That's on top of the most widely watched media in the nation already being a billionaire's propaganda.
They have used this power to terrify their voting base into action. Their voting base are fear-addicted racists who willingly allowed themselves to be brainwashed.
Donald Trump, the Man who called our Soldiers Losers and Suckers while Praising our Enemies and Residing over one of the Deadliest periods for our Secret Agents abroad, is a PATRIOT WHO LOVES AMERICA and KAMALA, who is LITERALLY the Vice President right and never Stole any Top Secret US Documents, HATES THIS COUNTRY!
BILLIONAIRE Donald Trump LOVES the Working Class while Prosecutor who went Lenient on First Time Offenders and Non Violent Offenders Kamala Harris HATES the Working Class!
Donald Trump, who Presided over the DEADLIEST YEAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY, will Protect us while LITERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER Kamalamala Harris WONT!
Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning.
There's a few major flaws:
Trying to out-flank republicans on the right with immigration and crime; instead of counter-messaging that republican claims of migrant crime are false and migrants commit less crime than average, and crime as a whole is declining, her campaign promotes how tough she is on crime. This is essentially campaigning for the republicans. The people who are terrified of immigrants and criminals are voting republican.
Trying to out-flank republicans on the right in foreign policy. Harris can promise rivers of Muslim, North Korean, and Russian blood, and the people who want that will still vote republican. Talking about how lethal the US military will be and how hostile the US will be to other countries decreases turnout. War is not popular. Trump's campaign is already hitting Harris on supporting the genocide in Palestine.