To say "Americans are angry" is a half truth. The vast majority of Republicans and those who voted for Trump are not angry but rather satisfied not only with the outcome of the 2024 election but with their lives in general. People who believe the country is on the right track spiked up 16 points from shortly after election day 2024 to mid-March fo this year. I suspect most of those who changed their view were Republicans.
Democrats, however, are angry, angrier than I've ever seen them. Their rage borders on the pathological. Remember the term "angry white men" which made its appearance roughly around the time of the rise of the Tea Party in 2009? Today the national mood is more accurately captured by John Kass's coinage of the term AWFL: Angry White Female Leftist. I know several of them myself.
Democrats have become a vulgar parody of their former selves. Their emotional unraveling is seen daily in their spittle-flecked submissions on editorial comment boards and in the profanity their professional politicians unleash in their unhinged statements. Trump Derangement Syndrome, once viewed as humorous hyperbole, has bloomed into a full-fledged national mental health crisis.
Democrats need to return to the realm of the rational. Hating Trump with a passion only makes him stronger and his followers more convinced they are right. I voted for Trump but only because I am alarmed at the ideological decadence that characterizes today's Democrat Party. They need to tone down the rhetoric, keep their mouths shut and listen to what people are saying about government elites, bullyish bureaucracies and the collapse of faith in and trust of educational institutions which now seem to exist for the sole purpose of indoctrinating youth in neo-Marxist ideology.
The Handmaiden outfits were inspired by the Afghan burkas which Atwood saw years ago while visiting her father there or so she said. She didn't clarify how that got transmorgified into something Christian.
Because Islamophobia, duh. It's true that Islamist-ruled societies are far, far, far worse than anything Evangelicals say or do, and their level of violence and terrorism is far, far, far worse than anything the religious right has ever done in the US, but why critique reality (sadistic far right Islamist sociopaths), when she could invent a religious right that doesn't exist in the United States.
Progressive virtue signaling and hysteria at its best.
Have two AWFLs in the family, one having been axed last week from work under HHS. The other works at a junior college and DEI is foremost. Both have been angry for several years and there is no changing their minds no matter how reasonably an argument is put to them.
Sanders would probably have lost to Trump, too. In a battle between two populist New Yorkers for swing voters, the one who ran on tax cuts and less immigration would likely have beaten the one who wanted to raise taxes to give free college to his young left-wing supporters. A lot of Romney-Clinton voters, moreover, might well have stayed home rather than choose between two populists.
Clinton could have won had she never said “basket of deplorables.” Pushing back against early wokeness would have helped her, too.
Yeah, I don’t think running as an outsider/agent of change is necessarily *sufficient* but it is *necessary* (at least at this moment). I think there’s ample evidence that voters also don’t want someone who is too ideological. Seems the right balance might be pushing (convincingly) for genuine change but not being a cultural radical.
Exactly so. Obama and Trump were both candidates of the base rather than the Establishment, coming out of nowhere to defeat the anointed one. Obama made his peace with the Establishment which certainly exhibited more loyalty to him than the Republican counterpart did to Trump 1.0. Was this due to personal attributes of the two or Obama in office becoming part of the Establishment more than Trump 1.0 or less respect for the base by the Republican Establishment. Remember the reaction to the Tea Party. In hindsight, Biden was a terrible error not just in 2024 but in 2020 as well. His history was Establishment but he wound up being a facade for a set of deeply unpopular radical policies. Since people thought they were voting for normalcy, many felt betrayed. Trump 2.0 on the other hand made no secret about his intentions. And policy failures during the Biden years set the table for Trump 2.0 by further undermining the institutions. It is entirely possible that policy failures in Trump 2.0 will set the stage for...what? Democrats need a brand other than Not Trump. And it can't be a defense of the Establishment either.
We are programmed to focus more on the negative than on the positive. For millions of years it helped with survival.
But, does it any longer?
Speaking to all of the old geezers like us reading this: Do you remember the Disney film Pollyana? She had a positivity bias. As kids we all loved her.
In fact, much of the 50s had a positivity bias. Look at all of the westerns. Good guys always won. Night after night after night. All of the sitcoms were about positive families. Movies were mostly positive (which is why we have a collection of 50s DVDs which we watch instead of going to see all of the current downer movies).
Do people really want to live in a world of negativity? It's addictive, for sure, because we are programmed to be negative, but is this really what makes people happy?
I also grew up in a kind Christian religion. The sermons and lessons were all positive....about love, salvation, hope, giving, etc.
