Besides, elections isn’t what defines a functioning democracy.
Why do so many people fail to pay attention in history and civics class? And why do people get so upset when their ignorance is pointed out to them.
«He was elected» is not a justification. If it were then the rest of the world would take a dim view of Americans. Be glad that hasn’t become worse.
I have news for you...
The people who can not present a problem. Regardless of what pairing of nationalities.
By lying
Ps. Firehose of falsehoods is a Russian propaganda technique. Whataboutism too
1 lie doesn't compare to the plethora of Trumps lies
Alternatively the UK violating the millennia old Magna Carta by halting jury trials for criminal offenses with less than 2 years of jail time.
Whoosh.
As for your assertion that anyone who opposes unlimited unrestricted immigration is somehow far right: you are simply wrong.
If you want to find out how wrong you are I would encourage you to try moving to Norway. Then tell me if the process feels "unrestricted".
I would suggest knowing things before you express strong opinions.
Harris received 97% of Trump's vote count.
There is not that strong a popular mandate for Trump, which shows in his approval ratings.
The Democratic Party is at odds with Democrats, in my opinion. They just don't want to let anyone but the party itself pick the candidate, then are surprised when their own voters don't feel the candidate is theirs.
Obama was nominated in spite of the party, and people showed up for him.
Trump is awful, but losing to him twice is unfathomably stupid.
There, I said it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...
https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2...
2024 eligible voters: 244,666,890
2024 ballots cast: 156,766,239. 64% of eligible voters cast a vote
Trump votes: 77,284,118. 49.2% of votes cast, 31.6% of eligible voters
Harris votes: 74,999,166. 47.8% of votes cast, 30.6% of eligible voters
Trump got 1% more of the eligible voting population to go through the effort of casting a vote. That's not nothing, and it put him in office, but it's not a landslide that grants him an unquestionable public mandate.
Making assumptions that non-voters would or would not support particular policies is erroneous. Harvard-Harris did a poll question on this last month, and found that 76% of Americans supported the U.S. arresting Maduro and bringing him to stand trial in the U.S.: https://harvardharrispoll.com/press-release-december-2025. That means most Americans are further to the right on this issue than a bunch of isolationist conservatives who voted for Trump.
The thing is, from the perspective of a foreigner, there are kinda two options:
1. Trump won fair and square, because Americans like him. They support his policies - like "threaten your close allies", "foreigners aren't welcome in America" and "foreign trade isn't welcome in America" - because the average American doesn't much like foreigners (like you).
2. That isn't the case.
From the perspective of such foreigners, 2 is actually seen as assuming more good faith, on the part of Americans, than 1.
Option 3 is consistent with national polls. This fact is not flattering to the American public, but it's also not damning. Unfortunately, our electoral system has a slow cycle rate so we're stuck with the consequences for a while.
Assuming you are European, I can only offer these small words of consolation: I feel confident that a significant factor Trump's plummeting approval ratings is his anti-Europe and pro-Russian rhetoric. Everyone was pretty aghast when Trump declared the new public enemies (Canada and Greenland) on his first day in office.
Americans generally have very positive feelings towards Europe. We all just need to make it through the next three years.
I don't partake in that subreddit so I have no clue as to the content or if this claim is true or false but it doesn't seem like a crazy idea for Russia to do. Sure there's plenty of content Trump gives Russia to potentially amplify, but there could still be bots amplifying things and making some opinions or takes on a story be more popular than reality.
Technically he won a plurality of the popular vote, but he didn't win the popular vote. This is typically not a distinction that matters, but in this case it's what happened. The majority of people voted for someone else, but he got votes from more people than any other candidate did.
Of course, what really matters is the electoral college, but the popular vote is often seen as lending even more legitimacy to a victory.
For instance, I wrote an invalid write-in candidate since both major parties ran clowns in 2024, but Harris carried my state by a mile.
Regardless, I think it's important to be precise about claims like this, since there is actually a difference between winning the popular vote and winning a plurality of it. Imagine making the claim if 10% of the popular vote went to third-party candidates, or even 20%!
That makes you part of the problem. And no, only one party ran a clown, and that party won because of people like you.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America...
The US right, however, went all in on woke .. they literally couldn't shut up about "the left", "woke" and immigrants eating pets.
