Why Megadonors Are Unfazed by Donald Trump’s Guilty Verdict | Money flowed into the former president’s re-election campaign from Wall Street and Silicon Valley following Thursday’s historic conviction
Money flowed into the former president’s re-election campaign from Wall Street and Silicon Valley following Thursday’s historic conviction.
With the billionaires backing him, it's going to be on us as individual Americans to make sure Trump doesn't end up in the White House again. That means not just voting but talking with people around you, volunteering and donating
I remember when, if a former president and current major party nominee for the next presidential election was a convicted felon, that person's political career would be over.
I have a feeling, these events were just things the media could use to manipulate the narrative on the Democratic candidate, otherwise would've been ignored.
Also, the "liberal media" seemed to really play that up. IIRC, there are some questions about just how loud his whoop really was.
Also, though: he is a Democratic candidate. None of this applies to the cons. The way things are conducted by the liberal media are that everyone affiliated with the Democratic Party must be as pure as the driven snow, not look silly, make zero gaffes, and so on (and even then - what was said of Hillary was that she was "overprepared" - wtaf - so even when Democrats don't violate the rules, they'll make up a new set of criteria that Democrats have supposedly violated to play the 'both sides" card). Republicans can do just whatever the fuck they want; it's expected that they'll be off the rails; cons will be cons and all that.
We've fallen so far. We've created an environment where people can create their own realities and make up things they want to believe, and ignore the facts that are presented to them as "rigged". There is no Truth anymore
That means not just voting but talking with people around you, volunteering and donating
Honestly, I give up. If you've already decided you're voting for Trump, you do not exist in the same reality as me. There is absolutely zero redeeming quality about the person or his politics. He literally does not care about the United States, the Constitution, or the people voting for him. A vote for Trump isn't a vote for president, it's a vote for a cult leader. I'm not equipped to fix what's broken in your head.
Some day we're going to find out the entire Republican Party was co-opted by a geopolitical rival, and once they got enough traction, they just need to hit the gas every once in a while and we do the rest to ourselves.
The only way we can truly have a democracy is by containing the income gap, which we have utterly failed to do since the 80's. The wealthy aren't part of our world. The truths which dominate our lives simply aren't true for them. The idiom is "death and taxes" but the truth is it's just death.
We know they were, it's Russia, they've been co-opted by Russia. We've been screaming it from the mountaintops since 2015, Donald Trump is a stooge for Putin and has infected the rest of the party. Nobody cares.
The wealth gap is certainly an issue. Typically, Americans are more prosperous under Democratic presidents and while that may be true on paper in select areas, it's apparent that most people are still hurting. On paper, Biden has been a remarkable president and has saved Americans billions if not trillions. Saving money is different than putting money in their pockets though. To say, yeah - but it could have been so much worse, means nothing to most people.
A study by the liberal Institute of Taxation and Public Policy predicts Mr. Biden's plan would increase by more than $100,000 a year what someone in the top 1% of earners pays Uncle Sam. President Obama in 2013 raised taxes on that same group by $83,000. President Trump in 2017 cut their taxes by about $50,000 a year.
The top 1% of Americans earn about 20% of all income in the U.S., but they pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes. The Biden plan will put even more of the tax burden on the wealthy. "It's time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1% of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share," he said Wednesday in his speech to Congress.
But to the greater point, when people are struggling to put food on the table and upgrade appliances or save for the future, they're going to get stressed. They're going to become afraid and they're going to search for answers - even if those answers are wrong, it's what they want to hear. Keeping this wage gap wide, keeping the middle class down, gives politicians power.
The convincing needs to be aimed at people who don't vote, of which there is an absurd amount, particularly among young people. Trump could be prevented if people on the left vote en masse, and perhaps even gain strong majorities in both houses.
I'm not in the US, so maybe I'm wrong on this, but I would imagine trump has pushed a lot of people who would have voted republican into non voters. These would be the group I would be having conversations with, trying to convince them that voting democrat is a bigger protest than abstaining, and to do anything else is to risk an anti democratic felon becoming president.
That certainly seems reasonable and maybe you're right.
For similar reasons, people are (rightfully) protesting Biden due to his policies with Gaza. I know that in the presidential primary in my (super blue/Democrat) county last month, 10% of the votes cast by Democrats (16,216) were write-ins and 90% of those (14,625) were for non-people ("uncommitted", etc). As it turns out, practically the same number of people cast protest votes as votes for Trump (14,740). Biden still got 144,000 votes so losing 14,000 to Trump isn't so much of a concern. My greater concern is about how easily people are being manipulated - across the board, across the world - and how people are losing sight on the possible crumbling of the country they live in. Not to mention only 20% of my county even bothered to vote.
