r/politics • u/Quirkie The Netherlands • 1d ago

Soft Paywall Obama Breaks Silence on Trump’s ‘Unimaginable’ Presidency - “Imagine if I had done any of this,” the former two-term president said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obama-breaks-silence-on-trumps-unimaginable-presidency/
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u/jtsa5 1d ago

If anyone else other than Trump did anything wrong it was like the world was ending. When it's Trump everyone has kid gloves on.

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u/RemarkableWave8066 1d ago

Obama wore a tan suit once and the Fox News goons had aneurysms for a solid week

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u/Raoul_Duke9 1d ago

You guys remember "terrorist fist jab"? That one was the one that pissed me off the most.

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u/gatsby712 1d ago

Remember that time Bush got us into two wars because of 9/11, but it wasn’t until Obama that the guy who caused it was killed. I member. Turns out the Republicans didn’t care about justice, they just cared about using the crisis to make some oil money for their VP and President. 

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u/old_and_boring_guy Tennessee 1d ago

The part that bothered me was that the first thing Obama did was put the war money in the budget (as opposed to special appropriations) and everyone suddenly cared what the war cost.

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u/mockg 1d ago edited 1d ago

Are you sure that is just not republicans and the right wing news being themselves. I swear the only times I hear about budget from them is if a democrat president is in charge.

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u/EE_Tim 1d ago

It's called the Two Santas Strategy and it's by design.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/EE_Tim 1d ago

I think there's a definite nefariousness that comes from the fact that it is a concerted effort on their part, separate from the historical proof of it in action.

People are idiots if they fall for that.

People are idiots, that's why we are where we are as a nation.

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u/GiftToTheUniverse 1d ago

There's been a vested interest working overtime to dumb us down for the past 50+ years.

People who are long dead started this offensive against us. And for what? What did they get out of it?

This system is cancer.

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u/Professor-Woo 21h ago

That is the thing. For the right, power is its own end. It is not to govern or make America better. It is to maintain their own power.

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u/carz4us 15h ago

And mix in racism and sexism to seal the deal

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u/EE_Tim 9h ago

I've been assured from conservatives that racism was solved in the 60s. Please ignore the LA riots, the Watts riots, the Miami riots, the BLM protests, the Charleston United the Right etc. etc.

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u/Kind_Dream_610 1d ago

People ARE idiots who DO fall for it. They don't look at the data, they listen to the sound bites, and their current idol spewing lies. They don't care about cause and effect, they care about if they win (even if they can't see when they're really losing, because they never actually lose, it's stolen from them by those who the idol tells them is to blame for all their woes).

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u/slowpoke2013 1d ago

No kidding. Enter the people who are feeling the pain and all they have to say is “they’re hurting the wrong people!”

FFS. Beyond hope.

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u/RanaMisteria 1d ago edited 13h ago

They don’t have to be stupid to fall for it. All the GOP has to do is flood the zone. If their politicians, and their economists, and their media, and their etc. are all saying the same thing over and over then it starts to look like they know what they’re talking about because surely if it was all nonsense then someone would say so? And that’s all they need because they’ve already laid such solid groundwork to ensure that their voters don’t trust any other source of information but those sanctioned by the party. People aren’t stupid for being brainwashed. The GOP has been at this for decades. They have slowly pushed their voters boundaries to get them to accept more and more extreme, illegal, immoral, authoritarian, and anti-constitutional crap. Some GOP voters are not smart it’s true, and some are bigots and would be fully on board with everything even if the party were honest, but most of them are mostly good people who genuinely buy the lies. They have been radicalised. They’re in a cult. Yes, their choices are still their own, but it’s a bit like being in an abusive relationship. You think you have no choice when really, you can always just walk away. But abusers and cults both like to boil the frog so to speak, and by the time people realise what’s happening the water is already boiling and you’re stuck. Or you feel stuck. Or you think “well, I’m already covered in 3rd degree burns and I’ve come this far and my whole family hates me I might as well stick it out to the bitter end.” Which is the sunk cost fallacy. Or you think things will get better or….

All I’m saying is that yeah, it’s dumb, and yeah, its wrong, and yeah, people who decide they’re okay with their party being full of and run by Nazis are, at the very least, Nazi sympathisers and so automatically wrong in all ways at all times period. But people who are in a cult need to feel like there’s a way back to reality, otherwise even if they realise they have been duped and controlled, they won’t feel like they have a choice but to stay in the cult. Because one day this will end, and we will have to figure out how to put ourselves back together.

By all means, fight fascism with everything you have, but don’t lose sight of each other’s humanity.

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u/PlushladyC 16h ago

Well said . Its been a huge campaign of manipulation .

Im not from USA - just a few monthes back I finally had the realisation that your country is as deeply brainwashed as China or any of the other nations that previously would have been denounced by your government .

And just calling everyone dumb is not going to help come back together as a Nation going forward

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u/RanaMisteria 12h ago

I live in the UK now and we have the same problem here. It’s just subtler. And more class driven. But we have a current Labour government saying they’re going to be reducing how much money is given in PIP (personal independence payments) for disabled people and they’re going to make it harder to qualify for disability benefits and PIP in the future. PIP is already hard to get, and the process to apply is notoriously dehumanising. When I first moved here we had a Labour government and social services and the NHS and local government were all providing far more services and social safety net programmes than they do now. But almost 15 years of Tory “austerity” has stripped those services and programmes so much that many of them don’t exist anymore. They began to privatise the NHS bit by bit because they see how much money it makes people in the US and as they’re the ones who own the concerns that would benefit, well, they wanted what the US had. It’s a mess. They basically did the UK Two Santas. The Two Father Christmases Strategy. And now what’s happening? Labour is saying they’re going to have to cut back on more social safety net spending to fix the problem. It’s a mess everywhere.

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u/PlushladyC 16h ago

Well said . Its been a huge campaign of manipulation .

Im not from USA - just a few monthes back I finally had the realisation that your country is as deeply brainwashed as China or any of the other nations that previously would have been denounced by your government .

And just calling everyone dumb is not going to help come back together as a Nation going forward

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u/RachelMcAdamsWart I voted 1d ago

People are idiots

Many, too many, are.