There’s no way I’m voting for him, but I also disagree that he’s a terrorist or that this election is any different from 2016 or 2020. He’s not going to pass pretty much anything in Project 2025, and while the Supreme Court does lean strongly conservative, they’re not going to let him get away with the worst of his plans, if he actually follows through (which I highly doubt he will).
If you haven’t, you should read some history books from the POV of people who lived through the early to late 1930’s in Germany. Erik Larson does one from the POV of the US ambassador to Germany during that time, called “In the Garden of Beasts”.
Almost word for word, (with the non-relevant bits swapped around), exactly what Germans were saying about Hitler during that time. Nobody thought Hitler would do or go as far as the media and “alarmists” were signalling, and anyone who called it what it was, a plan to force Germany into a war rather than pay down their debt from WWI, along with the attempted extinction of anyone they classified as “undesirables” (started with Jews, and moved on to many other groups. Replace “jew” with “trans” and the similarities are nearly impossible to ignore); was flagged as being hyperbolic and out of touch and exaggerating what the Nazi party and Hitler were “Really” trying to achieve, or what Chancellor Hindenburg could prevent him from doing to keep his power in check.
Obviously everyone who thought the threat wasn’t real or being overblown was wrong. But it took years and years for them to be proven wrong. At every single step along the way, were groups of people saying “This time, this is the check to the Nazi/Hitler power struggle that will work and keep them in check”.
There is absolutely no reason that couldn’t happen again somewhere else. Assuming that there was something deeply wrong/broken with Germany that led to the rise of Nazism is the height of folly. It can, and is happening here, just as it’s been attempted in other countries since WW2 ended.
Do I like the fact that my choices are:
Vote for a democratic party that keeps shifting more and more towards the right/center without gaining anything progressive in response
OR
Vote for a literal wannabe dictator who can and will give rise to a fascist party in America and hand the most powerful military in the history of humanity over to a certifiable narcissistic wannabe dictator who has literally, not figuratively, done and said everything up to and including “I will be dictator on day one in the office”, has never walked it back, and has never treated it as a joke, has already attempted one coup, refuses to believe in the democratic process (see disputing the 2020 election despite no proof) and has all the hallmarks of the next generation Hitler, including literally repeating parts of Hitler’s speeches as a part of his speeches.
I’m not super happy with option A, because I would like to see more change here, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let option B happen.
Whether or not you believe that option B is a real threat, like everyone else in the world and most Americans currently believe, doesn’t matter to me. You being wrong about this doesn’t make me more right. And you are wrong about your views of trump and what he’s trying to have happen. But it’s unlikely any amount of evidence or historical context will convince you, so I’m not entirely sure why I’m typing this up, except in the hopes that someone else comes along and reads it and maybe it sways them towards acknowledging how great of a threat trump and the current republican party poses to the idea of a free and fair world.
I think you’ve been reading/watching a bit too much leftist media.
First of all, if you live in one of the 43 states that aren’t battleground states, who you vote for will not impact the election at all. That’s my point. If you live in one of those states (and statistically speaking, you probably do), you can safely vote for your preferred candidate without any worry about changing the outcome of the election. That is my main point here. Whether Trump or Harris wins the popular vote does not matter, only the Electoral College matters, and unless you think your state has a reasonable chance of flipping (i.e. if it’s one of those 7 battleground states), you might as well signal to the major parties your preference. Maybe they’ll look at that data for the next election, idk, but voting for one of the two major parties just signals that the choices are acceptable.
If you do live in one of those 7 battleground states, then you probably should vote for one of the two major parties, because every vote there counts.
That’s the core of my argument here.
I could go through and show how a lot of Trump’s statements have been taken out of context, or give examples of similar statements he made in 2016 and his complete lack of action during his presidency, but at the end of the day, I still think he’s an absolutely terrible candidate and is unfit for office. I don’t think he’s a fascist though, I think he’s just a self-centered man-child who craves public attention. He does court fascists though, because he wants them to support him so he wins, but I don’t think he actually wants what they want. He’s also really old, so he’s far more interested in leaving a legacy than taking power for himself. But none of that’s relevant because I agree with the underlying message, “DON’T VOTE FOR TRUMP,” I just disagree with the reasoning (i.e. name-calling like “fascist” or “Nazi” or whatever). He’s certainly dangerous, but not because he wants to subjugate minorities, but because he’s largely incompetent.
