“The guy is not a democrat with a small d,” the president told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
President Joe Biden said in an interview Wednesday he is all but certain Donald Trump, his predecessor and presumptive 2024 rival, will reject the results of the November election and called Trump “dangerous” for the nation.
“The guy is not a democrat with a small d,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett during a visit to Wisconsin this week.
“How many court cases do they have, Supreme Court cases? They’ve all said this is a totally legitimate election. … He may not accept the outcome of the election? I promise you he won’t. Which is dangerous.”
The president went on to say other world leaders had expressed to him their fear of a second Trump presidency and pointed to Trump’s pledge to prosecute his political opponents if he enters the Oval Office once more.
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My dude, fascism is here, it doesn’t just have its foot in the door it’s sitting in the living room wiping its ass with Biden’s throw pillows. Genocide is already being carried out in your name.
People need to start getting into a resistance and preparation mindset, not thinking Biden’s going to help reverse our course towards fascism. There’s a long road of direct action ahead if people hope to turn the ship. Lesser of two evils isn’t cutting it, they’re both leading us to the same place
Then you’d concede that if they are leading us to different places, lesser of two evils does cut it.
You’re playing chess. You have a choice - lose a pawn, or you can keep the pawn and the next move you’ll lose by checkmate. I dunno about you, but I’m saying goodbye to that pawn.
That’s the choice, except instead of keeping the pawn you lose it anyway because Trump likes Israel even more. Biden wins, there will be a different Democratic nominee in 2028. And if you want it to be someone more in line with your thinking than Biden, well you know what you gotta do in 2028.
But if Trump wins, he’s gonna do everything in his power to make sure the choice in 2028 is his and not yours. Not stopping him is game over.
Exactly. OK, we get Biden again. Now use the next 4 years to REALLY push … for ranked voting, age limits for reps, or anything! Because you still can.
I’d say it needs to be sooner than ‘28, more like as soon as the election is over
No, like chess, at a certain point it becomes clear that you’ve lost the game you’re playing. It doesn’t matter if you save your metaphorical pawn or not in this scenario, delaying with the lesser of two evils will not create any further opportunities to turn things around.
It is the end game, and it turns out that the using the lesser of two evils as a strategy for the past 7, 8, 9 election cycles has been a definiteively losing strategy. It has produced no favorable results, instead it has simply allowed fascism to creep in at a pace which the general public will acclimate to it. And once the majority is acclimated, there is nothing that anyone who cares can do.
Instead, you should not be playing a game with rules rigged by two parties, neither of whom actually have an interest or will to preserve democracy. Instead you should be turning the board over and refusing to play
Voting for the lesser of two evils has been the strategy since day 1. In 1860 both Lincoln and his opponent Douglas wanted to keep slavery (Lincoln only wanted to limit its spread), and worse, only some Americans were allowed to vote. Forget the far left, a modern moderate might refuse to vote at all in that election - why vote for Lincoln if you’re voting for someone who wants to keep something as abhorrent as slavery?
Yet voting for Lincoln nevertheless did move the needle against slavery and eventually led to its abolition. And voting for people we’d almost certainly see today as the lesser evil eventually would lead also to improvements in worker rights, universal suffrage, social security and medicare, ending segregation, gay rights, and the right to abortion - before refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils took that away.
It’s your right not to vote. But what happens - or doesn’t - is your responsibility.
What about all the struggle and violence that directly led to those outcomes? The moderates who presided over those changes didn’t enact them out of the love of the game, they were compelled to in order to put a stop to the unrest.
You understand the needle didn’t move because of moderates and voting the lesser of two evils, right? Every major shift in progress in this country was accompanied by protest, conflict and refusal to go along with the status quo.
oh great. here come all the shitty yeye ass takes
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Why do Biden Bros get so offended that people don’t want to live in a make believe world where they’re happy to vote for Biden? No where did they say that won’t vote for him over Trump.
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You don’t say…?
