A thin majority in an election with a poor (and/or constrained) turnout in a lop-sided nonsense of an electoral system with disproportionate weightings voted for parts of this.
Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president.
Voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent (below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020).
So 31.8 percent of the eligible voters in the USofA voted for Trump in the 2024 elections, most eligible voters didn't vote for Trump.
Eligible Voters aside, an even greater percentage of people in the USofA didn't vote for Trump being too young or otherwise disenfranchised.
Of those that did vote for Trump it's a leap to say that all of them voted to fire the chief government records keeper, to empower DOGE to gut departments, etc; like Brexit, many of those who voted for it had no real idea what they had voted for.
In the campaign Trump ran to avoid jail he repeatedly stated he wasn't aware of the Project 2025 playbook, that he would be all things to all people. People who voted for Trump voted for what they heard, what they thought he promised.
Most of the citizens in the USofA did not vote Trump, not all of those voted to gut the government, the sciences, foreign aid, etc.
Did you mean to respond to another comment? I was responding specifically to the claim that election turnout was low. As I said, it’s the 2nd highest since 1968 - 2020 was indeed the higher year.
Like Brexit, people who don’t like what’s happening come up with all sorts of convoluted explanations for why democracy doesn’t apply when their position loses. It seems to regularly boil down to “people who don’t vote the way I would like are too foolish and were tricked or brainwashed and if only they were enlightened they would vote my way.” I don’t think this is a winning message but we seem to be doubling down.
It's straighforward in all democracies to point out that people claiming that bad policy enactment "is what most people wanted" are making a false statement.
It is very rarely what the minority that voted directly for a specific party of candidate wanted. That's just a dull bald fact, not at all convoluted.
Even completely ignoring the dubious ethics invoked - a lot of non Americans will get worse outcomes than the US because of this. Given the work that has been cancelled so far, some of those non Americans are likely already dead.
That’s a bold statement. US is a young country. Empires that lasted longer by 5x have been consigned to the dust bin of history with nary but an oral tradition to remember them. If looking at americas military capability is any indication it is already in steep decline especially with regards to its seeming inability to not crash or destroy million/billon dollar hardware purely based on incompetence and short staffing. Its inability to prosecute an illegal war in the ME (occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan) is also a great example of the lack of exceptionalism exhibited by americas armed forces and their inept leadership.
Please don't post flamewar comments to HN generally. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
(Fortunately your earlier comment history seems fine, so this should be easy to fix.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html