Our grandparents grew up in the great depression. One lost his farm, everything he owned. In our photo collection, none of our grandparents are ever smiling. They died young. Worn out. Losing young children.
We have it sooooo much better because of them (also because they sent their sons, i.e., our fathers, to fight and risk dying in WWII).
How can we think about them, and still be negative about a world that is now so good that they could not have even dreamed something like this could exist?
I don't think the public believes that Democrats believe in America and it institutions. The major, angry Democrat voices---Bernie Sanders (a socialist), AOC (ditto), and others appear to most Americans to want to destroy the two sexes, the family, education, and America's heritage.
So far, the GOP has been masterful in not saying anything that could get them in trouble or indicate otherwise, so their registration numbers continue to rise everywhere. Again, just yesterday NC's #s came out. In 2024 Ds had a 175,000 lead. Last month Rs netted about 2,400 continuing a more than 12-month trend, and now, shockingly, Rs lead by 83,000 among ACTIVE voters in NC. Same is true with yesterday's numbers from WY. You say, WY? Of course it's red. Yes, but it's getting redder (by about 100 NET) but equally important is that Rs outregistered BOTH Ds and Independents. As I pointed out yesterday, we now have 156 monthly registration reports from 12 states, and 135 of them have shown big movement to Rs.
This is a massive branding problem for Democrats. The author cites Obama, but I think it was in the Obama era when the American flag disappeared at the DNC convention. Democrats fly to El Salvador to check on a gangbanger but won't even meet with Americans who have lost people to illegal criminal invaders. And even Obama has weighed in on that. And, for the record, Obama lost a RECORD number of seats nationally when the luster wore off.
If there was an archetype that Obama replaced in 2008, it was the Finance Bro. The crash of 2008 ended the institutional belief in laissez-faire financial regulation and ushered in the Great Awokening.
The years 2008 - 2024 were the reign of the Great Awokening, which was was getting stale by the time COVID arrived and became downright off-putting during the Biden Administration. IMO the Bud Light fiasco was the beginning of the end for that movement.
I don't know what sort of movement will follow, but it is evident overseas as well as in the US. I suspect globalism, trade, climate alliances etc will get pared back.
But Obama's Great Awokening is over, and the Left's Gramscian March Through The Institutions has probably seen its high water mark.
To call John McCain a "lifelong politician" is an astonishing mistake, since part of his political appeal was his naval service including years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The parties swing back and forth trying to break loose from the ties that constrict, held back by the purse strings of the people who finance them. Trump, an imperfect candidate by far is the first to actually break loose. Trump is what happens when parties like the Democrats become too institutionalized. What they did to Sanders in 2020 led to Trump's win in 24. I have to wonder if they can ever come up with a change candidate.
So far no Dem since Sanders in 15 has been able to be anti low wage immigration. Silence here on these pages too, ahem.
I came here this morning after first reading Ezra Klein's interview of Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (MGP)where in parts Ms Perez sounds supportive of tariffs and Klein not so much. We seem to have unusual bedfellows on globalization. Democrats abandoning the working class and Trump sticking up for protecting US jobs.
Obama was way ahead of the game in terms of leveraging new communication technologies, too--but most importantly, he came around before the development of the attention economy. It was a different world, and his political opponents were still held to standards.
Back then, if Obama OR McCain/Dubya had had a childish temper-tantrum in front of the head of state of a besieged country, or allowed a banned child trafficker to come back to the country and then had lunch with him, or ejected news organizations from the White House Press Corps for writing a piece criticizing his foreign policy, or bragged to billionaire buddies about insider trading on a market crash he engineered, or had a private dinner with a company under investigation by the DOJ for financial fraud to discuss taking a stake in it, or a private dinner with wealthy investors to discuss putting some money into his memecoin, or threatened to rescind all public funds from Brigham Young University unless it got rid of any academics who criticized him, or [insert rest of 10,000 item list of Trump's out-in-the-open corruption]...he would be punished for it, in the media, at the polls, and by BOTH political parties.
Now, Trump gets a pass on things like this, from the right-wing social media apparatus and from his own party. It's an impossible standard for Democrats to compete with. The Dems' new leader has to reckon with this, and must have a deep understanding and command of the social media technologies that dictate the consumption of political information. *This* is why Democrats like AOC punch above their weight--it's not their policies. It's an understanding of the attention economy, and the technologies that operate it.
"...Now, Trump gets a pass on things like this..." Really? Every MSM newspaper has page after page after page of Trump criticism. Judges are blocking his every action. Dem response? Grandstanding about MS-13 / wife beaters. How do you think that will play in Peoria?
