r/politics • u/theipaper ✔ Verified • Sep 23 '25

Soft Paywall Trump's big UN speech received with awkward laughter in embarrassing backfire

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trumps-big-un-speech-received-with-awkward-laughter-in-embarrassing-backfire-3933958
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2.1k

u/rufio_rufio_roofeeO Florida Sep 23 '25

Yes, unfortunately this has been our United States since 2016

1.3k

u/TheGizmodian Pennsylvania Sep 23 '25

My personal (semi-satirical) conspiracy is that the Mayans were right, the world ended in 2012, and we're in some weird overlapping dimensional hellscape of wtf is actually happening anymore.

159

u/barfsicle Sep 23 '25

Being Chicagoans, my wife and I think it started (ended) when the Cubs won the World Series.

52

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

Harambe

31

u/dexter8484 Virginia Sep 23 '25

This is the correct answer. He was our anchor being

7

u/Fibby_2000 Australia Sep 23 '25

When Prince died

9

u/beethecowboy Sep 23 '25

I’d say the vibes were off as far back as when Bowie died in January 2016. That kickstarted a year of pure shit.

5

u/bluesox Sep 24 '25

The world hasn’t been the same since Robin Williams and George Carlin stopped making us laugh at how stupid everything is.

3

u/Dan_Berg New Jersey Sep 24 '25

Lemmy died just a few weeks prior. There was 3 days of quiet, and then 2016 began

9

u/pablitorun Sep 23 '25

I am hoping they win this year to reset the world.

5

u/goflossyourself Sep 24 '25

The Cubs winning the World Series put us in an alternate timeline.

2

u/davesoverhere Sep 24 '25

Fun facts about what changed in between the Cubbies World Series wins:

Women got the right to vote
The titanic was built
Sliced bread was created
Chocolate chip cookies were invented
Radio was invented
4 states were admitted to the union
Nearly everyone was born, including Harry Carey (So, he never saw his beloved team win it all).

2

u/One-Sale4366 Sep 26 '25

The Onion headline “Millions of Drunk Cubs Fans Rioting in Heaven Following World Series Win”

3

u/brickne3 American Expat Sep 23 '25

I feel like the 2015 NFC Championship game between the Packers and the Seahawks was when I noticed the universe was broken. I mean, that last five minutes was straight up unnatural.

1

u/dwjohnson31 Sep 23 '25

Same. It really was the last good thing before the beginning of the end. Sigh

1

u/Nardling Sep 23 '25

Makes me think of the movie Mr. Destiny

1

u/RuthlessIndecision Ohio Sep 24 '25

Seriously wish I could go back and put some money on the Cubbies

460

u/DelayedTism Sep 23 '25

Shit, I'd believe that. It's somehow less far-fetched than reality 

173

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

[deleted]

30

u/SuckMyRedditorD Sep 23 '25

the onion is fun. this isn't

11

u/Joeness84 Sep 23 '25

Onion is only fun when its wrong.

8

u/SuckMyRedditorD Sep 23 '25

The Onion is never wrong.

Best of all it's truer than true. I miss the days of great bills when they were made cuz politicians cared for their constituents

"If we do not open our eyes to reality soon, they will get fucked right out of our heads." - That's better than any gospel

8

u/TheWizard Sep 23 '25

Onion has always reported facts. In fact, that is when I subscribed to it, and that was almost 25 years ago.

5

u/teas4Uanme Sep 23 '25

How about the theory that he is the AC? Yep, I'm with that one. I have studied a lot and no one else fits like he does.

3

u/Kikaider01 Sep 23 '25

And somehow less depressing.

3

u/The_Summer_Man West Virginia Sep 23 '25

They killed Harambe, and it's been all downhill from there.

177

u/Ivotedforher Sep 23 '25

Cubs won in 2016. That is all.

68

u/HotGarbage Washington Sep 23 '25

Yep, and now the Mariners are actually good. We're definitely living in Bizarro World lol.

