Quote:
Originally Posted by G1..
Trump is responsible for the downfall of America ,trump and the people that support him.
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Before people talk about downfall, I think they should clarify what THEY mean by "downfall". Economic downturn, loss of world opinion, loss of hope, societal discord, or what?
I personally think that the U.S. is in a downfall in almost all ways, but what concerns me
most is the increase in race-based violence. Although the
start of that cannot be blamed on any one POTUS -- the slave trade was established well before 1776 -- there was plenty of white racism in all parts of the U.S. before the Civil War. I think that OPEN hostilities shown by blacks to whites started with Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, gained steam for decades after that (due in large part to most POTUSes turning a blind eye to such things as lynchings and KKK activities), subsided a
bit under FDR (thanks to influence of
Eleanor Roosevelt), and then subsided a bit more under JFK and LBJ
until the the 1965 Watts riot. However, after 1970 or so, open hostilities continued to decrease until Obama had been in office about a year or so, at which time both black
and white racism roared back to life -- at least in my opinion -- and this just got worse after Trump was elected.
What people tend to forget is that 43% of non-Hispanic whites voted for Barack Obama, a not-100-percent-white person, in 2008, although this figure went down to 39% in 2012. I think that the only explanation for this is that although many whites
were willing to give Obama a chance in 2008, quite a few of them changed their minds about him after he had been in office for four years. After Obama's reelection, racial hostilities continued to escalate, and as a result, Trump was elected in 2016. I think that if it there had been a Trump-Obama election in
2008, Trump would have beaten by a much greater margin than McCain was (and I don't think that McCain was a better choice than Romney, and he
might have even been the more appealing choice to Independents and/or Moderates).
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/poll...ps-voted-2008/
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/poll...ps-voted-2012/
Now all that being said, I truly do think there was much less
openly-expressed racism in the last quarter of the 20th century than there is now -- but I might very possibly be wrong because racism-fueled incidents are much more
publicized now. (I
personally have not
heard ANY white person use a derogatory name for a black person or express any bigoted opinions about blacks
in general for
decades -- not since I lived in Alabama for six months in 1973; and I have lived in predominantly white areas for all my life in four different states since then: California, Ohio, Maine, and Colorado.)
*and this opinion is based
only on what I have read and my personal observation for the past 55 or so years.