"Now, Trump gets a pass on things like this, from the right-wing social media apparatus and from his own party. It's an impossible standard for Democrats to compete with."
The MSM media news outlets report on Trump's many acts of corruption, yes, but the right-wing social media apparatus and Fox News do not, nor do the Republicans say or do anything about them. (thus the accusations of being 'cultish')
The MSM media outlets, and even mainstream Democrats, on the other hand, while certainly not without their own biases, will report on acts of corruption by either Trump or a Democratic president or presidential candidate. So Democrats have to uphold actual standards of conduct acceptable to more than 50% of the country and the MSM media, while Trump is essentially protected from criticism by 50% of the country and *only* has to deal with critics in the MSM media.
It's a double standard and a built-in disadvantage that requires extra money and resources to overcome, and any Democrat who wants to attain the White House needs to understand not only that it exists, but its internal dynamics.
Yes, for longer than most of us can or care to remember, certainly going back to the Obama presidency, candidates have ridden the voters' yearning for change to electoral success.
But promises aside, the real question is who, more than Donald J. Trump, has actually campaigned on what, if elected, that change would look like, and then has proceeded to deliver on that promised change?
Frankly, I think as the most bona fide outsider Trump has, in the view of a majority of Americans, proven the most credible and authentic and passionate in refkecting and sharing the majority Americans' concern.
The difference for Trump is one of mounting trust rather than mounting cynicism. If Democrats don't know or refuse to recognize that difference, it could be years, maybe decades, before they again becoming a ruling majority in the U.S. It's really up to them.
As a voter and citizen, hat I would like to see that I haven't in 73 years, a congress that sees beyond the next election. e.g. The fiscal hawks are all a flutter about as spending cuts. If they passed legislation now, that supports the President' agenda, they could make a very good case for staying in power as they actually used it for the benefit of the people. There is no reasonable reason the Big Beautiful legislation hasn't been passed yet. Because the issues holding it up, can be addressed in the future, 4 or even 8 years down the road, and people will actually believe the Republicans know how to govern. My basic assumption is, that if congress does it job and the result of those actions is re election because they have shown they can work together to get things done is the way to proceed. But then the CW by the not to bright elected leaders of this country is that 2 and done or maybe even 4 and done is the only way it will work. And these are the mindless people who lead our country.
Netflix has released a documentary series about the Vietnam War, entitled Turning Point. One key point the series makes is the "credibility gap" which emerged under LBJ and increased under Nixon was a turning point in terms of trust in the federal government.
McCain appeared like he was demented. Perhaps not as badly as Biden, but enough that I stayed home in 2008. He wasn't an option. Obama swung leftward during the campaign and dissuaded me from voting for him.
Hillary was very, very unpopular from her statements over the prior...15 years I suppose. That thing about undercapitalized businesses didn't deserve to survive back during the Hillarycare thing in 1993 and a dozen other unforced errors over the years. The business thing was more salient back in the days when small business entrepreneurs were more frequent.
Anyway, the pussy hat protesters (yes, I know the hats weren't in vogue during the campaign, but the same people that were at the rallies were resisting Trump upon inauguration) at Trump rallies didn't help at all, it just solidified a characterization of her. Run anyone but Hillary and Trump probably doesn't get his first term.
Americans don't want any more progressive stupidity invading their lives. Can the Democratic Party reform itself to reduce the influence of Ivy League educated morons who speak like their from Planet Kook? Doubtful.
The analogy of Trump and Obama is probably correct to a point. Having voted for Obama because McCain was a warmonger and more of the same, Obama turned out to be more of the same except for a couple of his programs. He became a warmonger also. Now we have Trump, thinking we were going to get a change from war and even he is rattling the sabres. His shock and awe is a good step to change, but even DOGE intervention may fissile as they find there isn't as much graft as they feared, although there is plenty exposed so far. The Israel lobby may be Trump's undoing if his war hawk associates get their way. Then he will be just like all the preceding presidents before him. Can he hold fast? Am doubting it. Maybe his other appointments will really get something done in their respective departments. 100 days does not make an administration. Time will have to pass to see what results can be achieved.
To say "Americans are angry" is a half truth. The vast majority of Republicans and those who voted for Trump are not angry but rather satisfied not only with the outcome of the 2024 election but with their lives in general. People who believe the country is on the right track spiked up 16 points from shortly after election day 2024 to mid-March fo this year. I suspect most of those who changed their view were Republicans.
