Donald Trump’s extreme rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and his penchant for siding with America’s adversaries and autocrats pose a unique challenge to his Republican opponents and, ultimately, US voters.

The ex-president, who has a good chance of being the next commander in chief, warned over the weekend that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. And he parroted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to discredit American democracy in his latest craven genuflection to the ex-KGB officer, who’s been accused of war crimes.

Trump’s comments on Saturday, at a rally in the first-in-the-nation GOP primary state of New Hampshire, are contrary to America’s founding values and political traditions. They are the latest sign that Trump, who sought to overturn the will of the voters after the 2020 election, would act in an even more extreme fashion in a second White House term. His rhetoric is also likely to play into the central premise of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign – that he’s the only option to thwart a return to power by an ex-president who could destroy US democracy. It is not yet, however, helping the incumbent in polls that show him trailing Trump in vital swing states.

  • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I remember seeing a study that found that conservatives are more likely to have liberal friends, whereas liberals are unlikely to have conservative friends. All the conservatives were circlejerking about “the tolerant left lul”.

    But they missed the point; It’s easy for conservatives to tolerate their liberal friends’ views, because they aren’t direct attacks on the conservative as a person. But liberals can’t tolerate conservatives, because they’ll eventually get too comfortable and drop an N-word with a hard R within earshot to see how you react, or casually tell you that you’re “one of the good ones” like it’s some sort of compliment. Liberals just want people to be themselves, but conservatives want to systematically destroy anyone who isn’t like themselves. And that means friendships between conservatives and liberals are not a two-way street, because one wants to fundamentally alter or destroy the others’ entire life.

      • Esqplorer@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Other conservatives that are socially liberal. They legitimately think everyone left of Bush II was a secret leftist.

    • Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Liberals just want people to be themselves

      Maybe policy-wise but let’s not go overboard here. You get A LOT of NIMBYs in liberal affluent neighborhoods when you start talking about low income housing. Or they love brown and black ppl but suddenly start complaining about property values when they start moving into the neighborhood and call the cops because they don’t look like they live here.