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.
Two separate issues have popped up that I’d like to comment on:
The EC: Obviously antiquated, over-represents rural states, etc. IMO, the real problem with the EC, however, isn’t that it’s an indirect form of democracy, or even the ‘winner take all’ system (although I agree that the second makes a third-party president almost impossible). It’s the fact that EC votes are based on congressional representation (representatives + senators) rather than state population.
For example, the day after the election, I crunched out the numbers for population vs electoral college votes for the state of Illinois (where I just moved from), vs the entire intermountain west (ID, NV, AZ, UT, CO, WY, and NM). Illinois has 58% of the population of those seven states, but only has 43% as many electoral votes. So, basically, urban populations are somewhat gerrymandered to begin with (which is why no democratic president ever wins the EC vote without also winning the popular vote). The EC would be much more democratic if votes were based on number of representatives each state has, rather than congressional votes total.
States rights: In a sense, I sympathize with this. No one in the US congress can truly represent their constituencies, because they each have a constituency numbering in the thousands (at least), so they’ve never actually met most of their constituents. This is much less of a problem on the state level (for example, I was actually taught high-school government by my state assemblyman, who was a public school teacher in his off years*). Also, for those who don’t like either party and think the US would have a much better government with a viable third party, I might point out that various third parties have much greater representation at the state level than the national, so there’s that, too. I don’t talk about it a lot, because I know ‘states rights’ is code for racism and misogyny (and I hate to feel like the confederates were right about anything at all), but there is a point there. It’s just a shame that it’s been buried in other right-wing bullsh*t.
*The Nevada state legislature meets every other year, so the legislators all have regular jobs in the off years.
States rights is only ever invoked when people want the “right” to oppress others in their state. The right wing’s faux concern for states rights goes out the window when a more liberal passes a bill they don’t like. Such as strict gun laws, single payer healthcare or emissions laws on cars that are stronger than the federal standard.
@Kat: Trumps appeal is quite simple: fear sells better than hope. Always has, always will.
@WWTH: Agree, which is why I only speak in support of states rights among people who already know what else I believe in*. I do think individual states can better enact laws for their own populations (including tighter gun control and more funding for Medicaid), but I don’t want to come across as supporting anything right wing, so I generally don’t talk about it.
*I think I’ve posted enough here to make it clear that whatever flaws I have, I’m all for gender/racial/GLBTQA equality, socialized medicine, strict gun control, etc. At least, I hope so.
I know I’m a damn foreigner and all, but I really couldn’t care less about “state’s rights.” I care about people’s rights. I recognize it’s probably more complicated than it seems from an outsider’s perspective.
Re the OP
Yeah. I couldn’t enjoy the schadenfreude as much as I wanted to after encountering Tweets like the Jewish Trump voter who was upset with Steve Bannon’s appointment to a made-up position. Like, you’re an ignorant assface for voting for him, but you don’t deserve the onslaught of anti-semitism that’s coming your way.
Arizona, Texas and Georgia are all turning blue though; Hillary did much better in each one than Obama did in ’12. All three of them should be in play in 2020, which will give the Democratic candidate a much better chance. The problem with 2016 is that it was both too late (in the Midwest, which is turning red) and too early (in the aforementioned South/Western States).
@Viscaria
‘States’ Rights’ just means ‘federalism in service of oppression’. I’m a pretty staunch federalist. Devolution of powers is a good thing, and, all else being equal, lower levels of government are better suited to craft targeted policy than DC. Unfortunately, all else isn’t equal. Yeah, it makes no sense for the federal gov to decide trash day for my street or whatevs. At the same time, it makes even less sense for an individual state to decide who is or isn’t allowed to be treated with basic human decency. ‘States’ Rights’ is basically bigots equivocating on the rights of marginalized groups
This from someone who was ranting about the evils of “statism” on another thread. What could be more statist than states, not voters, determining the outcome of an election? And what could be less free and democratic?