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Since you need me to explain the joke, here it is.
It comes across as you making the assumption, “there are no biden bros in this thread”.
You then say not to make assumptions about people you know nothing about.
So unless you know everyone in this thread, you are making an assumption about people who you know nothing about.
It’s comedic.
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Right here:
The irony here is you’re the one who doesn’t understand the situation we’re actually in.
The house is on fire and you’re telling people “Don’t worry guys, if we just stay in the kitchen there’s no fire here so it’ll be ok. It’s vitally important everyone stay in the kitchen, don’t listen to that extremist firefighter telling you to leave the building. Quick, someone grab that sieve, we can use it to splash water from the sink on the fire, we can save the house if we all just grab a sieve!”
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Because no updoots means you’re wrong and bad and should go away 😠
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So, lemmy.world and all of its federated communities are far left now? And you want to talk about ignorance?
Believe it or not, internet points are not always very meaningful.
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You realize that people can also go vote for Trump too, right? Do you understand that? Do you understand that “go vote” does not mean your man is the target?
Taking no action in a genocidal cult-for-a-government is better than taking action for what either side believes is the right side.
Back off of fascism for a second and respect people’s autonomy. None of us asked for be a part of this half-baked, misguided mechanism, but we have a choice to stop using it. You have no right to say otherwise.
A no-vote IS a vote.
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Did you really just link me to NBC news?
How are so many people still plugged in to this nonsense?
Do people really still believe that space age nations with access to AI, nuclear, and semiconductor technologies should follows the dramas of individual human leaders?
Does this primitive practice really, actually appeal to people? Are you people actually real? You actually care about the sayings and doings of clearly theatrical and phony leaders?
There is no such thing as a leader of 300 million people, you understand this, right?
The dog and pony show of elections is a theater of puppets orchestrated by a global elite that owns the US government and most governments of the world.
Do you know how easy it is to capture the soul of a single meat and bones, weak human entity with a family and a physical time and place?
Do you know how easy it is to capture 10,000 souls? How many representatives and senators do you have again?
ALL of them are captured.
Most with money.
The more stubborn ones, with blackmail. Some of them are so principled and stubborn they would rather die than compromise their values. But those ones have sons, daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and while they won’t compromise for their own lives, they do compromise for the lives of those they love.
You have no clue, do you, the reality of this world? You have no idea of the evil hidden in plain sight within the hearts of man?
Your “government” fell a very long time ago.
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Your political strategy has failed though, again and again and again. Why the hell should anyone listen to you when people following your prescription in the past, is what produced the very situation we find ourselves in?
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Look, it’s really important that you understand this; what you’re doing right now, this political strategy, is an abject failure. People have done things just how you’re arguing, have gone along with it for literally decades it it has failed. So the only reason I can think that you continue is because you want that failure to continue.
Also, you can’t on one hand write an entire essay of a response to something and then claim it’s no big deal and “not making waves”. Remember Clinton? How’d that work out for you?
Your suggestion to fix this failure of a system is literally “do nothing”. Please try to recognise that: You are advocating for fighting the status quo by doing nothing.
It will not work. If you want change you need to take action. Not voting is the exact opposite of attempting to change things. Use the influence you have to push for a change in the right direction.
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Right, instead we… should hop right through the meat grinder door? Why, because quicker death?
Democrats have refused to stop Trump at every juncture. Id really should be appalling to us that we allowed democracy to be on the ballot when we had four years to patch every exploit in the system.
This is not what success looks like. Im just very tired knowing that Democrats never seems to push anything beyond half measures that fail.
The stakes were simply too high, and we’ve let the cancer metastisize too long.
Lets hope we can shove it into remission, but we really should have done it earlier.
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This is the right answer. (Assuming they really are all lazy assholes) if others don’t join the cause because it’s full of lazy assholes, that’s all it’ll ever be.