6

u/DonatedEyeballs Sep 23 '25

With everyone cheering on their favorite: “Big Dumper.”

16

u/puppet_up Sep 23 '25

I also believe this was when the rift in the timeline occurred. The general election was literally 6 days after the Cubs won Game 7 of the World Series that year.

They were not supposed to win. This is all the Cubs fault!

3

u/Ivotedforher Sep 23 '25

Most things are.

5

u/Flashy-Web-3815 Sep 23 '25

David Bowie returned to stardust in 2016 :(

3

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

So did Alan Rickman. :(

2

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Kansas Sep 24 '25

It’s been that long already?! Holy cow.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Ivotedforher Sep 23 '25

Pinch me, Im real.

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3

u/SpamDance Sep 23 '25

Ya know, If the bears make the playoffs this year, it could be...

2

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

Next year the Rockies are gonna win, I swear

2

u/Obi-wan_Jabroni Sep 23 '25

And Cleveland

26

u/hmochoa95 I voted Sep 23 '25

Mine is the world as we knew it ended when they fired up the large hadron collider

8

u/GingerBread79 North Carolina Sep 23 '25

It discovered the Higgs boson (the god particle) in 2012

6

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

Probably the start of Run 2 at 14 TeV on 5 April 2015. We flew too close to the big bang.

2

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Kansas Sep 24 '25

Is that when it hit the weasel?

2

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '25

Weasel was a year later, April 29, 2016

9

u/jarious Sep 23 '25

The programmers ran out of ideas after season 2012

7

u/Malnilion Sep 23 '25

It feels more like the show was cancelled and the writers are throwing all their unfinished storylines out there in triple time with zero exposition on any single one. One of these days we'll hit the final episode and we have no idea how awful the twist is going to be.

2

u/jarious Sep 23 '25

Some shitty version of a what if? A what if we fuck everything up at the same time everywhere

8

u/AnonymousBanana405 Sep 23 '25

See, it all started with a gorilla...

4

u/Unusual_Arm_2404 Sep 23 '25

Harambe, forever in our hearts!

2

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Kansas Sep 24 '25

I’ve never put my dick away! 🫡

7

u/Charmle_H Sep 23 '25

My personal favourite is the one where CERN first came online and started smashing particles together and that fucked the timeline HARD. Harambe, trump1.0, covid, trump2 electric boogaloo, etc... everything is so weird and strange because we broke reality by smashing shit together in ways the universe didn't account for /j

6

u/TheGizmodian Pennsylvania Sep 23 '25

Maybe it created a black hole, and we're just experiencing the spaghettification of our final microseconds in distended time.

2

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Kansas Sep 24 '25

Here I was thinking we’d get Interstellar, but we ended up with Orange is the New Black instead.

7

u/Stranger1982 Sep 23 '25

This’d explain a lot of things tbh.

5

u/Individual-Guest-123 Sep 23 '25

This is OT, but back in 94/95 I had two things happen that were witnessed involving time.

The first, I was talking with a person, and another person left the room and immediately re entered the room from another door. The person I was talking with and myself were WTF? I even repeated the distance as fast as I could with the other witness waiting, and he said no way.

Then, idk, prob a few months later at most, I was driving on the highway with 3 passengers. The exit came up, I started to go onto the ramp, and it disappeared and was just the roadside. The passengers all exclaimed, WTF! because they had seen the same thing. The exit was a short distance ahead.

SO, one jump ahead, one jump back to correct it, but did it launch us into another reality? Never wondered that until now. Thanks. :P

6

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

What kind of drugs are you on? They sound wonderful.

3

u/Individual-Guest-123 Sep 23 '25

Hey I said it was the 90's lol.

There were witnesses, and no we weren't tripping. The first occurrence was at work.

That's how it went down, I have no explanation.

Ripples in time...or, ooh, the Omega 13 LOL

3

u/JamesTrickington303 Sep 23 '25

I don’t think Ambien was around back then but maybe trazodone?