But don’t get distracted by any of that, I agree with the sentiment, I just disagree with the rhetoric. That kind of rhetoric just puts people on the defensive and strengthens their support of Trump, it does absolutely nothing to change anyone’s mind.
It was labeled as a “Muslim ban” by Trump, his aides,[3][4] as well as his critics,[5][6] and became widely known as such since the ban mostly impacted countries with predominantly Muslim populations.[7]
Over the course of four years, the Trump administration set an unprecedented pace for executive action on immigration, enacting 472 administrative changes that dismantled and reconstructed many elements of the U.S. immigration system. Humanitarian protections were severely diminished. The U.S.-Mexico border became more closed off. Immigration enforcement appeared more random. And legal immigration became out of reach for many. All of this was accomplished nearly exclusively by the executive branch, with sweeping presidential proclamations and executive orders, departmental policy guidance, and hundreds of small, technical adjustments.
Muslims certainly count, but the goal here wasn’t to persecute existing US residents and citizens, but to limit Muslims coming here, and I chalk it up more to FUD surrounding terrorism than a genuine intolerance toward a specific minority. We absolutely have had intolerance in the US, but it doesn’t usually look like travel bans, but internment camps (FDR during WW2) and the war on drugs (mostly Reagan, which largely targeted hippies and black people).
And it’s important to note that the Muslim travel ban was blocked by the Supreme Court (links to those cases are in the first link you provided), so there absolutely is precedence there for preventing anything like this happening. The executive can still block based on origin country, but not based on religious affiliation.
As for the second link, I’ll just leave this quote:
it removed 935,000 noncitizens from the country during Trump’s term in office, compared to 1,160,000 in the prior four years.
As in, Obama’s executive branch deported more people than Trump did. I’m not saying this to imply Obama was somehow worse on immigration than Trump, but to show that Trump’s impact on immigration was… limited.
Sure, but I would honestly be surprised if even this conservative supreme court overturned that precedent, because it was grounded in first amendment protections, which applies to everyone on American soil and to border control agencies evaluating visas.
kids and cages thing
I’m pretty sure that existed before Obama, but given the state of search engines these days, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to find something about it. All Trump did here was revoke some of Obama’s EOs, he didn’t really change any of the laws, so that nonsense was likely legal and commonplace.
The proper solution here is to pass laws, not EOs, yet nobody seems interested in doing that. And that’s a big reason I’m very disappointed in both parties right now, immigration is a major concern of mine (I want more, and the process should be easier), but neither party seems interested in actually solving any problems with it, they just pass some EOs to make it a little better or a little worse.
If you haven’t, you should read some history books from the POV of people who lived through the early to late 1930’s in Germany. Erik Larson does one from the POV of the US ambassador to Germany during that time, called “In the Garden of Beasts”.
Almost word for word, (with the non-relevant bits swapped around), exactly what Germans were saying about Hitler during that time. Nobody thought Hitler would do or go as far as the media and “alarmists” were signalling, and anyone who called it what it was, a plan to force Germany into a war rather than pay down their debt from WWI, along with the attempted extinction of anyone they classified as “undesirables” (started with Jews, and moved on to many other groups. Replace “jew” with “trans” and the similarities are nearly impossible to ignore); was flagged as being hyperbolic and out of touch and exaggerating what the Nazi party and Hitler were “Really” trying to achieve, or what Chancellor Hindenburg could prevent him from doing to keep his power in check.
Obviously everyone who thought the threat wasn’t real or being overblown was wrong. But it took years and years for them to be proven wrong. At every single step along the way, were groups of people saying “This time, this is the check to the Nazi/Hitler power struggle that will work and keep them in check”.
There is absolutely no reason that couldn’t happen again somewhere else. Assuming that there was something deeply wrong/broken with Germany that led to the rise of Nazism is the height of folly. It can, and is happening here, just as it’s been attempted in other countries since WW2 ended.