I feel like there are way too many people who feel like using the power of their vote is some magical trump card that fully absolves them of getting involved in any actually meaningful way. And accusing them of being lazy is another excuse to not have to get involved.
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In this anology, all I want is for the lazy asshole to stop beingbeing a lazy asshole.
We never seem to put up a less lazy asshole. Ever.
And then we wonder why we have a dragon problem.
Im already being downvoted for simply asking for a dragon slayer in that can slay the dragon.
I didn’t downvote you, but my frustration with statements like this is that there is no other dragon slayers to call up now. There is no scenario where Biden is not the Democratic nominee in November. I agree we should have a better candidate, Biden is not my preference at all, but that’s reality. Asking for a new candidate for this election is a complete nonstarter.
I’m not even asking for a new candidate at this point, I’m just asking for Biden to do better. I totally think he is capable of doing more and doing better, but it seems like he just doesn’t want to. And it seems like the moderates don’t expect him to, as if they also are frustrated with him. A lot of the progressive frustration comes from the fact that we had warned about this years prior And we’re just told to shut up about it.
If we need a dragon slayer to meet the moment and Joe Biden is all we have, then we better start training him to be a dragon slayer. We really should have been doing that four years ago.
Instead, the election is coming up and we have someone who might not be able to slay the dragon… versus a dragon. We can help all we can, but it’s really up to him to slay the dragon in the end. I just don’t think we put ourselves in the best situation if the goal is to kill the dragon.
What would you have liked the Democrats to have done, keeping in mind that Republicans have a majority in the house? Can’t amend the Constitution.
Republicans keep being given the power to delay and deny anything the Democrats want done, and then people complain about Democrats not doing enough, so they don’t vote, which allows Republicans to keep doing it.
It’s frustrating how successful the strategy is working for them.
Exactly. The first priority is removing the GOP roadblocks. I’m a progressive. I desperately want progressive policy enacted. There is no viable path to make that happen without electing more Democrats in general elections. I recognize that the Democratic party is not a progressive party, but that’s our job to change via primaries.
My biggest complaint about my fellow progressives is a lot of them seem to refuse to think strategically and cling to the idea that your vote is somehow a moral choice. It’s not. It’s a strategic choice to further your interests. Helping elect Republicans during the general election does nothing but put us even further away. Biden is not our champion, he’s a tool. We use Biden to promote our interests where we can and ditch him the moment he’s no longer needed. Right now, he’s absolutely needed.
For starters, Biden should have picked a better AG, that would have gone a long way. Secondly, Democrats should have impeached Trump THE DAY OF THE INSURRECTION, while Republican support was wavering in the uncertainty. Instead they waited months.
We could have removed the filibuster to ease legislation.
Mind you, all of this was stuff progressives were screaming at the time but moderates ignored.
At the time, picking Garland as AG was a giant fuck you to republicans to get revenge on them denying Obama the supreme court nomination in 2016, a way of saying “ha, ha, you denied him a seat and now we gave him one that’s almost as good.”
Unfortunately, in hindsight it turns out that when you put a very moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican in the cabinet, they will run their department like a moderate, nonpartisan, old-school Republican, and that resulted in the DOJ focusing on the mooks more than the masterminds out of fear of being seen as a political hatchet man.
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I think Biden could be a dragon slayer. He just has to have the gumption to do it. To a lot of progressives like myself, it feels like we are just giving up on the prospect of Biden doing better, as if that is not even an option anymore, and the people that are most prominently supporting that notion are the moderates right now.
The fact of the matter is we have a dragon problem, and it doesn’t seem like anyone is willing to fix it. We can’t just get eaten by the dragon.
I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem like people are frustrated enough that we have no dragon slayers. Perhaps we would have gotten one if people were this upset earlier.
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The people downvoting you are scared, and don’t see themselves as having any other options.I think their fear is warranted, but you can’t stand idle in the face of an oncoming train. You have to move your feet.