Democrats, however, are angry, angrier than I've ever seen them. Their rage borders on the pathological. Remember the term "angry white men" which made its appearance roughly around the time of the rise of the Tea Party in 2009? Today the national mood is more accurately captured by John Kass's coinage of the term AWFL: Angry White Female Leftist. I know several of them myself.
Democrats have become a vulgar parody of their former selves. Their emotional unraveling is seen daily in their spittle-flecked submissions on editorial comment boards and in the profanity their professional politicians unleash in their unhinged statements. Trump Derangement Syndrome, once viewed as humorous hyperbole, has bloomed into a full-fledged national mental health crisis.
Democrats need to return to the realm of the rational. Hating Trump with a passion only makes him stronger and his followers more convinced they are right. I voted for Trump but only because I am alarmed at the ideological decadence that characterizes today's Democrat Party. They need to tone down the rhetoric, keep their mouths shut and listen to what people are saying about government elites, bullyish bureaucracies and the collapse of faith in and trust of educational institutions which now seem to exist for the sole purpose of indoctrinating youth in neo-Marxist ideology.
I think the first A in AWFL could stand for affluent as well.
The sort of women who steps out of her $200,000 Range Rover at Halloween dressed in a Handmaiden outfit and thinks she is oppressed.
The Handmaiden outfits were inspired by the Afghan burkas which Atwood saw years ago while visiting her father there or so she said. She didn't clarify how that got transmorgified into something Christian.
She would have been cancelled otherwise.
Because Islamophobia, duh. It's true that Islamist-ruled societies are far, far, far worse than anything Evangelicals say or do, and their level of violence and terrorism is far, far, far worse than anything the religious right has ever done in the US, but why critique reality (sadistic far right Islamist sociopaths), when she could invent a religious right that doesn't exist in the United States.
Progressive virtue signaling and hysteria at its best.
Have two AWFLs in the family, one having been axed last week from work under HHS. The other works at a junior college and DEI is foremost. Both have been angry for several years and there is no changing their minds no matter how reasonably an argument is put to them.
Sanders would probably have lost to Trump, too. In a battle between two populist New Yorkers for swing voters, the one who ran on tax cuts and less immigration would likely have beaten the one who wanted to raise taxes to give free college to his young left-wing supporters. A lot of Romney-Clinton voters, moreover, might well have stayed home rather than choose between two populists.
Clinton could have won had she never said “basket of deplorables.” Pushing back against early wokeness would have helped her, too.
Yeah, I don’t think running as an outsider/agent of change is necessarily *sufficient* but it is *necessary* (at least at this moment). I think there’s ample evidence that voters also don’t want someone who is too ideological. Seems the right balance might be pushing (convincingly) for genuine change but not being a cultural radical.
The change, as Ruy suggests is an economic one but will Democrats be credible. They need someone to out populist Vance
Exactly so. Obama and Trump were both candidates of the base rather than the Establishment, coming out of nowhere to defeat the anointed one. Obama made his peace with the Establishment which certainly exhibited more loyalty to him than the Republican counterpart did to Trump 1.0. Was this due to personal attributes of the two or Obama in office becoming part of the Establishment more than Trump 1.0 or less respect for the base by the Republican Establishment. Remember the reaction to the Tea Party. In hindsight, Biden was a terrible error not just in 2024 but in 2020 as well. His history was Establishment but he wound up being a facade for a set of deeply unpopular radical policies. Since people thought they were voting for normalcy, many felt betrayed. Trump 2.0 on the other hand made no secret about his intentions. And policy failures during the Biden years set the table for Trump 2.0 by further undermining the institutions. It is entirely possible that policy failures in Trump 2.0 will set the stage for...what? Democrats need a brand other than Not Trump. And it can't be a defense of the Establishment either.
Negativity bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/05/06/negativity-bias-positivity-strategies/
We are programmed to focus more on the negative than on the positive. For millions of years it helped with survival.
But, does it any longer?
Speaking to all of the old geezers like us reading this: Do you remember the Disney film Pollyana? She had a positivity bias. As kids we all loved her.
In fact, much of the 50s had a positivity bias. Look at all of the westerns. Good guys always won. Night after night after night. All of the sitcoms were about positive families. Movies were mostly positive (which is why we have a collection of 50s DVDs which we watch instead of going to see all of the current downer movies).
Do people really want to live in a world of negativity? It's addictive, for sure, because we are programmed to be negative, but is this really what makes people happy?
I also grew up in a kind Christian religion. The sermons and lessons were all positive....about love, salvation, hope, giving, etc.