Do I like the fact that my choices are:
I’m not super happy with option A, because I would like to see more change here, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let option B happen.
Whether or not you believe that option B is a real threat, like everyone else in the world and most Americans currently believe, doesn’t matter to me. You being wrong about this doesn’t make me more right. And you are wrong about your views of trump and what he’s trying to have happen. But it’s unlikely any amount of evidence or historical context will convince you, so I’m not entirely sure why I’m typing this up, except in the hopes that someone else comes along and reads it and maybe it sways them towards acknowledging how great of a threat trump and the current republican party poses to the idea of a free and fair world.
I think you’ve been reading/watching a bit too much leftist media.
First of all, if you live in one of the 43 states that aren’t battleground states, who you vote for will not impact the election at all. That’s my point. If you live in one of those states (and statistically speaking, you probably do), you can safely vote for your preferred candidate without any worry about changing the outcome of the election. That is my main point here. Whether Trump or Harris wins the popular vote does not matter, only the Electoral College matters, and unless you think your state has a reasonable chance of flipping (i.e. if it’s one of those 7 battleground states), you might as well signal to the major parties your preference. Maybe they’ll look at that data for the next election, idk, but voting for one of the two major parties just signals that the choices are acceptable.
If you do live in one of those 7 battleground states, then you probably should vote for one of the two major parties, because every vote there counts.
That’s the core of my argument here.
I could go through and show how a lot of Trump’s statements have been taken out of context, or give examples of similar statements he made in 2016 and his complete lack of action during his presidency, but at the end of the day, I still think he’s an absolutely terrible candidate and is unfit for office. I don’t think he’s a fascist though, I think he’s just a self-centered man-child who craves public attention. He does court fascists though, because he wants them to support him so he wins, but I don’t think he actually wants what they want. He’s also really old, so he’s far more interested in leaving a legacy than taking power for himself. But none of that’s relevant because I agree with the underlying message, “DON’T VOTE FOR TRUMP,” I just disagree with the reasoning (i.e. name-calling like “fascist” or “Nazi” or whatever). He’s certainly dangerous, but not because he wants to subjugate minorities, but because he’s largely incompetent.
But don’t get distracted by any of that, I agree with the sentiment, I just disagree with the rhetoric. That kind of rhetoric just puts people on the defensive and strengthens their support of Trump, it does absolutely nothing to change anyone’s mind.
Who do you consider minorities?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_travel_ban
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/four-years-change-immigration-trump
Muslims certainly count, but the goal here wasn’t to persecute existing US residents and citizens, but to limit Muslims coming here, and I chalk it up more to FUD surrounding terrorism than a genuine intolerance toward a specific minority. We absolutely have had intolerance in the US, but it doesn’t usually look like travel bans, but internment camps (FDR during WW2) and the war on drugs (mostly Reagan, which largely targeted hippies and black people).
And it’s important to note that the Muslim travel ban was blocked by the Supreme Court (links to those cases are in the first link you provided), so there absolutely is precedence there for preventing anything like this happening. The executive can still block based on origin country, but not based on religious affiliation.
As for the second link, I’ll just leave this quote:
As in, Obama’s executive branch deported more people than Trump did. I’m not saying this to imply Obama was somehow worse on immigration than Trump, but to show that Trump’s impact on immigration was… limited.
Different supreme court, it’s now Trump’s and extremely corrupt.
You’re going to have to explain that a little better. The kids and cages thing especially.
Sure, but I would honestly be surprised if even this conservative supreme court overturned that precedent, because it was grounded in first amendment protections, which applies to everyone on American soil and to border control agencies evaluating visas.
I’m pretty sure that existed before Obama, but given the state of search engines these days, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to find something about it. All Trump did here was revoke some of Obama’s EOs, he didn’t really change any of the laws, so that nonsense was likely legal and commonplace.
The proper solution here is to pass laws, not EOs, yet nobody seems interested in doing that. And that’s a big reason I’m very disappointed in both parties right now, immigration is a major concern of mine (I want more, and the process should be easier), but neither party seems interested in actually solving any problems with it, they just pass some EOs to make it a little better or a little worse.