I don't see you guys having any other politician who isn't running on some lunatic Christian brand or who isn't an Obama clone.
AOC is on that trajectory. Watch videos of Pelosi when she was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Congressional neophyte, and she sounds like a carbon-copy of AOC. Now she's a sclerotic, corrupt old crone. Same thing happened to Obama, the 'change' candidate. That's what Washington, especially the legislature, does to any reformer. It corrupts, and AOC is already too far gone imo.
Trump's popularity is in abusing the mentally unwell and broke Mexicans, somehow the new Jews of the American Nazi regime, except the Jews had fucking money. When does this translate into any actual good for anyone?
I think this is a very out-of-touch assessment as to the motives and beliefs of the average American voter. My aunt cleans houses for a living. She doesn't have any hate in her heart for Mexicans. But she has a mortgage to pay, and when they border is open and we have people streaming over half the rich people she works for switch to Mexicans who pack into a house like sardines and will work for half as much. School taxes go up because ESL instruction is expensive and in the US property owners pay for local schools. It's not hateful or meanspirited to want a decent life and a job that pays enough to have a roof over your head. The bottom line is that when you have people streaming into the country who are used to third world living standards and are willing to work for pennies on the dollar, your own poor and working classes can't compete unless they immiserate themselves to a similar level.
Then there are the local economic effects. The US is the largest source of remittances in the world. Billions upon billions flow out of this country every year from immigrant workers to their families back home. If you are small business owner in a small town with a factory that employs locals, those locals come to your store and have a certain portion of their paycheck to spend. Then you take the money you make and spend it at other places in town. This is the basic economics of how money gets moving in the local economy, and how a rising tide can lift all boats. What happens if the local union goes on strike, and the factory brings in illegals as scab labor and then keeps them on, paying them let's say 60% of what they were paying the union. Well, that's 40% less money being spent around your town to being with, and 40% more going into the factory owner, which these days is probably some constellation of investors in wealthy zipcodes scattered throughout the country. Then let's say the immigrants send 30% of their paycheck back to their country of origin. Well now you're down to 42%.
What does that do to the local economy? What happens to the mom and pop shops on main street? The restaurants? They get gutted, then the real estate gets bought dirt cheap by a mega-corporation that turns everything into the same bunch of corporate chains. When I was a kid and you went around to different towns sure there was a McDonalds at the big intersection, but the town itself was all small businesses owned by the people who lived there. Increasingly that's not the case - everything is corporate owned.
Foreigners often see this as a race thing for some reason but it's not. Trump has the highest support among ethnic minorities for a Republican in my lifetime, and it grows every year. The growth has been especially strong among Hispanic voters, with Trump coming within an inch of winning an outright majority of Hispanics in 2024, a record level of support. Black support is also growing, and these groups especially approve of Trump on immigration. This is a large part of why Democrats are losing voters - back when Bernie stood a chance and was wildly popular (also with Hispanics), he said that open borders were 'a Koch Brother's proposal'. Cesar Chavez, the famous Mexican-American civil rights activist and labor organizer, campaigned heavily against illegal immigration while he worked to unionize largely Mexican farm workers in the US, rightly seeing them as scab labor who would break strikes and suppress wages.
Our media loves to frame this as some sort of mean-spirited racial issue, but it just isn't, and their constant insistence on doing so is why pretty much only decrepit boomers watch corporate media anymore - their ratings are in the toilet, and what viewers they have live in a dementia-addled fog. But I feel like people outside the US don't have the reality in front of their face all the time, and so only have the news to go by and get an incredibly distorted picture of what the country is like and how people feel. Take this:
Trump's popularity is in abusing the mentally unwell
This mostly comes from a single instance back around 2016 about which the media shamelessly lied. Trump was talking about people dancing/cheering in New Jersey as the towers came down on 9/11. A reporter, Serge Kovaleski, criticized him for this. Trump mocked Kovaleski, as he had written an article about it himself, in the exact same way he's mocked other people that he's portrayed as incompetent in his little Borscht-belt act: by flailing his arms around with a vacant look on his face. He's done this same gesture for a general and for Ted Cruz when he waffled about waterboarding, it's one of his canned routines. The media clipped that moment and ran article after article about how Trump 'mocked a disabled reporter'. They cite it in just about every article they've written over the last ten years. The public walked away with the idea the Mr. Kovaleski was someone with Downs Syndrome or some sort disability which Trump was mimicking.
He has a completely normal face and mannerisms. He suffers from arthrogryposis, a condition which causes stiff joints and limited mobility. He's a normal, intelligent guy with a hand which is stuck in an awkward position. Someone who wanted to mock his disability would do the precise opposite of wildly gesticulating and waving his hands around his head. In some of the most breathtakingly dishonest articles, the outlets would take a freeze frame of Trump's wild flailing at a point where his hand was in a position that most approximated that of Kovaleski's. In reality, Trump was mocking either incompetent factchecking or outright journalistic malfeasance. The 'mocking a disability' angle was a welcome opportunity to distract people from their own shoddy reporting, which was at the time on full display.