They rely on hope and fantasy whose only basis in reality is between their ears, because otherwise the weight of it all becomes crushing. I’d rather bear the weight if that’s what it takes get my feet going though. I’m will not go willingly into the long dark night.
Yeah except that what you’ve described is a delusional fantasy. The ‘lazy asshole’ in your metaphor has been enabling and empowering the tyrant asshole the entire time, and when it comes to draw swords, they’ll be turning cloak to try and retain some semblance of power and position.
They aren’t your allies and they never have been.
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Me, watching an insurrection televised live: “hmm, but why aren’t the media giving coverage to Hunter Biden’s laptop?”
You just proved the OC’s point. Congratulations.
Yeah thats not what their comment described.
The ‘lazy asshole’ in their metaphor is never coming to your aid. They’ll vote to call protestation against Israel hate speach before they’ll ever consider reforming the system that keeps them in power. This is the solipsistic delusion I’m highlighting. ALL of the evidence suggests that Democrats will maintain support a tyrannical Republican agenda before considering the kind of critical systematic introspection necessary to actually reform the system. Democrats are not interested in reform of a system that keeps them in power.
The only place in which Democrats are a reform party is in the deluded minds of their aquarian sycophants. There is no external evidence to suggest that Democrats are a reform party, because at every given opportunity to do so, Democrats refuse. Its a Marvel-tier fantasy that the Democrats writ large are the heroes in this story.
Holy shit I’m sorry to make you write all that out. I’m not sure what happened in my brain but it looked like your comment was a reply to a different comment.
The problem is that a majority of those vocally supporting Biden can’t just be happy with people agreeing they’ll vote for Biden over Trump, but they insist that people live in the fan-fiction fantasy land with them.
Yeah, no! The simple fact is that actually changing something is a lot harder than simply obstructing. Just look at the Ukraine aid bill. One guy was able to hold it off for more than half a year.
Actual change requires buy in from a lot of people and that means talking, compromising and then doing it. If there is one obstructionist fuck in your path, everything slows down or even grinds to a halt.
That is why Trump wants to be dictator (for a day, or maybe a few… and the a few more) and why they have the 2025 plan. To eliminate the need to talk and compromise but simply bulldoze your plans through.
Your narrative is false and hurts democracy a lot.
Your down voters have been propagandized to their entire lives that there is always a ‘team good’ and a ‘team evil’, and that the lathe of heaven cuts just so. Its the rebels versus the empire and the rebels always just. Its David versus Goliath, and the underdog always wins.
Its a fantasy. Democrats as a functional political party, in practice, are not allies of the people. They’ve supported and promoted effectively an identical slate of polices to Republicans for almost 50 years. It was RBG that refused to step down from the supreme court. It was Obama who didn’t pressure her to do so. Its the Democrats who refused to fully investigate Trumps involvement with Russia in the Mueller investigation, because they needed to take the ‘high road’. Republicans are there to represent a convenient excuse, while its Democrats who fail to do what they need to do when its the right time to do it. They aren’t your friends, they aren’t even your allies. Stop engaging in these masturbatory fantasies of what you think this institution represents.
Muller is a Republican, was made director during a Repub admin, and was working in a Republican DoJ. You might want to choose a different example if you’d like to give the impression you know what you are talking about?
I’m pissed off about RBG as well, but they are lifetime appointments. Not sure what the Dems as a collective group were supposed to do on that one. By the time Obama had an obstructionist Senate it was too late.
Hows the water doing? Getting heavy yet?
Oh, no, I think it’s pretty rewarding to educate young children such as yourself. Feels good.
You live in a fantastic delusion regarding your relationship to power.
Not really. That’s why I don’t want to help a complete authoritarian running on a campaign of bigotry by throwing my vote in the garbage.
I think it’s more the people completely wrong on basic facts of who is Dem or Repub are delusional. Like they are so biased and bought in to what they want to believe that they don’t care about the truth.
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there are so many easy ways to refute this so I’m just going to go with: you dumb bitch.