There would be 2 fewer extreme MAGA judges in supreme court.
The same level of MAGA corruption and disinformation would not have been possible.
January 6 would never have happened.
Trump would not have the same legitimacy and platform to constantly scream his MAGA hate message.
Trump would likely have been judged much sooner for the crimes that were revealed during his first campaign. So he might actually have been in prison by now.
The widespread MAGA treasonous behavior to favor Putin and Russia and undermine USA would probably not be a thing.So since Trump has been THEE major driver of extremism and treason in USA for the past 8 years, I’d say no. USA would not be nearly as divided as it is now.
There would also be about a million less deaths in America since we would’ve had a competent president who wouldn’t fumble such an easy fucking task.
Not so much that he was incompetent, as it was pure unfiltered corruption.
He was recorded behind closed doors agreeing that people should mask, and get vacinated, and make sure space between people is adhered to.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut, if covid kills in NYC so easily because it’s condensed amount of people in a small space, and if all the major cities vote blue…then that means covid will kill the democrat voters and mostly leave the republican voters unharmed because they all live on farms and such!
That was his thought process, verbally expressed. Not mine.
Problem is, democrat voters didn’t fall for his bullshit. I remember one press conference where he would say things like “Covid will go away in the spring, it’s all a hoax” and then a scientist studying the virus since conception IMMEDIATELY followed it up with “Covid is NOT a hoax. Treat it seriously, or you may die”. Then Trump would say something like “We don’t need businesses shut down, we need to get back to work.” And immediately followed up by that same scientist saying “It’s not wise to encourage people to engage in public activities at this time. We must continue the quarantine”.
Basically Trump would spew some bullshit, and IMMEDIATELY be followed up with this scientist saying the exact opposite of what Trump said. All this while Trump is giving him a look of “WILL YOU SHUT UP??? YOU’RE FACT CHECKING MY BULLSHIT!!!”
I LOVE a good absurdist moment…but I prefer for the absurdity to be based in fiction. 3rd Rock From the Sun is amazing absurdist humor. John Lithgow is amazing in that role. However when the show ends, my country isn’t on fire with 1 million people dead.
So, I see this as corruption rather than incompetence.
Stop! PLEASE!!! I can only get SO erect…
Not at all, Trump’s presidency provided a false air of legitimacy for those fringe beliefs. And his success forced politicians to morph into his sycophants - if he’d failed the GOP would assume that going that extreme was unpalatable to Americans.
If Trump had lost to Hillary Clinton then people would make fun of him for not even being able to beat Hillary Clinton when there was a multi hundreds of millions of dollars hate campaign launched against her that was so effective that people still hate Hillary today.
I can see Saturday Night Live doing an election special - I want to see a Clinton look alike get raucously drunk in celebration, yelling “ Hey Donald, grab this, ya pussy!”
Doubtful. Clinton wouldn’t have focused on division. Sure, it would have simmered like during Obama’s years. But you can name 99 polarizing things Trump did and I can think of few Clinton would have done. Besides, you know, being a woman and continuing Obama’s legacy.
Hillary is pretty divisive herself, and there was bound to be another Trump like candidate in the next election who would makes waves. Trump is a symptom, not the source
I’d say it’d depend on the specifics of the result.
Taking the wind out of MAGA’s sails would take a blowout victory and Hillary wasn’t gonna get that without doing some serious full court pressing for the entire general campaign, like well beyond even the “she should have campaigned more in the rust belt!” ideas people have about where she fell short.
Yes. The MAGA group probably wouldn’t be as large, but they would still be there and very angry.
Yes and no.
You can bet that there would have been 8 years of propaganda against her. And we would have lost even more house/senate seats because people on the left historically decide to not bother to vote in midterms unless there is an active threat on CNN.
And… I am pretty sure we would have lost in 2020 because of COVID. Which would basically put us back to where we were in 2020 in terms of having a deranged fascist who nobody realized was too dumb to accomplish anything (not a problem this time. See Project 2025).
The main difference would be the Supreme Court. Yes, republicans did everythiing they could to protevent Obama from appointing anyone and I would not put it past them to have stretched that out for a full four years. But Scalia (Rest in Piss) would still be dead and so would Ginsburg (fuck her for putting us in this mess). Which would have made the math a lot tighter. 7 justices but the math would have been tight enough that Hilary likely would have gotten to appoint at least one moderate.
I think Hilary would have bought us the better part of a decade because, like her or not, she is an incredibly effective politician… when nobody thinks she is running for POTUS. She is/was even more generally liked by both sides of the aisle than Biden and would never have had to make concessions to sanders and The Squad for the 2020 ticket (Biden is an asshole but his platform is shockingly Left leaning by US standards…)…
And I think trump would have faded into nothing. But there are plenty of other people who were just looking for an excuse to become a magat on the republican side. And people like cruz and romney and even liz cheney would not be complete laughing stocks without trump. So, at best, we were looking at a ticking clock to the next “reagan republican” as it were.
Like, there are a lot of people who consider the day Ginsburg died to be the day the US collapsed. And we are seeing exactly the repercussions of that with shit like today.
Probably. Division is what we are being fed, every day, on every topic with everything.
We would just be in a different shit show, attacking different groups.
Absolutely. The Right Wing funded Hate Machine funded by billionaires would have been there, just like now.
trump is just a symptom of underlying problem in society that manifests itself all over the world.
populist politicians trying to appeal to nostalgy for “good old times”, ability to weaponize social media and craft customized lies to every minor group, russian bot networks spewing out propaganda… it is something that creates problems everywhere and it will not get better.
recent eu parliament elections are shining example.
The maggots would still be screeching like banshee’s
Yep, but I’d like to think they wouldn’t be as emboldened as they have been since 2016. That was 4 years of their worst impulses being coddled and, often, encouraged from the highest office in the country.
A bit less divided.
Yes. Just because trump lost doesn’t mean conservative propaganda hasn’t been spewing hate and lies for decades. Even before obama, I knew people that hated Democrats but could never tell me why. Their propaganda has labeled Democrats enemies for quite a long time now. They started this shit back in the 50s-70s. Republicans have been brainwashed and somehow they’re proud of that fact.
some republican would have won in 2020, for sure; trump or somebody worse
Yes, but in a less civil warlike posture. The consequences of the shift to venture capital driving the economy in the 1960’s shifted the need to create more massive scale wars, but unchecked consolidation of wealth destroys the necessary egalitarian framework of a real democracy. All the pieces are in place to enslave the nation, i. e. we all carry tracking devices that can not be turned off, all of our financial means can be controlled, we are surrounded by cameras on most homes and vehicles that are connected to a monitoring system of a few entities. We only have the illusion of autonomy. Real democracies are very rare in history. The blood that bought this one is old money that few value with a thorough understanding. I’d say it was inevitable for unchecked venture capital to destroy the USA, but perhaps it was better than the warhawks destroying the world again in the 1980’s.