Our grandparents grew up in the great depression. One lost his farm, everything he owned. In our photo collection, none of our grandparents are ever smiling. They died young. Worn out. Losing young children.
We have it sooooo much better because of them (also because they sent their sons, i.e., our fathers, to fight and risk dying in WWII).
How can we think about them, and still be negative about a world that is now so good that they could not have even dreamed something like this could exist?
We choose positive people.
That sounds nice. Who is a positive politician these days?
Good question. That is one reason we are so discouraged. Obama, when he ran, came across as powerful and positive.
I don't think the public believes that Democrats believe in America and it institutions. The major, angry Democrat voices---Bernie Sanders (a socialist), AOC (ditto), and others appear to most Americans to want to destroy the two sexes, the family, education, and America's heritage.
So far, the GOP has been masterful in not saying anything that could get them in trouble or indicate otherwise, so their registration numbers continue to rise everywhere. Again, just yesterday NC's #s came out. In 2024 Ds had a 175,000 lead. Last month Rs netted about 2,400 continuing a more than 12-month trend, and now, shockingly, Rs lead by 83,000 among ACTIVE voters in NC. Same is true with yesterday's numbers from WY. You say, WY? Of course it's red. Yes, but it's getting redder (by about 100 NET) but equally important is that Rs outregistered BOTH Ds and Independents. As I pointed out yesterday, we now have 156 monthly registration reports from 12 states, and 135 of them have shown big movement to Rs.
This is a massive branding problem for Democrats. The author cites Obama, but I think it was in the Obama era when the American flag disappeared at the DNC convention. Democrats fly to El Salvador to check on a gangbanger but won't even meet with Americans who have lost people to illegal criminal invaders. And even Obama has weighed in on that. And, for the record, Obama lost a RECORD number of seats nationally when the luster wore off.
If there was an archetype that Obama replaced in 2008, it was the Finance Bro. The crash of 2008 ended the institutional belief in laissez-faire financial regulation and ushered in the Great Awokening.
The years 2008 - 2024 were the reign of the Great Awokening, which was was getting stale by the time COVID arrived and became downright off-putting during the Biden Administration. IMO the Bud Light fiasco was the beginning of the end for that movement.
I don't know what sort of movement will follow, but it is evident overseas as well as in the US. I suspect globalism, trade, climate alliances etc will get pared back.
But Obama's Great Awokening is over, and the Left's Gramscian March Through The Institutions has probably seen its high water mark.
To call John McCain a "lifelong politician" is an astonishing mistake, since part of his political appeal was his naval service including years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The parties swing back and forth trying to break loose from the ties that constrict, held back by the purse strings of the people who finance them. Trump, an imperfect candidate by far is the first to actually break loose. Trump is what happens when parties like the Democrats become too institutionalized. What they did to Sanders in 2020 led to Trump's win in 24. I have to wonder if they can ever come up with a change candidate.
So far no Dem since Sanders in 15 has been able to be anti low wage immigration. Silence here on these pages too, ahem.
I came here this morning after first reading Ezra Klein's interview of Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (MGP)where in parts Ms Perez sounds supportive of tariffs and Klein not so much. We seem to have unusual bedfellows on globalization. Democrats abandoning the working class and Trump sticking up for protecting US jobs.
Obama was way ahead of the game in terms of leveraging new communication technologies, too--but most importantly, he came around before the development of the attention economy. It was a different world, and his political opponents were still held to standards.
Back then, if Obama OR McCain/Dubya had had a childish temper-tantrum in front of the head of state of a besieged country, or allowed a banned child trafficker to come back to the country and then had lunch with him, or ejected news organizations from the White House Press Corps for writing a piece criticizing his foreign policy, or bragged to billionaire buddies about insider trading on a market crash he engineered, or had a private dinner with a company under investigation by the DOJ for financial fraud to discuss taking a stake in it, or a private dinner with wealthy investors to discuss putting some money into his memecoin, or threatened to rescind all public funds from Brigham Young University unless it got rid of any academics who criticized him, or [insert rest of 10,000 item list of Trump's out-in-the-open corruption]...he would be punished for it, in the media, at the polls, and by BOTH political parties.
Now, Trump gets a pass on things like this, from the right-wing social media apparatus and from his own party. It's an impossible standard for Democrats to compete with. The Dems' new leader has to reckon with this, and must have a deep understanding and command of the social media technologies that dictate the consumption of political information. *This* is why Democrats like AOC punch above their weight--it's not their policies. It's an understanding of the attention economy, and the technologies that operate it.
