But the people who did vote for him explicitly voted for all the stuff he's doing right now. Nothing that he's currently doing is surprising, except maybe for the fact that a politician actually followed through on so many campaign promises.
I don’t recall “we’re gonna kill science research, cancer research, we’re gonna make a million poor children die of AIDS and tuberculosis” in any campaign ads.
His actions were outlined in Project 2025 throughout his candidacy. Surprised all it took was a simple statement of ignorance for people to completely dismiss what was plainly written what was going to happen (and currently is).
"I love the poorly-educated!" was not empty rhetoric. Only a country that gives slow-witted people the same political power as those on the right side of the IQ bell curve could elect a Trump democratically.
Both parties actually target a bimodal IQ distribution. The D distribution covers most of the left tail and the upper-mid, and the R distribution covers the lower-mid and most of the right tail. You generally expect interleaved affiliation like this; it's just a question of how many bands there are. R avg is actually slightly higher, although that doesn't tell the full story. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
I don't think it's a partisan question, although it'd be interesting to repeat the survey today given how the makeup of the Republican party has changed since 2014. Keep in mind Trump could not have won re-election with the support of Republican constituencies alone.
You had to be genuinely gullible to vote for Trump this time, but that wasn't the case in 2016. I'm thinking of the blue-collar union members who voted for the Trump '24 ticket, for example, bitching to everybody who would listen about the price of eggs under Biden. In 2014 they would have been dragging down the Democrats' collective IQ, and now they've switched sides. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are still registered Democrats.
> You had to be genuinely gullible to vote for Trump this time
It seems like he's mostly doing what his coalition was hoping he would do? Certainly to a greater degree than in 2016. I have not seen any credible indications of post-election regret from his coalition.
I have not seen any credible indications of post-election regret from his coalition.
They believed that things were bad and that Trump would make them better rather than worse. If that's not gullibility, I don't know what is.
His voters will ultimately be among his greatest victims... but he'll blame Biden for whatever goes wrong, and they'll lap it up like a dog with a dish of antifreeze, just like they always do.
So would you would take the vote away from " those on the right side of the IQ bell curve"? (That has been done before, you know. You might be somewhat uncomfortable sitting with those who once did it, however).
I remember warnings of all this bullshit going around the socials. Kinda funny how it's playing out *exactly the fuck like those warnings portrayed*.
For those who voted for him I understand the people who are happy about what's happening. Those who claim they didn't "vote for this": they don't deserve to have a vote. The writing was on the wall in clear script.
He repeatedly stated he knew nothing about Project 2025. So arguably he's not following through on his campaign promises. Some of his voters I'm sure saw through his bullshit, but many were conned.
It's a far stretch to say that this is what the majority of his voters wanted. Certainly many Republican voters have seemed very upset about this stupid blitzkrieg dismantling of core services.
People love being conned. And he has been conning people a long time, and is very good at it. I expect most of the money he and Melania made on their meme coins were from his followers.
I disagree. In particular, the complete disrespect with which he and Elon are going about "cutting costs" and the way he's handling Ukraine would likely have lost him the election were they known beforehand.
