So you don't think there was any reasonable motivation for anybody voting Trump over Hillary? Was it simply the fact that half of all Americans are evil and corrupt that led to him being elected?
that depends on your definition of "reasonable" - if by "reasonable" you mean "consideration for a sequence of actions and events likely to occur within the realm of possibility" then the answer is no, there was no reasonable motivation for voting trump.
but if by "reasonable" you mean "can be presented in a coherent way as a narrative" then yes there was reasonable motivation to vote trump.
all spoken and posted statements by the likes of people who support trump come down to one of two categories:
1. idiots who thought any of the BS he spewed during the 2015/16 campaign was true - that he was some noble outsider who was going to strike down institutional corruption and governmental mismanagement and run the country efficiently and effectively like a proper businessman.
these are the gullible twats who just want reality spoon fed to them by a higher authority so buy into the narrative fox news tries to sell about those claims being true and trump being effective at delivering on campaign promises, and they seem to be a rather huge minority... mostly old people too addled to have the proper critical thinking skills required to successfully navigate the modern world.
2. the rank-and-file of the modern day 'conservative' movement, for whom trump is simply the physical manifestation of everything their ideology has been leading to for the last 60 years. these people seem to be the vast majority of trump supporters, and are not rubes who have been duped into believing a false narrative about what's going on, they just idolize exactly what trump is and how trump runs things and so for them this is what they want out of elected government.
this category includes those who actively seek out deranged conspiracy as a solution to every perceived obstacle, as well establishment politicos who are fine with trump so long as he is an avenue to retain power.
i've never personally seen any evidence of any kind of rationale for supporting trump that doesn't fall into one of those two categories.
the first one i would say is NOT reasonable because it's predicated on blind stupidity, but it's such a minority that it falls into the sample range one would expect of "humans are dumb".
the second one is reasonable, at least from a broadly ontological standpoint. it might be ethically indefensible, but it makes sense from the perspective of the lunatics who hold this toxic sewage as moral value.
I think he won because most Americans disliked Hillary more. It's interesting to discuss, why that is? She was obviously competent at the job. She had the brains and experience. So a distrust of her abilities wasn't it.
this is a false dichotomy predicated on a great lie told about america: that reasoned and objective democracy exists, that civic voting is serious and rational, and that election results are based on individual merit and/or in any way related to the actual people involved.
the reality is that most of the time, presidential elections in the US have absolutely nothing to do with the candidates - or at least very little, and then only as a modifier to an otherwise existing factor - and are instead broadly determined by a cultural zeitgeist pendulum that's been swinging back and forth in this country since about the 40s when the two political parties as they exist today were formed.
it comes down to a simple formula: democrats get to be president, which pisses the hell out of republicans and makes democrats complacent. then republicans get to be president, which pisses the hell out of democrats and makes republicans complacent. then they switch again. repeat.
there's a couple minor outliers and some arguments to be made for some elections having candidates so terrible that what could have been a contended election was basically just handed to the other party, but generally speaking elections in the US just come down to 'which side is more pissed off this year'.
hillary clinton had zero chance in any conceivable version of reality of ever winning the 2016 election - not only because obama had just been president for 8 years so it was the republican's turn, but the republicans had one of the greatest (from a campaign standpoint) party candidates since the modern incarnation of the GOP has existed.
it's not interesting to discuss because it's a non-issue... 2016 was the new common trend in US elections: the democrats had more votes and still lost because it was the republican's turn.
(and because the electoral college is fucking stupid)
I think it's worth bringing up cancel culture and woke. Today the left control the public discourse to the point where we can bully anybody out of a platform.
1. no it isn't, because it doesn't exist.
2. no they don't.
3. that a laughably pathetic farce of an assertion to make on both fronts.
'the left' does not control the public discourse whatsoever - every media outlet and major public source for news or information in the US is significantly right-leaning, and every major topic within the cultural zeitgeist is strictly framed within the right's terms and the right's framework for the discussion.
also, 'bully out of a platform' is a nonsense phrase because it doesn't mean anything, and it doesn't exist. there is no system in the US where such a thing could even happen.
sure you might sometimes have public outcry resulting in a given outlet deciding that its perception of its own public image is more important than the employment status of a single individual, but making any more of it than that is delusional.
We are threatening free speech. It is a real problem today.
no we aren't, and no it isn't.
freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence to speech, nor guarantee of employment in the face of speech.
