#trump election 2016

[blujane]

"Voting third party does no harm—"

If we lose so much as 11% of the votes to third party votes, Trump wins and Project 2025 plays out.

Source.

In case you didn't know, Project 2025 is the Republican Party's nightmarish dystopian and genocidal 920-page plan for the first 180 days of Trump's second term reign (the Supreme Court has now granted absolute immunity to presidents; Trump will be effectively a tyrannical monarch).

Note: Read Project 2025 here.

Third votes are doubly useless for another reason: there are too many third party candidates and none of them are known well enough to have a chance in hell to win.

Voting third party as things are helps no one but the Republicans.

It is as helpful as abstaining from voting, which is to say not at all.

Please, for the love of god and democracy, vote blue up and down the ballot!

[irenespring]

Really I think nothing shouts "my first Presidential election as a politically active person was 2016" more than the fact that when I feel hope and excitement for the future (possible President Harris) for more than five minutes I immediately get a crushing, all-consuming anxiety of "feeling this positive emotion now is going to make it so much worse when the worst thing possible happens" to the extent that I'll probably need my break-glass-in-case-of-emergency anxiety medication.

[batboyblog]

idk, feels like it should be slightly bigger news that a shady dictatorship with a crappy human rights record tried to illegally give Trump $10 million dollars to help win the 2016 election and then the Trump controlled Justice department stopped that from being fully investigated, that seems like a big fucking deal, but what do I know?

[cleophantom]

To anyone who refuses to vote for Biden in the US elections because of what he's done in Palestine: I'd like to hear the plan to get America to stop aiding Israel in the event of a Trump victory you must have to act so belligerently confident in your stance.

[decolonize-the-everything]

"The shock that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump was sadly hilarious. It turned out that even among white women, solidarity was only for some of them. For women of color, especially Black women, it wasn't a surprise. It was the same racism we had always seen masked as feminism playing out in real time. Feminism that could ignore police brutality killing women of color, that could ignore the steady disenfranchisement and abuse in local and national politics of some women based on race and religion, wasn't about equality or equity for all women; it was about benefiting white women at the expense of all others. There was a sense that when the targets of oppression weren't white, it was fine to vote based on “economic distress" and not solidarity with other women. Only it turned out that the policies that followed have so far served to increase that stress, disadvantaging everyone who isn't a rich white male."

- Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism

[originalleftist]

The thing about "protest votes" that makes them, in this of all elections, so mind-bogglingly intellectually and morally bankrupt, is that the potential consequences now are NOT A HYPOTHETICAL.

We don't need to speculate on what could happen if a bunch of people decide to stay home or vote third party, because they did that in 2016 against THIS EXACT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE, and we all enjoyed four years of hell culminating in an attempted coup as a consequence. And three years and counting of the aftermath since, including the destruction of abortion rights across much of the country. To say nothing of the ones who didn't make it through, like the migrants who died in detention, or the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of preventable Covid deaths.

And now fuckers are saying, "Well, we better do it again just to make sure we get every last bit of the world we haven't burned down yet".

How many real, actual, living people are you prepared to throw under the bus for your "protest vote"?

[alwaysbewoke]

[lucrezianoin]

Hillary Clinton: When they go low, we go high

Kamala Harris:

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

Donald Trump’s first of four criminal trials is scheduled to begin Monday in New York. After what is expected to be two to three weeks for jury selection, Trump’s criminal trial—where he is facing 34 felonies--is predicted to take six weeks. That means by mid-June, Donald Trump will be a convicted felon. It’s really that simple. Is there a chance Trump is not convicted? Sure, as a former trial lawyer, I can vouch firsthand that juries can surprise you. But based on the evidence developed in the criminal investigation and disclosed during the pre-trial portion of this case, it is clear that Trump falsified documents to conceal other federal and state crimes. Thus, Trump committed numerous felonies. Everyone knows the core allegation, namely that Trump—via his then lawyer Michael Cohen--paid $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election to stop Stormy Daniels from going public with the tale of her affair with Trump.  Now, if Trump had paid Daniels solely to keep his wife from finding out about his affair, that would be one thing. It wasn’t.  

Trump paid Daniels the money because he feared that if information went public at the time, he would lose the 2016 election. That at the very least made the secret payment a violation of federal election laws—which is one of the felonies Cohen pled guilty to committing in 2018, telling the court he made the payment “in coordination with, and at the direction of,” a presidential candidate who was Trump. This is why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has repeatedly stated  the “core” of this case “is not money for sex,” it’s election corruption.  Indeed, the very first line of the Statement of Facts that details the basis for the charges against Trump tells us that, “The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

When you look at the timing of when Trump first hatched this scheme to pay off Daniels, you get why this was all about the campaign.  The charging documents tell us point blank: “About one month before the election, on or about October 7, 2016, news broke that the Defendant had been caught on tape saying to the host of Access Hollywood: “I just start kissing them [women]. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the [genitals]. You can do anything.”   The political firestorm caused by the release of the Access Hollywood tape is why just three days later, Trump—with the help of Cohen and his publisher friend AMI Editor-in-Chief David Pecker-- moved swiftly to pay off Daniels. They heard she was shopping around the story of her affair with Trump. And Trump, former Trump aide Hope Hicks (who the State will be calling as a witness), Cohen and others knew that it would have been devastating for his campaign if voters learned in the midst of the Access Hollywood tape backlash that Trump had an affair with a “porn star” a mere four months after Melania gave birth to their only child. 