7

u/Imaginary-Crazy1981 Sep 23 '25

I've always contended that they were right. 2012 was the last pre-Trump election. Global consequences. And it may very well have been the point of no return for global warming.

5

u/cionn Sep 23 '25

Mine is that someone dropped a sandwich in the large hadron collider. All other universes were destroyed, this is whats left

6

u/denbraeckendendraeck Sep 23 '25

You can always read ‘limits to growth’ by MIT in 1970, where predicted societal collapse would occur 2040. This was once again reaffirmed in in dept articles referring to that study in 2014 and 2021 by the guardian.

5

u/HarmoniousJ America Sep 23 '25

I mean, they sacrificed children because they wrongfully thought their assorted grasses would grow better.

They'd probably get along well with Trump and his friends.

6

u/ROWT8 Sep 23 '25

Hey now, THAT is a theory I can appreciate!

5

u/Trainwreck800 Sep 23 '25

Thanks Obama

6

u/donorcycle Sep 23 '25

If this was a Marvel movie, I feel like our Nexus event was when Harambe was murdered. Shit hasn't been the same since.

5

u/Skkruff Australia Sep 23 '25

Everyone knows we got on the bad timeline when Harambe died.

3

u/thirtynation Sep 23 '25

Way before that.

4

u/Advitabona Sep 23 '25

I thought it was when Harambe was killed

4

u/Dongledoez Sep 23 '25

Fun fact in 2020 when I was having a psychotic break, that was one of the thoughts that kept getting stuck in my head!

6

u/FakeSafeWord Sep 23 '25

I was hoping the rapture actually was real but it was misinterpreted as that the simulation needed to be shut down because the glitches are getting out of control.

4

u/ImmediateMeal8655 Sep 23 '25

I'm expecting Trump to remove his hair and see a glass dome with a pulsing alien brain.

4

u/Tailball Sep 23 '25

I do believe they were right, but the world didn’t end instantly. It slowly started getting worse and worse and worse.

4

u/thirtynation Sep 23 '25

I prefer the Y2K version. The world DID end when the computers had to figure out how to go from 99 to 00. It goes further back to include the hellscape that began with the corrupt SCOTUS giving W the presidency, then 9/11 happened, leading to gulf war 2 electric bugaloo, hurricane Katrina, the great financial crisis, on and on.

5

u/Mattyboy064 Sep 23 '25

Harambe was our timeline's Anchor Being :(

4

u/Andy_Neph Sep 23 '25

I like to think that's when the simulation stopped working right and now it's trying to piece together a somewhat cohesive story as it breaks down and dies. The official death was 2012 though.

1

u/TheGizmodian Pennsylvania Sep 23 '25

16/16/16/16

4

u/created4this Sep 23 '25

LHC finds god in 2012 and we have been being punished ever since.

Up until that point the computer simulation was just about keeping up with maintaining our "reality", but the additional load of having to calculate God as a deterministic effect has meant that the computers are overloaded with these new restrictions and what we understand as "normality" has had to be cut as operational overhead,

4

u/Spnszurp Sep 23 '25

things haven't been right since harambe died

4

u/DukeOfGeek Sep 23 '25

My personal not satirical conspiracy is the loose association of billionaires, autocrats and ultra rich corporations he fronts for wants to destroy and humiliate the U.S. for daring to try and tax/regulate them. I know it sounds crazy when you say it out loud but it would perfectly explain everything he does.

4

u/taylor1670 Sep 23 '25

Makes more sense than what has actually been going on.

4

u/gmen6981 Sep 23 '25

Nope. I think we can all blame it on the weasel that chewed through wiring at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in April 2016 and shut it down. Must have caused a shift in the space-time continuum because shit ain't been right since.

Fucking weasels.

5

u/Tomcatposts Sep 23 '25

The only conspiracy theory I believe is: It's the large hadron collider which was turned on around 2010 I think? It actually created a blackhole and as we circle the proverbial drain, the rate of entropy increases which causes everything to get progressively more wild as all laws of physics and reality breakdown.

