Attention Trump haters! If you’ve been starved for schadenfreude lately, there’s a blog for you: Trumpgrets, a small but growing compilation of Tweets from Trump fans now feeling betrayed by Orange Mussolini.
Granted, most of them are mad at him for terrible reasons, but hey, I’ll take what I can get at this point.
Speaking of Ann Coulter, the author of In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! and yes that really is the name of the book, is also feeling played, big league!
While it’s always delightful to see Coulter redfaced — with “blood in the face,” as her white supremacist colleagues like to put it — some of the other Tweets are more sad than funny.
Ah, Bob. You know who else is worried, Bob? EVERY OTHER PERSON ON MEDICARE OR MEDICAID. Every American with pre-existing conditions who couldn’t get insurance before Obamacare kicked in. Lots and lots of people who are just barely hanging on.
You and everyone else who voted for Trump made a huge mistake. And we’re all going to be paying for it for years.
H/T — To the WHTM reader who linked to Trumpgrets in the comments here.
http://s1.r29static.com//bin/entry/d51/x/1307174/image.gif
Wow, the well-known scammer and fraud turns out to be a liar?
I would have never expected this. Colour me surprised.
Shockingly, it turns out that a pathological liar can’t be trusted.
A state’s right to what?
@weirwood
Ahh, that’s who miggs is. It all comes flooding back now.
Anyway, the problem with the president is not how they’re elected, its the fact they have so much power. The office should be broken up. Once it has been thoroghly defanged, the election process matters a whole lot less.
The problem with the Trump presidency isn’t so much the fact that he’s got the number 1 job, but more that he has a really nasty piece of work as his VP, a Tea Party cabinet and a republican-dominated house and senate. It wouldn’t have been nearly such a problem that Hillary lost if the democrats hadn’t had such a poor showing everywhere else, but the ridiculous drawn-out pantomime of the presidential election seems to drown out all other political activities so non-presidential problems just don’t draw the attention they really should.
Apologies in advance if this joke is really old, but I just had to make it; I just realized that Miggy is the 329-year-old engineer himself!
I know the reason for Miggy’s backward ideology! He was born in 1687, so he would have come of age in the early eighteenth century; thus, he’s nostalgic for the days when nobody paid attention to homosexuals and transgendered persons, when white men ruled the world, and everyone else knew their place! It’s funny though that he’s so fond of “states’ rights”, given that he would have been around 100 when the United States were founded.
@Miggy
Considering that smaller states already have a relative advantage in congress (especially the senate), giving them this advantage everywhere is probably a dumb idea.
Especially since the presidential vote has essentially become a popular vote anyway.
And especially since most states use a horrible “winner takes all” approach, which makes a huge amount of votes in those states utterly worthless and creates this unbearable swing-state phenomenon.
You live in a blue state and generally support republicans?
You’re vote is worthless.
You live in a red state and support democrats?
You’re vote is worthless.
This is not fucking mob rule, mob rule means that a majority, however slight, has acquired the power to decide EVERYTHING (including killing a minority, because most support it) rules be damned, not just electing a leader for the next few years. If that was mob rule, all elections not done by an oligarchic elite would be mob rule, including representatives, senators, mayors and so on.
Simpler solution for supporters of the EC:
let the House elect the president, why even play this game of pretend?
It would be fairer, too, since there’s no “winner takes all” on state level. This also lowers the impact of larger states (since the votes will be split between the canditates).
It makes gerrymandering worse, but this should be banned anyway.
@Trollbert
If the electoral college was abolished it wouldn’t matter where people move to. It’s one person one vote. Because, you know, democracy.
@Miggy
I actually do care about states’ rights. I have very libertarian tendencies (if only I didn’t generally find the Libertarian party so repulsive).
But as Falconer pointed out, that is what our system of checks and balances is for. States’ rights are represented in the legislative branch. Other than veto power, the power of the executive branch is all supposed to be about federal government appointments and foreign treaty. The president should represent all of our citizens in a democratic way. So should the judicial. I believe states rights should be balanced by citizens’ rights.
As a liberal-leaning independent in a completely red state (the last year my state went blue was the year I was born), I don’t feel at all represented by my state government. There are no “checks and balances” for me when the states are also given an unequal amount of power in choosing the president.
Two reasons I’m against the EC that I think haven’t been mentioned yet:
1. We moan about low voter turnout. I think a lot of this is due to the fact that the EC (and all electors go to one party in a state) completely disenfranchises voters. I’d be fascinated to see what happened to voter turnout if the presidential election was by popular vote.
2. We moan about our two-party system. I think the only remote chance a third party ever has of becoming relevant would be if we did away with the EC.
Anyway, I’m not sure why I’m bothering to try to speak with someone who has temper tantrums over menstruation, but whatever. You said you voted third party. Consider for a minute whether a third party might gain leverage in a system where suddenly all voters felt empowered, and also empowered to work together with voters in other states.
@Herbert West
Gerrymandering shouldn’t be banned, it should be regulated and assigned to an independent board, whose duty is to gerrymander in a way that is as representational as possible. And they should be required to make everything they do public so it can be reviewed and questioned by all interested parties.
@belladonna
Gerrymandering is defined as making weirdly shaped districts for some political advantage. Merely drawing up districts that cover sensible administrative or geographical areas or regions of roughly equal population isn’t gerrymandering.