Indeed, the statement of facts tells us this was all about the campaign: “The evidence shows that both the Defendant and his campaign staff were concerned that the tape would harm his viability as a candidate and reduce his standing with female voters in particular.” That is why Daniels was approached on October 10, 2016, with a deal to “prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election.”  Under the agreement, Daniels was paid $130,000. But here is where the crimes come in. As the pleadings explain, Trump “did not want to make the $130,000 payment himself” so he asked Cohen to come up with a way to do that. “After discussing various payment options,” Cohen agreed he would make the payment and Trump would pay him back. It all worked as planned, Daniels never told America about the affair and Trump won the election.

Then, “shortly after being elected President, the Defendant arranged to reimburse” Cohen for the payoff he made to Daniels on Trump’s behalf. The plan they came up was that Cohen would be paid monthly for “legal fees” until the amount he advanced was repaid. In reality, as the pleadings note, “At no point did Lawyer A [Cohen] have a retainer agreement with the Defendant or the Trump Organization.”   Yet Cohen still submitted monthly invoices to Trump’s company for legal services. Some were paid by Trump’s company while nine of the reimbursement checks to Cohen for fabricated legal services came from Trump’s personal bank account and Trump “signed each of the checks personally.” And as alleged, “The Defendant caused his entities’ business records to be falsified to disguise his and others’ criminal conduct.”

Dean Obeidallah wrote in his Dean's Report Substack that Donald Trump will likely have the words "convicted felon" attached to his name by sometime in June or early July should the jury find him guilty in the Manhattan election interference case. Most of America wants to see charges levied against him.

[jaythelay]

2016 is the year people say was when everything changed, but the truth is, it started in 2013. And escalated from there in doubling magnitude.

That's when rightwing/russian propaganda hit and the dumbest of leftist dumbshittery were truly started. Nobody came out kinder from that situation, just eccentrically frustrated and pissed.

Also that was when YT drama, and in general the word "drama" picked up steam.

2016 was R's taking advantage if the vitriol from literally anyone online, memes and energy was high. Dems did Hilary and lost mostly because of it. They were in the 2000s while R's were making a 2016 in 2013.

What we see now is Dems making a 2025 while R's are eternally trapped in 2013/16

2016 is simply when you noticed.

2024 is much the same, because shit changed during covid when we had time to think for a god damn minute and not grind away endlessly. When real shit happened, R's were in charge, mostly killed their base and scared the shit out of normal people recognizing having a bunch of bumbling idiots in charge isn't funny during a pandemic.

2020 was when things started to change. We now see it happening again and tbh, as scary as it is, as hopeless as it is, if we push hard enough we may finally make political progress. Kamala doesn't have to be The Spark nor Your Spark, but you'd be lying if ya claimed going back to 2016-2020 was a good idea, and that is all R's have ever had to offer. 2016 and 2020 again.

No thank you. I waited 4 years for them to not make every day scary. Dems listened and swapped Biden for a good candidate. Maybe try that for the Genocide Israel is commiting sometime. Demand better. Because unlike R's, Dems will listen to demand, R's listen to Russia.

[jabibi-the-beef]

HOW IS AMERICA SO SCREWED THAT HAMILTON HAS TO REMERGE FROM ITS GRAVE TO TELL US ALL TO VOTE IM SHAKIGN

[captainjonnitkessler]

Younger liberals in my social media echo chambers: Ha, Kamala Harris is going to kick Trump's ass! Can you imagine his tantrum when he loses to a woman? I can't wait to elect our first female President this November!

Me:

[rubenesque-as-fuck]

Anyway if you reblog any of my "please fucking vote" posts with add ons about how it's pointless/don't vote at all/vote third party then I'm just gonna block you for being an obnoxious little shit who is intentionally missing the point

[filthy-rat]

if you put anti-voting rhetoric on my dash, i'm blocking you.

[flipflopitstimetomakeart]

🦵🦵🦵

…

nobody tried to stop me, so here it is:

my buddy rachel (left) and i (right) conquering gregoriah regretevator

this is my magnum opus

[originalleftist]

This election feels like it has become a second chance, in more ways than one.

In 2016, we had a battle between the "old guard" of the Democratic Party and the progressive wing, and though the old guard won the primary, the divisiveness and bitterness of it, sometimes spilling over into open bigotry, nearly torn the party apart (I also think there is exactly zero to be gained from trying to rehash which side was more to blame for that, and will delete any comments doing so).

Then after Clinton became the nominee, we had a chance to elect the first female President. Instead, we lost to Donald Trump, and our country plunged into this ongoing existential threat.

Going back further, in 1968 a Democratic incumbent facing backlash from progressives against an overseas war dropped out, and instead of uniting behind an alternative, the party faced a divisive primary, riots at the convention (also held in Chicago, no less), and a loss in November to Richard Nixon.

Now, we have the Democratic incumbent dropping out ahead of the primary in Chicago- but the party has swiftly united around a strong alternative.

We had big donors and party insiders try to push Biden out, toss the primary results completely, and hold a "mini-primary" of insiders to pick a presumably corporate-friendly nominee- but instead all major wings of the party have swiftly united around a new nominee with a progressive voting record in the Senate to rival Sentors Sanders'.

Now, we again have a woman running for President against Donald Trump once again. And it remains to be seen if history will repeat... or if we will get it right this time.

So many people were dreading a rematch between Biden and Trump. But it seems that instead, Biden's withdrawal and Harris's extraordinarily strong campaign have given us a rare and precious chance to, in a sense, "rerun" some of America's (and the Democratic Party's) greatest failures.

Let's get it right this time.