Totally unrelated.. actually, maybe not totally, this conversation has me going back and checking on some voting records. The 2020 election was the highest voter turnout in Philadelphia for 25 years. It was also the highest turnout in the United States for a century. So when Trumpers claim 'the election was rigged because Trump got more votes than any other president. How is it possible for Biden to get more votes than him?', they're ignoring the verifiable facts that the election had a record high turn out. It's been all downhill since they've been denying these election results.
Unhappiness with President Biden is one reason. Trump’s tough-on-immigration, low-tax, regulation-shredding stance has been a big draw for billionaires who may be calculating that an endorsement or donation now will reap a bigger return if he wins in November. Another possible calculation: backing Trump at a low point could amplify that return even more.
This is why moderates keep moving to the right, which drives republicans even further fiscally.
Even being more conservative than dem voters on immigration, tax rates, and industry regulation, he'll never be more conservative than trump. All it does is make trump go twice as far so the rich can overlook his negatives.
And the more Dems do it, the more it costs to convince Dem voters to vote for them.
They're both chasing donations instead of voters.
Bill and Obama didn't even have to chase voters, they were so charismatic that voters chased them.
But Hillary and Biden are nowhere near that charismatic, so they chase donations like Republicans and hope if they pay enough for televisions ads that will suddenly start mattering again.
We can't beat republicans at convincing billionaires to give our politicians money.
But if our politicians focused on getting votes, they wouldn't need the 2 billion dollars Biden's campaign is estimating for this election.
Money in politics never stopped being a problem, we just stopped talking about it because everything else caught fire too.
He rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, revoked the Keystone Pipeline permit, created a 13 million acre federal petroleum reserve for Alaskan wildlife, greatly increased oil site lease cost, signed $7B in solar subsidies, and enacted the Inflation Reduction act to support clean energy.
Biden is conservative on immigration?
He repealed Title 42 and the Muslim ban, allowing an open border policy for most of his term while pressing for congressional immigration reform. Congress failed to provide reform as a partisan play. With pressure from overcrowded sanctuary cities, only then was was Biden forced to issue an Executive Order to reduce the flow of immigrants.
Biden is conservative on taxes?
His tax plan doesn’t go into effect until next year, when Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy expire. It reduces taxes for working class by increasing the corporate minimum tax rate to 21% to align with the global minimum tax rate, implementing a Billionaire Minimum Tax of 25% on the wealthiest taxpayers to ensure the top 0.01 percent pay taxes on their income, raising the tax rate on corporate stock buybacks from 1% to 4% to reduce the differential tax treatment between buybacks and dividends and encourage businesses to reinvest profits in their workers and in the company’s growth, and denying corporate tax deductions for employee compensation in excess of $1 million paid to any employee by both publicly and privately owned C corporations.
Give it a rest with your unsubstantiated nonsense, would ya?
That's not even mentioning Biden's NLRB ruling. Basically the largest labor victory in the last 100 years. Combined with the Biden Administration FTC ruling squashing non-compete agreements. Which is the second biggest win for labor in the last 100 years. Or the billions in student debt his administration has forgiven.
I'd love to read a breakdown of how American culture got here. Outside of Trump a section of America just loves a grifter / cult leader. From Elon Musk to leaders of mega churches, there are just Americans seemingly willing to be conned.
Of course this is true in all cultures but America appears to execute grift to maximum profitability. Mega church pastora with 6 jumbo jets, etc.
Culturally, we also sadly don't seem to have many other measures of success aside from wealth, and a poor social support structure that requires people to seek out their own forms of support. Add in the pervasiveness of the "prosperity gospel", where the more good you are, the more money you have, and people flock to these conmen because they can't possibly believe someone that wealthy could be bad.
Donald Trump is the first sitting or former president to be convicted of a felony in U.S. history, after a jury ruled that he falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal with a porn star that could have sunk his 2016 campaign.
David Sacks, the venture capitalist who will co-host a San Francisco fund-raiser for Trump next week, called it a “sham trial” and said that the former president had lots of supporters in the tech world who were afraid to admit it.
Ron DeSantis of Florida, and die-hard critics of Biden like Elon Musk slammed the trial, with the tech entrepreneur saying the ruling damaged the “public’s faith in the American legal system.”
Skydance is now viewed as the front-runner in the race to merge with Paramount, which owns MTV, CBS and the movie studio behind “Top Gun,” after Sony and Apollo backed away from a rival $26 billion bid.
Shares in chipmakers Nvidia and AMD fell in premarket trading following a Bloomberg report that the Biden administration was slowing the licensing of high-end chips to the region for fears they could fall into the hands of Chinese companies.
Earlier this week, Lenovo, the Chinese tech company, said it would sell $2 billion worth of bonds to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and build a research and development hub in Riyadh.
The original article contains 1,755 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The dude’s been on borrowed time for years now. His heart’s gotta give out any second. I guess they just want an R win, regardless of who gets it for them.