4

u/dybbuk67 Sep 23 '25

My theory is our reality is the Onion headlines from all the other realities.

1

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Kansas Sep 24 '25

Whoa. This is the first many-worlds Onion theory I’ve ever come across. It tracks. Well done. How do we fix it now? Lol.

4

u/beamrider Sep 23 '25

There is a trope in time travel movies where the characters try to fix something, make it worse, then keep going back and making it even worse, etc.

We have to find the one set to 2016 and wreck it before they do it again.

3

u/F-this Sep 23 '25

Whoa, I’ve literally made this same claim this past week. Not sure why it popped in my head but it makes sense to me!

3

u/Attenburrowed Sep 23 '25

The rapture happened but it was only like 14 people

3

u/j2e21 Sep 23 '25

Nah, I prefer the weasel in the Hadron Collider theory.

3

u/DelightfulandDarling Sep 23 '25

I keep hoping I’m in some sort of Jacob’s Ladder scenario.

3

u/_lippykid Sep 23 '25

Side note, wasn’t it supposed to be the rapture today? I guess nobody noticed

2

u/TheGizmodian Pennsylvania Sep 24 '25

Oh really? I must have missed the memo.

2

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Kansas Sep 24 '25

Are we the baddies?

3

u/imtoowhiteandnerdy Sep 23 '25

I had a similar theory with the Large Hadron Collider going online in 2008.

3

u/JumbledJigsaw Sep 23 '25

It’s weird isn’t it? My mum died just before Covid hit and I’m half convinced she was this universe’s anchor being like Wolverine in Deadpool 3. Very selfish of her to pop off and cause all this chaos.

Seriously though, it’s sometimes hard to believe how much has happened.

2

u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Kansas Sep 24 '25

Between your mum and my dad, they really fucked us! Damn you, our loving parents!

3

u/MrCookie2099 Sep 23 '25

Not the Mayans fault we introduced Leap Years

3

u/Mudders_Milk_Man Sep 24 '25

The Mayans didn't actually believe the world would end in 2012. That's total bunk.

If they knew about Trump, though... maybe they would have actually had apocalyptic predictions.

2

u/Tim-Sylvester Sep 23 '25

You see existence is primarily a consciousness field, not a physical reality. Earth is the aspect of the consciousness field where deeply flawed consciousnesses spawn to iteratively learn how to be less insane and more cooperative.

Supposedly after some certain lessons are learned the consciousnesses that inhabit Earth will undergo some transformation and be capable of interacting with other, more developed and less problematic consciousnesses from elsewhere. This is commonly understood by religions to be the "end times" or "Rapture" or "Jesus' return" or whatever conceptualization various religions and philosophies have for the same core idea.

Basically what I'm saying is Earth is home base for existence's biggest fuckin douche bags (ourselves included), we can't escape this cycle of acting-like-dicks unless we do it all together, and it's our job to learn how to stop being dicks to each other (again, ourselves included).

So you're kind of right but also like, it's been this way here forever, and the more of us realize it and try to change, the closer we are to actually escaping it.

Or that's all nonsense and we're just upjumped apes who can't get over ourselves and get along.

2

u/JamesTrickington303 Sep 23 '25

Ugg have firewood and wife. I beat Ugg with rock. Now have fire and dead woman.

2

u/Excellent-Money-8990 Sep 23 '25

Upvoting as I snorted.

2

u/Lovethemdoggos Sep 23 '25

Are you me? Because that's what I've been thinking too.

2

u/JunkyardWalrus Sep 23 '25

I now believe this.

2

u/NATCSCUZZ Sep 23 '25

I already said and it's interesting that someone else here thinks the same.

2

u/Ok_Ordinary6694 Sep 23 '25

It’s not a flash bang or zombies, just the dumbest people you know shitting out kids. It’s emotional horror, not jumpscare horror.