Outside of that Fox / Carson / Turner Network et al altered reality bubble it was hard to see evidence of significant increases in Drag Conversion therapy in school libraries and litter boxes in school classrooms.
Good effort though, it was years of sustained make believe and dead cat after dead cat thrown on the table of public discourse.
Kamala declined to walk back her support for, among other things, taxpayer funding of transgender surgeries for inmates. This was an extreme position that most Americans do not support. It is also at odds with the global trend, including in progressive European countries, with regard to the risks/benefits of transgender surgeries.
The Left loves to play the "Republicans pounce" game, and say that the Right is politicizing things. But this is a situation where the Right was reacting to a move the Left had made. This situation helped the Right win in the 2024 election cycle because they had the 80 percent side of multiple 80/20 issues (especially border security and transgender issues).
You can dislike the outcome (I sure do!), but this was a case of the pendulum swinging back, not the Right getting out over its skis.
ADDITION: It also didn't help that the prior administration had lied its face off about Biden being competent, which undermined trust in Dems in general and Kamala in particular. But when Republicans called this out, they were not exaggerating, they were just 6 months ahead of CNN/MSNBC finally admitting it after the debate.
That's the problem, though. It shows how gullible and easy manipulated the US population was. Trans people are already such a tiny part of society, and an even tinier part of the prison population.
Offering healthcare for prisoners is something a developed, first world country should do, and trans healthcare is considered by experts to be necessary most of the time.
To throw away a vote on this single issue can only be due to ignorance, hate or both.
But Kamala's position was not that it wouldn't cost very much. She backed the ideology, and the vast majority of Americans disagree with that ideology.
> To throw away a vote on this single issue can only be due to ignorance, hate or both.
Many Americans saw this issue as yet another one (like the Biden competence one) where Dems were telling them to ignore what appear to be plainly obvious facts, like "men cannot become women". Some voters decided that they could not support a candidate who appeared to live in a different reality, on the thinking that "if she's willing to lie to me about such basic facts, what won't she lie to me about?"
I don't think that's really accurate. Most Americans are deeply misinformed on the issue, and a fair percentage of them think it's something like men making excuses to go in women's prisons.
A lot of those voters got their info specifically from misinformation sources like Fox News or those ads.
> Many Americans saw this issue as yet another one (like the Biden competence one) where Dems were telling them to ignore what appear to be plainly obvious facts, like "men cannot become women". Some voters decided that they could not support a candidate who appeared to live in a different reality, on the thinking that "if she's willing to lie to me about such basic facts, what won't she lie to me about?"
This is why I've said elsewhere democracy doesn't work when you have such an uneducated population. Those voters are not informed on issues of transgender health of gender dysphoria, and so were taken advantage of and misled by a party that created/stoked fears and spread misinformation to win an election.
You're literally the person who downthread advocates for redefining "majority" to be a synonym with "plurality" because people who don't know the actual definition of "majority" use it that way.
> Those voters are not informed on issues of transgender health of gender dysphoria, and so were taken advantage of and misled by a party that created/stoked fears and spread misinformation to win an election.
This appears to be largely autobiographical.
No. Far from it. This seems to be a case of wilful ignorance, as I said in a previous reply reputable dictionaries[0] define majority to mean 'most', i.e. a definition exists for the word majority which exactly matches the way people use it.
It would seem it is you who is unaware of at least one of the definitions of the word majority.
> This appears to be largely autobiographical.
It's as objective as can be.
Out of the two of us, I'm not the one in a bubble.
You seem to think it's more likely that 80% of the country has been misled by propaganda related to basic human biology than that the other 20% is wrong. There have been plenty of times when 80% of people were wrong about something, but when the topic is one that all humans have firsthand experience with, it's somewhat less likely that they've been magically misled.
You're off-base comparing this to migrants eating cats and dogs. That was never an 80/20 issue.
I assume people genuinely not in a bubble also say it though. Gee whiz, what a conundrum!
> You seem to think it's more likely that 80% of the country has been misled by propaganda
I never gave or implied a percentage anywhere close to that.
> related to basic human biology than that the other 20% is wrong.
Yes, I trust medical experts and scientific and medical consensus over people that have no clue or expertise but let themselves be riled up.
> but when the topic is one that all humans have firsthand experience with, it's somewhat less likely that they've been magically misled.