Miggy, how do you keep your idiot ideology straight? Oh right, you don’t…you just go with whatever’s convenient to your ever-changing mercurial masculine moods.
Internal logic: get you some.
Gotlib is dead.
I guess that won’t mean anything to non-french people, but he was a french comicbook legend. His style was somewhat akin to Mad Magazine in that he did a lot of absurd humor, and a lot of trash or sexual humor. Sometime both. He was close to the guys from Charlie Hebdo, but he was more absurd and less political, and overall he was also less directly provoking, which is usually better to make people thing. Turn out that saying to people they are stupid is less though-provoking than showing a goofy priest who litteraly follow his religion. Gotlib also deeply loved his characters instead of depicting them as scums, like Charlie Hebdo often do.
French comics are less and less provocative and trash. It’s hard to say if it’s truly a bad thing given that a lot of trash or provocative stuff is just badly done, but it make me sad (see also : Charlie Hebdo).
My prefered quote of him is “Humor is something too important to be left to the care of funny guys”.
Gotlib, noooo :C
Ah :-((((((
I have a Rubrique-à-Brac album stashed away somewhere, that I bought back when I was living in France (though I admit I prefer F’Murr). French bd culture is outrageously ingenious.
I actually prefer F’murr too. Legend say that while he was published in Pilote, there were several letters each weeks questioning F’murr sanity. But that don’t make Gotlib any less important to me.
Given the xenophobic contest everywhere, I seriously consider buying all Super Dupont albums. Maybe I could try to show them to FN militant library, just to see if they are able to catch that it’s satiric.
In addition to producing representative districts, gerrymandering should be themed. This time dragon-shaped districts, next time districts shaped like the states they’re in, next time after that famous landmarks. Best district gets an extra one-sixteenth of an electoral vote, which should eliminate ties forevermore.
For some reason, I don’t feel any Schadenfreude towards people who voted Trump. I mean yeah they’re the reason we have Trump and his administration for the next four years, but I just can’t. I don’t why
A drawing by Gotlieb, who for once don’t require translation.
Also, why WHTM mocking Trump is so important.
try two :
If the link still isn’t here, the blog system will have beaten me.
@Pie
Yeah the green party just pops its head up to run a presidential candidate then hibernates for another 4 years.
But in the current system a lot of people (Like Sanders) run as part of the two main parties even if they are otherwise independent,
and the over whelming majority of voters vote for the same party as the presidential pick all the way down the ballot.
To party, of course. They had to fight for that.
I’ve voted green at the US house level (ages ago), and a friend ran at the county level on the Green Party banner; she and a colleague each got 20+% of the vote.
The media rarely reports on anything below the US senate, and even more rarely acknowledges there’s more than two parties, so you have to be paying close attention to notice.
This is simply untrue. At the municipal level, in many states, Green candidates run both in opposition to and in place of Democrats in every election. Several of them won this year in the city where I live, which is blue but not so blue that a progressive candidate winning is a foregone conclusion.
The problem, as many people have said, is that they’re rare at the state level and almost unheard of at the national level, because those races are exponentially more expensive, beyond the means of the vast majority of individuals, and the Green Party can’t get access to the federal support infrastructure for campaign funding without passing that arbitrary 15% threshold for votes in the presidential election. It’s transparently a rigged system and I have trouble begrudging the Green Party whatever tactics it chooses to militate against that.
@numerobis + Ben
Yeah I should have clarified that I meant at the national level at the senate and such,
and yeah a part of that is just the way the system is set up.
@Pie
I have a hypothesis (although that’s all it is) about this. The EC disenfranchises massive numbers of voters. By massive:
Current vote count for Hillary Clinton: 65, 316, 724
Current vote count for all third parties: 7, 612, 988
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19
And that’s only among voters. It doesn’t count all the people who feel so disenfranchised that they don’t even bother to show up. IIRC, almost 49% of registered voters didn’t vote in 2016. And how many people in addition to that just aren’t registered at all? I’m also not breaking it down by state. The voters who are disenfranchised in blue states are Republicans, rather than the ones who voted for Hillary. But for this election, where Hillary’s current popular vote lead is 2,597,156, the voters feeling the most disenfranchised are rightfully the ones whose candidate won but didn’t win.