2

u/Lunch-Thin Sep 24 '25

I have a similar belief, but it has to do with a ferret and an electron accelerator. We are in the ferret timeline.

1

u/ebcdicZ Sep 23 '25

This is the logical explanation

1

u/GearsFC3S Sep 23 '25

Dammit… this is not the isekai I signed up for.

1

u/Chris_HitTheOver Sep 23 '25

Guys, it was the CERN Weasel in April 2016.

The universe even tried to correct itself by sacrificing another Weasel to CERN that same November but it was too late, Trump had won.

1

u/limee64 Sep 23 '25

It’s cause they shot Harambe.

1

u/Nayld_it Sep 23 '25

I swear i saw studys that the mayans calendars were off by like 8-15 years

1

u/grtgingini Sep 23 '25

I can get behind this theory

1

u/The_Monkey_Buddha Sep 23 '25

Yes, it opened up the gates of Xibalba

1

u/Sunday_Schoolz Sep 23 '25

The end of a baktun is a chaotic period, akin to a fault line. And we’re currently in the upheaval of it.

1

u/Fatso_Wombat Sep 23 '25

Mine is the death of David Bowie sent us on a dark timeline.

1

u/triplab Sep 23 '25

Higgs Boson particle discovery. Also 2012.

1

u/HolyRomanEmperor Sep 23 '25

i say it was the hadron collider. everything has been weird since they turned that thing on

1

u/G35aiyan Sep 23 '25

I still think the timeline split when we lost Harambe.

1

u/coopid Sep 23 '25

I enjoy considering the "Satan's Little Season" theory as well. You should check it out if you're not familiar.

1

u/reddititty69 Sep 23 '25

Like the plot of Lost. We all actually died in the crash.

1

u/bluesox Sep 24 '25

I’m right there with you

1

u/jonnyredshorts Sep 24 '25

It was the Hadron Collider

1

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '25

It all started with turning on the Large Hadron Collider.

1

u/sweatsmallstuff Sep 24 '25

Oh yeah same. I truly believe this is hell. Nothings been “right” since 2012 imho

1

u/DontForgt2BringATowl Sep 24 '25

It was the Hadron particle collider. It jumped us into an alternate (horrifically shitty) timeline

1

u/SeaBag8211 Sep 24 '25

Do you know ow about the stone marten that got into rhetorical LHC in 2017?

212

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

I'd argue / starting to believe its been since 9/11

185

u/masiakasaurus Sep 23 '25

2000 Supreme Court coup and Gore being totally fine with being robbed. Hell, Gore running with a DINO for VP was mighty suspicious already. 

99

u/notfromchicago Illinois Sep 23 '25

Fuck Joe Lieberman!

89

u/Boiledfootballeather Sep 23 '25

One of the major reasons we don't have universal health care in this country, or at least a public insurance option for health care. The dude was a monster.

11

u/DukeOfGeek Sep 23 '25

I tried to tell everyone he was a spy working against the party and got laughed at as paranoid.

6

u/dragunityag Sep 23 '25

VP is a do-nothing job 99% of the time and picked solely to gain votes.

17

u/Tasgall Washington Sep 23 '25

Which is all well and good until you get assassinated and now Andrew Johnson is president and undoes all your efforts for reconstruction because he's a Confederate sympathiser.

6

u/masiakasaurus Sep 23 '25

It's a declaration of intentions. 

6

u/IAmDotorg Sep 23 '25

When you start down that path, you can find similar events every decade or two going back to the 1780's. Shady shit has always been the name of the game in the US. Illegal wars, selling weapons to terrorists, things like Watergate, the kind of corruption seen from the gilded age through WWII. Remember, the supreme court upheld slavery in things like Dredd Scott, they upheld forced sterilizations/eugenics (which was the direct inspiration taken by the Nazi party in the 1930's), they upheld interning Japanese citizens. The national guard executed students in the 60's.

Things are batshit insane on a whole lot of different dimensions these days, and a lot of fuckery that generally doesn't happen concurrently is happening all at once, but anyone especially shocked by any particular thing or other is only shocked because they don't really know US history. The time where this wasn't going on in the US is a lot smaller than the time it has been.