"...Now, Trump gets a pass on things like this..." Really? Every MSM newspaper has page after page after page of Trump criticism. Judges are blocking his every action. Dem response? Grandstanding about MS-13 / wife beaters. How do you think that will play in Peoria?
Note what I said--
"Now, Trump gets a pass on things like this, from the right-wing social media apparatus and from his own party. It's an impossible standard for Democrats to compete with."
The MSM media news outlets report on Trump's many acts of corruption, yes, but the right-wing social media apparatus and Fox News do not, nor do the Republicans say or do anything about them. (thus the accusations of being 'cultish')
The MSM media outlets, and even mainstream Democrats, on the other hand, while certainly not without their own biases, will report on acts of corruption by either Trump or a Democratic president or presidential candidate. So Democrats have to uphold actual standards of conduct acceptable to more than 50% of the country and the MSM media, while Trump is essentially protected from criticism by 50% of the country and *only* has to deal with critics in the MSM media.
It's a double standard and a built-in disadvantage that requires extra money and resources to overcome, and any Democrat who wants to attain the White House needs to understand not only that it exists, but its internal dynamics.
After four years of Trump the next Republican nominee will need to run on the theme of Keep America Great. We should be in the Golden Age by then.
Yes, for longer than most of us can or care to remember, certainly going back to the Obama presidency, candidates have ridden the voters' yearning for change to electoral success.
But promises aside, the real question is who, more than Donald J. Trump, has actually campaigned on what, if elected, that change would look like, and then has proceeded to deliver on that promised change?
Frankly, I think as the most bona fide outsider Trump has, in the view of a majority of Americans, proven the most credible and authentic and passionate in refkecting and sharing the majority Americans' concern.
The difference for Trump is one of mounting trust rather than mounting cynicism. If Democrats don't know or refuse to recognize that difference, it could be years, maybe decades, before they again becoming a ruling majority in the U.S. It's really up to them.
As a voter and citizen, hat I would like to see that I haven't in 73 years, a congress that sees beyond the next election. e.g. The fiscal hawks are all a flutter about as spending cuts. If they passed legislation now, that supports the President' agenda, they could make a very good case for staying in power as they actually used it for the benefit of the people. There is no reasonable reason the Big Beautiful legislation hasn't been passed yet. Because the issues holding it up, can be addressed in the future, 4 or even 8 years down the road, and people will actually believe the Republicans know how to govern. My basic assumption is, that if congress does it job and the result of those actions is re election because they have shown they can work together to get things done is the way to proceed. But then the CW by the not to bright elected leaders of this country is that 2 and done or maybe even 4 and done is the only way it will work. And these are the mindless people who lead our country.
Netflix has released a documentary series about the Vietnam War, entitled Turning Point. One key point the series makes is the "credibility gap" which emerged under LBJ and increased under Nixon was a turning point in terms of trust in the federal government.
McCain appeared like he was demented. Perhaps not as badly as Biden, but enough that I stayed home in 2008. He wasn't an option. Obama swung leftward during the campaign and dissuaded me from voting for him.
Hillary was very, very unpopular from her statements over the prior...15 years I suppose. That thing about undercapitalized businesses didn't deserve to survive back during the Hillarycare thing in 1993 and a dozen other unforced errors over the years. The business thing was more salient back in the days when small business entrepreneurs were more frequent.
Anyway, the pussy hat protesters (yes, I know the hats weren't in vogue during the campaign, but the same people that were at the rallies were resisting Trump upon inauguration) at Trump rallies didn't help at all, it just solidified a characterization of her. Run anyone but Hillary and Trump probably doesn't get his first term.
Americans don't want any more progressive stupidity invading their lives. Can the Democratic Party reform itself to reduce the influence of Ivy League educated morons who speak like their from Planet Kook? Doubtful.
The analogy of Trump and Obama is probably correct to a point. Having voted for Obama because McCain was a warmonger and more of the same, Obama turned out to be more of the same except for a couple of his programs. He became a warmonger also. Now we have Trump, thinking we were going to get a change from war and even he is rattling the sabres. His shock and awe is a good step to change, but even DOGE intervention may fissile as they find there isn't as much graft as they feared, although there is plenty exposed so far. The Israel lobby may be Trump's undoing if his war hawk associates get their way. Then he will be just like all the preceding presidents before him. Can he hold fast? Am doubting it. Maybe his other appointments will really get something done in their respective departments. 100 days does not make an administration. Time will have to pass to see what results can be achieved.