You can blame the MAGA for everything that is happening, but they literally said this is what they were gonna do. Over half of the US, implicitly said, "Given all of that, and Kamala, it really doesn't matter who is the president".
Reducing the number of polling places in districts that tend to not vote Republican causing very long lines for voting. When it takes hours standing in line, often outdoors in bad weather, it discourages voting. Add to that laws in many states that criminalize providing food or water to people in such lines and it is even more discouraging.
Prosecuting people for innocent mistakes while voting. E.g., Crystal Mason [1]. Or Hervis Rogers [2].
In the Rogers case he was convicted of burglary in 1995 and was in prison until being paroled in 2004. His parole ended in June 2020. He didn't know that he was ineligible to vote, and voted in the Democratic primary in March 2020. The Texas legislature did pass a bill in 2007 that required the Department of Criminal Justice to notify people who had been in custody of their voting rights situation, but Governor Perry vetoed it.
Texas attorney general Paxton had him arrested and prosecuted. Bail was set at $100000. Eventually the case was thrown out because the attorney general does not have the authority to unilaterally prosecute voter cases. He has to get approval from local country prosecutors.
In nearly all these cases the prosecutors are very disproportionately prosecuting minorities and women.
Same with processes to restore voting rights for felons. See Rick Scott's handling of petitions to restore voting rights in Florida [3].
> And please don't say voter ID, nobody is disenfranchised by voter ID.
There are in fact a lot of US adults without an ID that works for their state's voter ID laws and would have a hard time getting such an ID because of cost (monetary and/or time). Here's a relatively recent report on the number who lack ID [4].
Yes, I know that most state voter ID laws require there to be no cost or fee to obtain the ID from the state but there are often significant costs to obtain the documents required to apply for the ID. Furthermore the offices that can process the application are often far away from where the people without ID live, and only accept applications during limited weekday hours. That can mean having to take unpaid time off from work and finding a way to get to that office. In reality that all can add up to over a $100.
If it was actually about election security and not intended to disenfranchise legal voters the voter ID laws would include provisions to make it easy to obtain ID without those burdens described above.
Here's a link to a comment that contains a dozen links with a lot more detail [5].
EDIT: I missed a disenfranchisement tactic. Election officials should go through the voter rolls occasionally and purge people who they have good reason to doubt are still eligible. But that can be turned into a disenfranchisement tactic by doing that just before an election possibly without trying to notify the purged voters that they have been purged so that the purged voters who are still eligible don't find out until it is too late to get back on the rolls in time to vote.
This is the part I'm curious about. Trump may be many things, but lacking transparency around his motives and actions is not one of them. As you say, he is doing basically exactly what he said he would.
So what I'm curious about is whether anyone who voted for Trump, and especially not the hard core MAGA folks but more the "The Dems suck, prices are too high" folks that shifted toward Trump in 2024 vs previous elections, are surprised/angered/scared by his actions. If so, what was their thought process?
I'm especially curious how they feel about Musk's role in all this. I just can't wrap my head around people that were "drain the swamp" nativists are cool with an unelected foreign-born billionaire having free reign, essentially unaccountably, to do whatever he wants to any federal department. If somebody told me in 2010 that this would happen in 2025 I would tell tell them that they are nuts. If the Dems had done anything 1/10th as egregious, Republicans would be apoplectic, and rightfully so.
> I just can't wrap my head around people that were "drain the swamp" nativists are cool with an unelected foreign-born billionaire having free reign, essentially unaccountably, to do whatever he wants to any federal department.
Go on Twitter or any other site that doesn't ban a certain flavor of discourse. Observe how much glee is being expressed towards negative emotions of others (such as "libs" or marginalized people). That's the point.
Again, I don't think that's really the whole story. For the 35-40% of the electorate that is hard core MAGA, sure, and for the smaller percentage of "terminally online" Twitter people, moreso. But for the folks who really were just unsatisfied with the direction of the country, didn't like the Dems, wanted to send a protest vote over Gaza, etc. - what are those people thinking/feeling?
I'm thinking the same thing that I was thinking when Biden was president, that Israel has corrupted our entire government. Nothing that's happening here even approaches what we've been enabling in Gaza, so if you weren't upset about that, it seems strange to be up in arms about what Trump is doing. I'd say it's a double standard that places way more value on the lives of Americans than those outside our borders.
> Go on Twitter or any other site that doesn't ban a certain flavor of discourse.
I just don't understand where people even get this idea. Is it the repetition and perpetuation of it that makes so many people believe it? We are and have always been allowed to have whatever opinions we wanted on any of the regular platforms, so long as it doesn't affect the rights of others (so there's a line at racism, calling for violence, and advertising for scams for example). There has never been a "flavor ban" unless one's flavor is KKK
> We are and have always been allowed to have whatever opinions we wanted on any of the regular platforms, so long as it doesn't affect the rights of others
If only it were that simple, because that's demonstrably not true. I'll give you a perfect example that was made clear by recent events.