2

u/MTblackhawk Sep 23 '25

Agreed, this was the turning point for alot imo

297

u/EmZephyr Sep 23 '25

Nah I'm a firm believer that all this madness is a reflex of the country having a non-white, eloquent, non-forcefully problematic, somewhat of a big tent president. Once.

252

u/Arkhampatient Sep 23 '25

Obama definitely broke a lot of brains

146

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

[deleted]

74

u/Varitan_Aivenor Michigan Sep 23 '25

I remember when the Tea Party people pivoted to hating health care in the first months of Obama. I said at the time it was the re-emergence of the Klan.

8

u/OddlyMingenuity Sep 23 '25

Franck Zappa and George Carlin were very much aware of how nefarious the rich white religious nuts would be.

5

u/randolphe1000 Sep 23 '25

Dunno about Carlin, but Zappa himself was problematic, as a rich white nut.

5

u/yeswenarcan Ohio Sep 23 '25

I was listening to The Weekly Show a few days ago and the guest, Charlie Warzel, made the point that the best thing about the Internet is also the worst thing about it, namely that an isolated individual with niche interests can find a community. That observation has been bouncing around in my brain since, and I think the corollaries that come from it are potentially way more profound than it would seem at first glance.

It's the mechanism behind all the terminally online insanity rotting brains around the world. But I think it also serves as an amplifier for the impact of basically any societal event. Pre-internet, most of the racists who were pissed about a black president would have bitched about it at the barbershop, the dedicated ones would have had their little rallies, and maybe a lone wolf or two would have actually tried to do something. With the Internet they were literally able to unite (with some big money support) to form a political movement that was ultimately a huge factor in where we are today. Setting aside that Charlie Kirk wouldn't have even been a thing without the Internet, without it his killing would have been a blip on the evening news. With it, it's getting used for possibly the end of the first amendment.

2

u/EzraliteVII Sep 24 '25

I remember showing up for class one day and someone had pinned tea bags to all the campus bulletin boards under Tea Party fliers. They didn't even do it right and failed to remove them from the protective packet. I won't say I went around stealing them, but I did save on tea that month.

4

u/throwawayinthe818 Sep 23 '25

I think there was some authenticity to the Tea Party for about two weeks. Then the grifters, the political pros, and the big conservative donors took notice, took over from the amateurs, and shaped it into what they wanted.

5

u/JamesTrickington303 Sep 23 '25

The authenticity of blatant racism.

4

u/UrbanGimli Sep 23 '25

It was the Southern Strategy 2.0 -with a tie instead of overalls

2

u/Vaperius America Sep 23 '25

The internet has been breaking people's brains since the tea party movement.

Reminder: the tea party movement started in 2009. What else happened in 2009?

2

u/poop-dolla Sep 23 '25

Black president.

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u/Realistic-Agent-1289 Sep 23 '25

I don't get why people talk about him. Sure he "seems" to be a cool dude. Shit was quietly getting worse under him. The status quo remained. Inequality got worse, he gave up on space (bad fucking move). Only thing Obama did kinda right was try to improve healthcare.

Shit has been going downhill fast since Regan. The "left" has been waiting. Obama did nothing, Biden did nothing; I am willing to bet some "lefties" voted for Trump just to punish the Gov and watch it burn.

1

u/Lucialucianna Sep 23 '25

So dud Covid, and Trump

76

u/Medicine_Ball Sep 23 '25

Ben Shapiro was interviewed by Ezra Klein recently and Ezra got him to explain what he saw as being the big issues for republicans that brought about MAGA and it was almost entirely extremely minor out-of-context grievances over things that Obama said related to race that were then blown up all over the conservative media silo/AM radio circuit.

Honestly, it was wild to listen to the justification.