I know it’s counterintuitive that more people vote in presidential elections (where their vote barely counts) than vote in downticket races where their vote can matter (except where it’s gerrymandered to oblivion). But I think the disenfranchisement may have a trickle-down effect. That is, the realization that you really don’t have much of a say in voting in a president might make you feel more apathetic about all elections.
Also, since there’s virtually no chance a third-party candidate will ever become president (and I don’t agree that Trump could have won as an independent—if he’d run as an independent, the voter split between the GoP candidate and Trump would have ensured a Clinton win), I believe that also has a trickle-down effect to other federal offices.
In the current political environment, it’s dangerous to elect a third-party candidate to the house or senate. It potentially disempowers your state in the legislature to have someone who isn’t in one of the two parties and would never be in the same party as the president. I think the fact that there are any third party congresspeople in this environment is actually a testament to the fact that there may be a great deal more support for third parties being buried under the EC and the winner take all approach to the EC that 48 states take.
So it’s my hypothesis that abolishing the EC could lead to seeing some very interesting things happen to our political party climate. Anyway, I could be completely wrong. My hypothesis (like many hypotheses) is only based on completely anecdotal evidence. I believe that the last time I voted before 2016 was in 1996. (I think I may have voted in 2008, but I can’t remember for sure.) And sure, it’s stupid of me not to just get more involved at a local level, but largely, it’s just led to a feeling of helplessness about all politics in general. So I typically only pay attention to the issues that matter the most to me, like women’s reproductive and sexual freedom and civil liberties, and then feel enormously frustrated that to support the right side in those issues, I have to support people who’d make it so that if I lived in one of “their” states, I’d want to wear a bag over my head to go to McDonald’s and would have to spend more to buy two 16-ounce cups of unsweetened iced tea if I were really thirsty. (But I’ll avoid my soapbox on the “obesity epidemic” here.) So far, there’s not a third party that I don’t find a whole lot more sickening than the Democrats, but if I really felt like my vote might matter, I would absolutely be on the lookout for one. I’d probably never find one since I’m a rather weird mix of (lower-case) libertarian socialist, but I’d still be looking.
You might be right that it wouldn’t be a terribly significant change. I definitely think that instant-runoff voting would have a much greater impact on the viability of third parties than abolishing the EC.
@Ohlmann
(That’s pretty good.)
What we need is to convince some very rich and powerful people to back the Libertarian party. They’ll take more votes from the Republicans than Democrats, creating a three-way split which strongly favors the Democrats. Only then could we reasonably throw some support to the Greens.
I mean, if you want to exploit lesser-evilism to your long-term advantage, that is. The problem with lesser-evilism is that it normally favors the short-term at the cost of the long-term, so it might be nice to turn that on its head for once.
The biggest and most productive change that could be made to the US electoral system is to adopt an automatic run-off rather than the plurality voting system we have today. Every voting system is problematic, but plurality systems have more problems than others. Automatic run-off would make third party candidates viable, because voting for one wouldn’t mean wasting a vote. Right now, you vote Green for President and you might as well have stayed home. With an automatic run-off, you could vote Green, and if Green loses your vote goes automatically to your second choice. Protests votes are no longer a problem, and spoiler candidates are no longer a problem. Third parties would become viable simply because the perception that voting for them is a wasted vote would no longer be a thing.
My brain is screaming at me… do you have any IDEA how distracting that can be?? My brain is screaming;
YOU KNEW I WAS A SNAKE WHEN YOU BROUGHT ME INTO YOUR HOME!!!!
schadenfreude, indeed