Same reasoning people like you used to use that homosexuality "isn't natural".
> You're off-base comparing this to migrants eating cats and dogs. That was never an 80/20 issue.
Nor is trans health issues. If you really believe so, please provide some sources.
Obama carried out mass deportations, claimed that undocumented migrants broke laws and must be held accountable, ordered extrajudicial execution of US citizen and was protected by executive privilege, invaded Pakistan to kidnap and execute Osama bin Laden, deposed Gaddafi and destroyed Libya, campaigned on a platform opposing gay marriage, wanted better relations with Russia and was secretly transmitting promises to Putin, vastly expanded the state surveillance apparatus, had citigroup appoint his cabinet, gave bankers bankers / wall st a pass for their role in the mortgage crisis. And he was (and very much still is), he was a darling of the left.
When pressed, many will try to claim they never really liked him, disavowed those particular things about him, that he was actually a right-wing president, etc., which in a weasely way might be technically true, but the difference in decibels surrounding very similar actions betrays reality.
The American mainstream left has changed quite a bit in the last decade. Not sure why I see so many denying this. Unless you're trying to say they never cared about any of that and still don't they're simply cheerleading for their team, which is more cynical but more understandable I guess.
The only thing the American "mainstream left" did in the last decade is grow from a completely insignificant size, on a national scale, to a slightly less insignificant size, through a subset of the political disaffected becoming engaged (a big catalyst for that being Bernie Sanders 2016 primary campaign; DSA membership shot up, IIRC, more than 10-fold directly after that.)
The set of viewpoints in that group didn't really change all that much, nor did the set of viewpoints in the actually mainstream groups left of the GOP (which themselves are not actually left, but center-right pro-capitalist.)
And its also the source of the change in the overall Democratic coalition; the Democratic center-right that has been (and remains) the dominant faction of the party hasn't moved an inch, but the party as a whole has moved because the segment further left has grown substantially, mainly by mobilizing the previously disaffected.
The democrat party essentially is the mainstream American left, that's what people call the left, and that was the topic of this thread ("why didn't the Democrats beat Trump?"). You may not like it or you may have your own definitions of what left and right are, but in this context it is what it is.
No, it is the fucking left.
> The democrat party essentially is the mainstream American left
The US has no political party named “the democrat party”, and the Democratic Party is (as historically each of the two major US parties has normally been) a broad coalition party, the dominant faction of which currently is center-right neoliberal capitalist, not anything even approximating left. The center-left to left component of the party is substantially weaker (though it has grown stronger since 2016, with an influx of the previously disaffected, as I described.)
On a very zoomed out aggregate level, sure, the Democratic Party has changed—and if that’s what you want to talk about, just say that—but the source of that change is the part that isn’t center-right neoliberal capitalist drawing in new blood from outside the party, not a change in the positions of the left (or, for that matter, a change in the position of the dominant faction of the part,y, either.)
If you use “left” to refer to a faction that (1) is largely seen as an opposing force by those who identify as “left”, and (2) largely sees the “left” as the label of an opposing force, and (3) where even you admit there is a much clearer term for what you are actually referring to... Well, maybe you should reconsider your terminology.
Secondly, tribal behavior is strengthened through sports teams, college allegiances, rep vs dem party lines and many other things, with the latter of those being the main reason.
Thirdly, the dems were very pro zionist while Trump was able to maintain deniability. This swung a lot of dem voters.
Lastly, Kamala got something like 0 votes in the primary. Wishing she would win the general election was delusional. Dems should themselves in the foot twice vs Trump with Kamala and when they betrayed Bernie to help Hillary.
You should engage in some critical thinking yourself instead of blasting your insecurities over the internet. Your media diet (bet $1000 that reddit is a big part) needs a do-over.
Critical thinking is a base human ability, which religion can indeed erode before it has a chance to grow.
> Secondly, tribal behavior is strengthened through sports teams, college allegiances, rep vs dem party lines and many other things, with the latter of those being the main reason.
This doesn't negate anything I've said, it adds to it. It is notable that the more religious parts of the US act more religious about their political party, however - something not seen in most western countries.
> Thirdly, the dems were very pro zionist while Trump was able to maintain deniability. This swung a lot of dem voters.
They were not as pro zionist as the "Lets demolish Gaza and build new resorts" GOP.