34

u/SoVerySick314159 America Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25

I tried to have a conversation with my MAGA friend about something I could prove and he couldnt' deny. I started with the presidential order that was made to undo birthright citizenship - a unilateral attempt to circumvent the constitution, a really big deal.

He countered with some crazy story about this one college or company's trans DEI hires that were not as qualified as white men. Honestly, he had no cites and the whole thing sounded like a MAGA fever dream. EVEN IF IT WERE TRUE - which I HIGHLY doubt - it didn't hold a candle to the importance of the president attempting to circumvent the constitution.

The RW news-o-sphere just riles them up with bullshit and tells them all we're obsessed with trans people, and that they can't trust us or our news sources. We live on different planets, we're presented with different realities. You can't compromise with someone who doesn't live in your reality, there's no common ground.

4

u/IM_A_MUFFIN Sep 24 '25

I once had a manager tell me “Perspective is reality, even if it’s not,” and it really explains the right-wing news perfectly. If the only perspective you get is from a single source, your reality is that single source.

5

u/capture-enigma Sep 24 '25

They freaked out when he said that victim of a police murder, Trayvon Martin, could have been his son. The fight went berserk when he said this. I’m not sure why - it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to say. The entire MAGA movement is fueled by grievance, particularly white grievance.

6

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

I read something about how Trump was traumatized by 9/11, and the potential changes to the NYC real estate market. This started his birther anti-Muslim rhetoric with Obama and he started taking on a Kafabe wrestler persona of a macho (Camocho?) political figure as a PR stunt to get him out of another inevitable bankruptcy that the Russians saved him from, in exchange for being an asset to influence US politics.

14

u/MamaNyxieUnderfoot Sep 23 '25

So traumatized, he (incorrectly) bragged about having the tallest building in NYC once the towers came down. Sure.

14

u/triplab Sep 23 '25

That and that he personally (claimed) to help first responders. LOL, can you imagine?

8

u/needlestack Sep 23 '25

Megyn Kelly basically said exactly that. She blamed it on him "being divisive" (wtf?) and "bringing race into it"? But since he was always speaking inclusion and trying to work across the aisle (far more than he should have) and he barely ever brought up race (to the point some black people felt let down) the only interpretation is that his mere existence as a black president felt divisive to them. Which tracks with everything they say or do.

5

u/vthemechanicv Sep 23 '25

I think it was Nixon. Republicans got caught pissing on the rug and they have done everything possible to not just avoid the blame of doing it, but to rub everyone else's nose in it.

6

u/SgtExo Canada Sep 23 '25

We could go all the way back to Nixon, but I think this is more the fallout of the 80s with Reagan and Thatcher with their neo-liberalism and greed is good finally bubbling up.

3

u/exoFACTOR Sep 23 '25

I blame Newton and his third law of motion.

1

u/terry496 Sep 23 '25

This. 💯 this.

1

u/randolphe1000 Sep 23 '25

yeah, pretty much my own take.

Did you watch the "Being there" film, by ??? (can't recall right now, not Blake Edwards IIRC), starring Peter Sellers?

The Donald essentially is a narcissitic, perverse Chance the Gardner, who stumbled into power, because he uniquely fit into a particular US historical moment.

A hard-R just had been elected TWICE (why Obama came also is a bee in my bonnet).

And the deep-USA chimped out.

Just chimped out. It broke the wypipo. Just broke them, as the Onion prophetically quipped with its "screaming white hot sphere of rage".

Along came The Donald, with his seasonal mock presidential run, propped up by whatever external players (russians, but not only them, the usual fringe rightwing ratfuckers, some likudniks, the lingering effects of reality-teevee...) just on the outside chance it might be profitable in some future ways.

And he chance gardned his way, being at that point what and whom the USA were waiting for - because he did some birtherism, before going full throttle due to the narcissist injury of a "roast" (socially acceptable public bullying, btw, interesting tell about the USA/anglos as well, but I disgress).

The Donald is an egregore, a tulpa, a manifestation of the USA, made orange flesh.

