Any give a qrd on what Trump getting elected in 2016 felt like? (I wasn't that interested in politics back then) I heard the main difference between then and now is that it legit felt out of the blue. Like, no one expected Michigan and Pennsylvania to flip.
It was amazing.
First you need to know I started paying attention to politics in the Obama years. The Credit Crunch, housing crisis etc woke me up from my childhood stupor because suddenly we couldn't have as many nice things and it was everywhere on TV and the morning radio going to school.
Year after year, things got worse. Never better. The economy 'recovered' for the asset-holders... but people still were worse off. It was a slow rot, an inevitable decline towards ossified globalist kleptocracy and gay neofeudal living with performative (what would now be called) progressivism all the while scandal after scandal came out about Obama and nobody cared. Fast and Furious, Uranium One, drone striking hospitals and schools,
massive unconstitutional surveillance and far more, but because it was a well-mannered well-presented 'presidential' president, nobody but the people on the fringes
really cared, even if the news picked up on it.
Then 2015 rolls around. You have a system that people like me's whole experience of is an inexorable failure, a corrupt and immovable behemoth that despite seeming to screech about change and making things better never actually achieves anything. And they run Clinton. The deepest of state people possible, the woman who got Bill to bomb Serbia by withholding pussy, who credibly wanted global war against Russia, whose main campaign promise was 'things will not fundamentally change', who was mired in scandal and whose main 'positive' attribute was someone with a different chromosomal arrangement would lead the country;
'Vote for me because I'm a woman'.
She rigs the primary against Bernie, the only left-leaning change candidate, has the entire machine behind her, and is set to reinforce the global neoliberal world order for another 4 to 8 years.
Then along comes Trump.
He's a complete outsider. People don't take him seriously. But because he was a complete outsider, because he stated things as he saw them instead of focus-tested politicospeak with no rough edges and instead insulted things that deserved insulting, he resonated with people. People who were tired of genteel smiles and self-congratulatory optics politics while the country fails in the background. People who wanted to throw a brick in the window of DC, who wanted someone with business acumen instead of a career politician, who saw the system and knew that it was bad and came to the conclusion it would never change willingly and so wanted to roll the dice on a completely new direction. Someone of, by, and for the lowest common denominator while still being intelligent and patriotic and who visibly loved what he did. Who was the polar opposite of everything that they'd ever seen.
The primaries roll around. He's against people who have never seen this before and have no idea how to handle it. The media initially loves Trump, until it seems like he might actually have a chance- then the machine turns against him. People notice that and TDS is coined and those who notice are drawn to someone who the machine hates, for there must be a good reason they hate him. He comes out on top of the primaries.
Memes are made. People are having fun. Whereas politics before then was 'look how bad the other person is' or 'here's what technical things I'll do better', Trump speaks to what things people actually care about, seeming to genuinely want to enact these things and people love it. The border, the economy, a return to antiwar noninterventionist foreign policy out of a decade+ of neolib interventionism. People are having fun. The base isn't simply against the other, but for theirs. A feedback loop of positivity grows as he gets further and further, more memes are made, instead of the quiet desperation of the berniebros there's an endless high energy of camaraderie, change, and chudly happiness. People are
having fun.
There's a chance. A real chance. We've rolled the dice and come up sixes, someone whose personality is Americana incarnate, who loves what it was and what it could still yet be. A man without a mask who you know exactly what he is and what he will try to do. We've taken something that we all thought could never be changed and thrown it into a new course, we have hope. Things might not yet be entirely fucked.
Election night rolls around. Trump is predicted to fail and fail hard by the machine that has done everything possible to stop him and didn't succeed. The base doesn't listen because we no longer have any trust in the media. That turns out to be right. He starts winning. Then winning more. The Internet is ablaze, liberals are put in cringe compilations and salt compendiums and the high energy grows ever higher. We have a chance. /pol/ is nonstop Trump train, despite Alefantis' bot farms and CIA glow ops. Youtube has ten different livesteams with +10ks of views from the new right, something that hadn't happened before. Even reddit with the_donald was on cloud nine, as they had been for months.
It feels like we're an empire of old, the youth and the fighting men are sitting rapt in front of a great orator, telling us of righteous battle to come and honor and glory. There are permanent smiles and you can feel the electricity in the air, we're a
part of something, it tingles in the lizard hindbrain. He's winning harder, Clinton is no longer seen in public. The DNC has long faces and crying millennials, the insufferable are suffering and it is
good.
He wins the presidency.
We never come down.
That's how it was. What happened after you all know, and what happened last election was a return of our hopes, but it didn't and never could match 2016.
