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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

Seems many(most?) people who voted for him think he was joking ; immigrants voting for him, people who would suffer from tariffs, former democrats who wouldn't want to see their still democrat family dragged off by the military etc. So now we all hope he is just a beginner standup comedian and is working on his repertoire?

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Still, the “we’ll just have to see” deflection does leave open the possibility ordinary people can accept things much worse than his rhetoric.

He didn’t use fear to its full potential in the last admin. This is the part of the stand-up routine where disloyal Republican lawmakers need an extrajudicial firing squad. See, the fear is now and still directed inward until he can purify the party.

It is all so familiar though... The 'we'll just have to see' is what everyone says now. They said that in different periods in history as well, until it was too late. Just wait and see is not what voting for a leader(s) should be about; you vote for policies and those policies might not pan out completely, however, the general gist should be there. Not spew so much random crap and then have people vote them in with a 'wait and see' attitude. Makes it somehow even worse.

But once you’ve seen the history, you are compelled to be a “this was not inevitable” person. Already, I’m seeing people deny that Project 2025 was organized and released last year by the Heritage Foundation.

https://archive.org/details/project-2025-mandate-for-leaders...

The misinformation is off the charts. Fear of losing democracy was a big exit poll issue, yet those voters broke towards Trump. The same person who incited an insurrection in 2020 and refused to accept the vote last time. Odd how until votes started coming in this time Trump was already crying about cheating.

We can put the hallucinatory vote tampering narrative to bed. Anyone concerned with it must now look across 2016, 2020, and 2024 or risk legitimacy.

Musk did a lot there; he was the shouter with the most reach who said that we are voting to prevent democracy collapse. While Trump already hinted to intentions to collapse democracy (wether serious or not is not very relevant; he was going for president, so you would assume he is not joking really...).

What I’m hearing, in a very rural area, is Trump supporters are hesitant to connect Elon on stage with Elon as treasury sec. They thought he was some Internet guy happy to just be on stage, rather than the richest man in the world presaging economic hardship (Nov 1). Musk doesn’t seem close enough to the movement for his rhetoric to be taken casually.

On the tariff thing, I think it's more a Brexit-esque "people have had enough of experts" sort of situation; complete magical thinking on the economic side.

Think everything about the vote was; many of those youtube videos with guys going out to rallies asking 'so why are you for trump?' 'because x y z' 'but he never did that and actually said he will do the opposite' 'oh, ok' 'so does that change your mind?' 'no i don't care, as long as the current frauds lose and leave! trump is chosen by jesus!'.

It happened/happens in other countries too; people don't care (well, they think they don't) as long as the current 'experts', who they don't believe anymore since covid, are gone.

The Brexit "people have had enough of experts" stuff was long before covid; the vote, and pretty much the peak of Brexit support, was in 2016. By covid, with Brexit looming large, and some impact echoing back in time from Brexit itself (by 2020, supply problems relating to the Brexit that hadn't happened yet were just starting to appear, as companies had difficulty with long-term contracts due to uncertainty), there was some indication that people were actually falling back in love with experts a bit, but by then it was far too late, of course.

I think the extremity of the resentment over covid found in the US is actually a bit of an outlier; views on the response are often more mixed elsewhere.

Populism, the strategy of appealing to the lowest common denominator with magic and happy thoughts. Wouldn't it be nice if economic issues were so simplistic?

I think of my two rules.

Rule 1: If you see someone do something shitty to someone else, stick around and they'll do it to you to.

Rule 2: When people tell you they are a bastard believe them.

The problem with saying a thing and then assuming that people know you really mean another thing, is that some people will believe you the first time (because it's what they wanted to hear) and not be happy until you've delivered it.

See Brexit for how that all pans out.

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