@Pie
Fair enough, if I got the strict definition of gerrymandering wrong, but I’m not just talking about “sensible administrative or geographical areas.” And I’m especially not just talking about population. I’m talking about specifically using the techniques of gerrymandering to make districts more representational rather than politically advantageous to one side. As suggested toward the end of this video:
The EC is part of why we have a two party system to begin with,
getting rid of it would make third parties more viable (not that I cared for either third party option this year).
@TreePerson
Agreed. I didn’t like the other options, either. But it’s sometimes nice to contemplate a system where the possibility of a third, fourth, or even fifth party could become viable. In my opinion, a good deal of the corruption in our system is currently due to the power that the two parties have.
Ooh I must have missed this while I was away. Fill me in?
“What the hell happened?” Well, you voted for a con man who’d say anything to seal the deal. What also happened is that plenty of people warned you of this but you saw them as the enemy, so you got the wool pulled over your eyes. How does it feel?
Man; and here I thought I was going to have to wait a few a years, until after Trump had failed to build the wall, for an alt-righter to declare that Trump was a cuck all along!
@Miggy
1) Actually, I don’t “believe” in “state’s rights”. I know that under the U.S. system, state governments have autonomous power, largely independent of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, but still subject to judicial oversight by the federal judiciary. The Electoral College (EC) has zero to do with that.
2) As far as ensuring that each state, however small, gets represented, we have this thing called the Senate. Ever heard of it?
3) The EC is problematic if you regard the outcome of a Presidential election legitimate insofar as it is the expression of the will of the people, rather than an accident arising from how votes were distributed geographically in such a way that a candidate with fewer votes eked out a series of narrow statewide wins and thus won the Presidency. Since under the EC a candidate that wins a state by a handful of votes nonetheless gets 100% of that state’s EC votes (with a couple of minor exceptions), the result is a massive distortion of the vote as an expression of the popular will.
4) And if you say #3 is not a problem, remember what Republican senators said when they refused to give President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee a hearing. “The people should have a say”, they said. Note, they said “the people”, as in a singular entity – not a confederation of “peoples”, state by state. By that standard, the people had their say. A plurality chose Clinton. Yet Trump is the one who will get to nominate the next Supreme Court justice. How is that right?
5) The distinction between a “democratic mandate”- which, again, these Republican senators appealed to, and which American politicians tend to tell us their power is based on, and “mob rule”, which you insinuate is the alternative to the EC, is something you are going to have to elaborate on a great deal if your allusion to “mob rule” is going to mean anything other than “I don’t like democracy”.
Asymetric mobilization. There were 3 scenarios for the outcome of the 2016 election:
1. Hillary Clinton runs Barack Obama’s 2012 map minus Iowa and Ohio
2. The Midwest turns red and Donald Trump wins all the battleground states minus Nevada and New Hampshire , ending with a rather unimpressive electoral college victory compared to previous winners
3. The New South turns blue and Hillary Clinton wins in an electoral college landslide
The second scenario is what came to pass, however, if you look at the data in Nevada, where Democrats run the table, in Texas, Arizona and Georgia where Democrats made huge gains and flipped urban counties, the New South is still turning blue. Now, how many conservatives will still support the E.C. on the night California,New York, Texas and Florida all get called for a Democrat?
If it weren’t for a few thousand votes in the Midwest, the narrative would be about Republicans taking the South West for granted and the need for the Republican party to listen to urban voters.
AFAIK “mob rule” is what European royalty called democracy back in the day. Now that we’re fixing to install a white nationalist authoritarian, I’ve lost what little patience I had with people who use “mob rule” as an abstract criticism of anything.
Of course we don’t care about “states’ rights”.
We don’t care, because “states’ rights” is code for removing federal protections.
When states started giving rights to LGBT people, right-wingers wanted the federal government to step in and crush those rights.
@NicolaLuna
Check out the other thread. He’s having quite the meltdown about menstruation with a Ryan Williams level understanding of what a tampon tax is (which he insisted after we explained it he already totally understood totally understands how it works).
@TreePerson
Is it an important part, though? It makes having a non-democrat, non-republican president a tricky proposition in the current climate, but the EC don’t have any part in electing folks to the senate or the house and neither of those places are exactly overflowing with third party congresscritters. If things had worked out a little differently, Trump might have ended up being an independent president, but it would be in name only. He’d still have to get the republican majority on side for anything important changes.
If there were meaningful opposition to the current big two, then the EC might be more of an issue, but there really isn’t.
I’m not currently seeing a lot of Trumpgret amongst my red-state high school Facebook friends. They’re still telling me to STFU and ‘give him a chance’.
I did sort of give him a chance in that I decided to not say anything until he did something really horrible. And then he went and appointed Bannon as chief of strategy. So my chance didn’t last very long.
I’m not sure what it would take to make most Trump voters regret their vote. They live in a bubble where they don’t see the hate crimes being committed in his name and/or don’t attribute it to him and/or think it’s not such a bad thing for those lefties/minorities/’deviants’ to be intimidated.
Many of them really can’t see that Trump is an embarrassment and a danger and I’m not sure what would wake them up.
Scapegoating is a central part of the Pence Plan. Killing Obamacare will cause bad things to happen, but the scapegoats are lined up already, starting with Obama himself. “He screwed things up so badly we had no choice but to gut the New Deal!”
The GOP base will put up with a lot, as long as they get their scapegoats. And the GOP has scapegoats from here to the moon.