Before last month, it was against Meta's rules to say that being LGBT was a mental illness. Similarly, you couldn't say people had a mental illness due to their religion.
But by this point I think it should be pretty clear that, in many respects, what we define as a "mental illness" is not some hard and fast rule, it's largely what we see as beyond the norm of socially acceptable boundaries at any given time.
I am gay. For someone else to have an opinion that being gay is a mental illness is a perfectly valid opinion, and it doesn't infringe on my rights (as long as they're not advocating for locking me up or whatever). I literally see no need to prohibit people from expressing the valid opinion that my being gay is a mental illness (I may think you're an asshole, but being a jerk certainly isn't banned on the Internet).
So when Meta announced their policy change to allow more "free speech", at first I was like "Ok, cool". I only became livid when I read the policy and saw that it's still against their rules to say people in "protected groups" have a mental illness except for a specific carve out for gay and trans people. F that. So I have to pretend all of the completely absurd religious nonsense about believing some sky fairy is out there and randomly does things like performing miracles (but for some reason never obvious enough to actually be miraculous) is not a sign of mental illness, but being gay is? Yeah, free speech my ass.
Point being, in your comment you have basically made an arbitrary division between what "whatever opinions" are valid, and what counts as e.g. racism, and pretend that it's a clear line.
> Trump may be many things, but lacking transparency around his motives and actions is not one of them.
That's not the perception I have. Between changing opinions 180° for no discernible reason (besides reports/speculation of money changing hands, but it's not given as the reason so that's hardly transparent) and most actions being in the short-term interest only of himself, it doesn't strike me as though everyone is aware that voting for him is going to make their future worse (exceptions may include some of the ultra rich affected by the same short term gains as himself). What I hear on this side of the pond is that he also e.g. denies knowing the people who wrote project 2025 and the plan being ridiculous, then (I checked Wikipedia to see what came of it) "nominated several of the plan's architects and supporters to positions in his administration" and it was found that "nearly two-thirds of his executive actions 'mirror or partially mirror' proposals from Project 2025." (Wikipedia, last paragraph of article lede on project 2025)
I'm curious how you see it, since you might be more into USA politics than me (most people are). Doesn't he change opinion most of the time and am I just hearing of the exceptions? Are his denials regarding project 2025 seen as obvious lies and thus deemed transparent that this open-secretly is the plan known to everyone? Or do you see it this way for another reason?
Sure, Trump flip flops all the time (in his previous term he negotiated the most recent trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that replaced NAFTA, touted it as a uniquely awesome trade deal, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/pr..., and now is the one ripping it up), and he lies every other word.
But my point is that behavior is completely predictable at this point, and if anyone is shocked by what he's done so far, they haven't been paying attention. Stuff like:
1. His extreme narcissism, and the fact that loyalty is a one-way street with him.
2. His desire for revenge
3. 0 respect for any governmental norms
4. His ability to bend (or break) the law to suit his needs. Since the Supreme Court granted him complete immunity for any official acts, and since it's so obvious that Congress are completely feckless at this point, he is essentially unconstrained by law.
When you ask "Are his denials regarding project 2025 seen as obvious lies and thus deemed transparent" I would say absolutely. But of course, when people are angry about the direction of things, they tend to want to believe the stuff they want to believe ("Trump will get in there and shake things up!") and minimize the things they don't ("Trump will shut down programs and departments I depend upon").
It basically comes down to ignorance. Most people don't have the time, inclination, and/or capacity to evaluate political platforms or the competence of individual politicians. They just decide based on heuristics or "vibes". Trump seems confident and strong. Harris doesn't seem to stand for anything much besides the status quo. They don't like that there was inflation under Biden, and Trump is the opposite of Biden. They don't necessarily like Trump's attitude, but figure they don't have to like him as long as he gets the job done. That's roughly the level of thinking that's happening, in the cases where there's much thinking at all, and people aren't just voting the way their friends, family, and neighbors all vote.
Basically this is a fundamental flaw of democracy, that you leave the most important decision in the hands of the median citizen, who has no particular aptitude for making it. Of course, other systems of government have their own flaws. Like Churchill said, democracy's the worst form of government, except for all the others. (Though I would argue that the particular structure of the American democratic system is especially flawed.)
There's no point in wondering this. Soros is swamp but Musk is not? There's just no rational, two neurons connecting there. It's just their side bad, my side good brainwashing.
I'm not in the Democratic party and had no role in defining their platform. What we are experiencing is 1/100th the pain the Democrats inflicted on Palestinians.
Over half of US was apathetic and didn't vote.
You can blame the MAGA for everything that is happening, but they literally said this is what they were gonna do. Over half of the US, implicitly said, "Given all of that, and Kamala, it really doesn't matter who is the president".
Which is worse than MAGA IMO