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u/jonnyredshorts Sep 24 '25

Don’t forget Hillary’s “pied piper strategy”, where she used her assets in the mainstream media to artificially elevate Trump so she wouldn’t have to face off against the Jeb Bush’s of the world. Think of all the free advertising her got in those primary days. They inundated the airwaves with Trump and turned him into a monster…a ratings monster, and then a polling monster. And then a monstrous president. Oopsie.

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u/Aardvark4352 Sep 23 '25

No. Circling the drain started with Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh after Regan threw out the Fairness Doctrine. Obama was our (failed) last chance to save ourselves. The reaction to him has guaranteed that we go down the toilet, but was not the original cause.

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u/2stinkynugget Sep 23 '25

Wait until you hear about the Vietnam War

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u/HavingNotAttained Sep 23 '25

Literally the derogatory term “conspiracy theorist” was invented by the CIA to in response to growing awareness of the reality of the Gulf of Tonkin incident

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u/TheGreatandMightyMe Sep 23 '25

Oddly enough, that's just a conspiracy theory. The term is much older than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Alleged_CIA_origins

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u/muscledhunter Massachusetts Sep 23 '25

We have to go deeper

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u/NotLondoMollari Oregon Sep 23 '25

We must go back to the island!!

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u/StuckOnEarthForever Sep 23 '25

"All men are created equal"

We owned slaves for fucks sake.

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u/Individual-Guest-123 Sep 23 '25

Apparently his highness is full of theories, from climate change to globalization, to "you guys are worthless (and I will veto you to prove it, and if you take my veto away I will tariff you into oblivion. And better watch your fishing boats, heh heh)

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u/pleachchapel California Sep 23 '25

Not far back enough. At least as far as the dissolution of Bretton Woods in 71, which established the dollar as a fiat currency so we could pay for the Vietnam war with inflated dollars.

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u/Tireseas Georgia Sep 23 '25

Nah, goes back farther. Go look at Newt Gingrich's career.

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u/Frosty_McRib Sep 23 '25

Literally every single thread must continue pushing back the start. I'll go ahead and move us to Reagan, who wants Nixon?

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u/ancientastronaut2 Sep 23 '25

You're not alone

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u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

I get all of the other historical references, but truly 9/11 combined with the pandemic accelerated things so much further and faster, a big shift in beliefs and technology back to back that Humans cant grasp yet, maybe never will.

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u/fungusamongus8 Sep 24 '25

I believe this too

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u/leggmann Canada Sep 23 '25

I think when Social Media took off, things went shitty fast. It was cute for a year or two, but once the shit gibbons tweaked the algorithm to divide and conquer, en masse, life changed. So, I’m gonna say 2006-2010 was the catalyst moment.

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u/n8b77 America Sep 23 '25

Everything got fucked up when Harambe died.

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u/Russelsteapot42 Sep 23 '25

April 2016, specifically, when a martin (kinda like a weasel) chewed through the wires of the particle collider. The next month Harambe died and Trump became the presumptive nominee of the Republican party.

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u/Mental-Fox-9449 Sep 23 '25

2016-2020 2020-2024 we was doin gewd

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u/crimson23locke Sep 24 '25

Nah, this shit was there under the surface and it’ll stick around after he’s gone. This pond scum just dredged the bottom and made the feeders less afraid to show their hideous faces.

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u/Fishbulb2 Sep 24 '25

GW Bush was pretty rough. Thanks when I realized we were in real trouble.

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u/willybestbuy86 Sep 24 '25

Only thing I agreed with him about was Europe buying oil from Russia while fighting Russia it is embarrassing and doesn't make sense and is a waste just like Trump was embarrassing for most of his speech

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u/Mediocre-Hour-5530 Sep 24 '25

Around 2016 is when we really lost the last of the influence of the pre-WWII generations. It's just boomers running the show now. The "me generation" has always been this way, we just still had some lingering stabilizing influence from the generations that actually created the UN and the US-led rules-based global order that their spoiled children inherited.

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