> Wishing she would win the general election was delusional.
Only because the US population is what it is, which is why wishing the only rational choice got elected is too much to hope for.
> blasting your insecurities over the internet.
I'm doing no such thing, however the way you make assumptions so haphazardly shows you yourself could benefit from some critical thinking instruction.
Colloquially majority means 'greatest share', and he certainly had the greatest share of votes out of all candidates. I don't like it, but it's correct to say he won the popular vote.
This is like asking someone to distinguish between a hypothesis of who killed JFK when they say they have a theory of who did. You're mixing the colloquial usage for no reason.
Majority doesn't mean more than 50% of the vote in everyday language, it means 'the most'. Trump got the most votes of any one candidate.
I guess it depends on whom you hang out with and talk to. I completely agree that some people can't understand the difference and speak accordingly. But I don't think we should redefine words based on the lowest common denominator of understanding/usage.
And in this case, it's especially important not to redefine "majority" because if we do then there's no word left to refer to an actual majority. That's not the same thing as JFK conspiracy theories.
No one is redefining anything. Merriam-Webster and Oxford both have a definition for majority meaning most, and that's the more common definition that is used in everyday speech.
Context matters.
> And in this case, it's especially important not to redefine "majority" because if we do then there's no word left to refer to an actual majority.
In this context, talking about the popular vote, no information is lost, nothing is miscommunicated by using the word majority and understanding how people are using it. Which, by the way, they are using correctly as per dictionary definitions.
> That's not the same thing as JFK conspiracy theories.
No, but it's the same as per my example in that you are being pedantic about a word in a way that serves no purpose, except maybe to try and make people feel stupid.
I don't have a subscription to Oxford's dictionary, but MW's lead definition mentions being more than half [1]. The fact that there is some other definition that doesn't specifically mention this is not probative of your claim that this is the more important definition. And your unsubstantiated claim that this is the more common usage is belied by the fact that your preferred definition is not the lead definition.
lol, why are you acting like you can't find it?
The definition you're attached to/fixating on, is marked as definition 'a'. Definition 'c' is defined as: the greater quantity or share - it's two lines below, you must have seen it.
That's the definition most people are using, and they are using it correctly. It's some shameful attempt at elitism to insist on correcting people, especially when they are not wrong - really it's just a completely inability to understand that different contexts use different definitions.
> And your unsubstantiated claim that this is the more common usage is belied by the fact that your preferred definition is not the lead definition.
I'm not sure the ordering of definitions indicates what you think it does, in any case it's trivial to find examples of the word majority being used to mean definition c. Ask your favorite AI, I bet they'll tell you you're wrong - and you know what? There's nothing wrong with that.
> a number or percentage equaling more than half of a total a majority of voters a two-thirds majority
I never said I couldn't find it, and I linked to it above. It's not a "shameful attempt at elitism" to point out that the first-listed definition is what I said. Your rejoinder that there exists some definition that could encompass your preferred usage does not refute what I said. Since you seem to be impervious to such logic, I'll leave it here. Have a good one!
That wasn't the behavior backing the claim, and you know it. The behaviour backing the claim was ignoring the definition being used as an excuse to try and correct people when you know well what they were saying. It's a sign of insecurity, generally.
> Your rejoinder that there exists some definition that could encompass your preferred usage does not refute what I said.
The fact that the word as a definition that shows that people were using it correctly is what refutes your claim.
> Since you seem to be impervious to such logic
I have no problem with logic, but I am critical of various peoples "logic".
> I'll leave it here.
I'm skeptical, but if you follow through I'll be appreciative.
Nonsense.
> Can’t help but think it’s orchestrated by Russian bots.
Rational people can.
> the president won the popular vote
False.
Trump won the popular vote in 2024. He lost it in 2016
Maybe I should make a website where example.com/e/Europe shows whatever I want people to think Europe thinks, and people will treat it as an authority for some reason? That's basically what you're doing with Reddit.
You just have to look at the protests in NYC over Venezuela to see it... they aren't actually for what the people of Venezuela seem to want (they're celebrating), the protestors are clearly pushing for and protecting at what represents communist values, even if Maduro isn't really much of a Communist.
Can’t help but think it’s orchestrated by Russian bots.
You do realize the current government won the elections and the president won the popular vote right