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Trump won by a remarkable margin if you consider the astounding number of reasons why he would have lost in any other country.
Eh, every other incumbent leader was ousted in this last round of elections post covid though so his normally extreme disqualification might’ve been balanced out
European here. Any margin above 0 is mindblowing, but at the same time not very surprising.
America is the land of all possibilities. When everybody else in the world says “Nobody can do something this dumb”, America rises up to the challenge and proudly says “Hold my beer…”
Right wingers when they lose a vote 40-60: well you still have to work with us because half of the voters support us!
Right wingers when they win 51-49: fuck you we’ll be doing everything we want, we won, you get nothing!
Democrats when they win 60-40: we still have to bend over for right-wingers to bring the country together!
Democrats when they lose 49-51: Oh well, the people have spoken, nothing we can do!Democrats when they lose 49-51: Which minority do we sacrifice?
tldr; Media outlet responsible for feeding the public a constant diet of Trump wonders why no one notices Trump barely won the election.
You’re not wrong in terms of what they tried to feed the public, but I also think the New York Times’s influence on the country is just infinitesimal at this point. There was a time when so many people read newspapers that it could make a sizable impact on the election, but I think that time is long in the past now, and even TV has waned quite a bit in its influence.
They sort of touch on what I think is the reason, but I think they dance around it: The systems by which people make sense of the world around them, and understand what is going on in the country factually, and what are right and wrong things or how “everyone” feels about things, are being hijacked more and more effectively by propaganda. Trump is genuinely popular now, at least enough so to win the election, because they were fed a diet of extremely professional fake news which was designed to create the impression that he should be popular.
In person, almost everyone I know who doesn’t get their news from TikTok is at least left-leaning. Some of the people who get their whole picture of the world from social media are rabidly right-leaning, and their picture of the world is also a huge chaotic mess. I do not think that is coincidence.
Trump is genuinely popular now
This doesn’t affect your point, but I just want to point out that he’s NOT genuinely popular right now. He’s still got a terrible approval rating. He’s starting at somewhere around 47 approve, 48 disapprove. Biden was 53-30. And this is his honeymoon, he was at a similar level at the start of his first term.
This was more of a rejection of Biden/status quo than people coming around to actually like Trump.
Trump is genuinely popular now, at least enough so to win the election, because they were fed a diet of extremely professional fake news which was designed to create the impression that he should be popular.
I must register my disagreement. America, as a whole, is fine with a Trump presidency, knowing full well what that represents. People have agency, and shifting responsibility to “propaganda” ignores that agency and relieves people of responsibility.
No, the American electorate as a whole is responsible here.
Some of them, yes. And some of them, once the real horrors start in their neighborhood, will be too complacent to do anything or even say a word against it, but just keep going with the herd. My point is that I think a huge number of them have no idea what’s actually going on.
I’ve talked with them. They really think Trump is a genius, and that he’s finally going to start fighting for the working man, after decades of the Democrats’ betrayal (which that part is, kind of, pretty accurate). All this stuff you and I talk about, the reality of what he represents and what he plans to do, they have absolutely no idea about. It’s not in their media landscape, and their media landscape includes deliberately designed features to make sure they won’t be able to accept it when they are occasionally exposed to it. It’s really hard to wrap your head around how little of an idea they have about what’s going on.
I’m not saying you are completely wrong. Some of them really want mass deportations and a Muslim ban, even if they don’t know that he plans to do much worse than that. And some will go along with it as it starts happening, and fuck them. But I think the level of ignorance is really vital to keep in mind, in particular because it means that a lot of these people who are about to start taking part in atrocities are not really “bad people,” in the way it would mean that they were if they completely understood it.
There’s also the factor of “people tend to gravitate towards media outlets that tell them what they already want to hear.” Yes, propaganda works, but it works best on people who already want to believe it.
Irreconcilable differences.
Propaganda
Because apathy.
Barely won? He won essentially every state that wasn’t deep blue. They each may have been small margins individually, but that’s a pretty massive overall victory. Pretending it wasn’t decisive isn’t helping anyone, it’s just denial.
And, if you add up all the counties of the United States and give one vote for each county, he won a massive victory, like those entirely-red maps that right wingers like to post that ignore population. The point is, though, that’s not an accurate way to count who is popular and not.
He won the popular vote too though. That was supposedly impossible for Republicans in the modern era.
It may not be an accurate way to count, but it IS the way this country counts elections. By the rules of the game, we lost; in a big way.
And then I say, “Yes, but that’s not an accurate way to count who’s popular.” And then you say, “Yes, but it is our current system, and determines who won the election.” And then I say, “But that’s not the point, if you read the article, it’s talking about popularity specifically.” And then you say, “But popularity doesn’t define the results of the election, the real point is, by our current system, he won by a lot” And basically we can keep going like that forever.
Sounds like fun, right?
A 1% swing from R to D and the reverse is true. Our system exaggerates close results as a bunch of battleground states move together. And even on the electoral front, this wasn’t a big victory. Biden got 306 electoral votes in 2020, Trump got 312. In 2008, Obama won 365-173. That was a massive victory.
