Brian Leeland, a 79-year-old Democratic voter in Detroit, had enough. Frustrated by the way the US media covers this febrile political era, from Donald Trump’s Washington to political campaigns across the country, he contacted the Guardian.
“Your decision to frame the race here as a simple progressive versus establishment choice is overly simplistic verging on lazy,” he wrote to this reporter, after our coverage of progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in the Democratic US Senate primary in Michigan. “As an electorate, we are not binary for the convenience of the media.”
His was a complaint I heard often as I traveled across the midwest to cover a host of contested Democratic primaries. So I called him up.
Leeland’s list of frustrations is long: grifters, liars, the two-party system, money influencing elections, the US’s standing in the world, the growing national debt and a fixation on cultural issues, not just the larger problems that plague the country.
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Nah they’re definitely less insistent on copying us after this year. A huge chunk of the world has looked at Trump and went “that’s not an ally. We need to diversify our allegiances in case the US goes nuts again”
It’s part of the reason China is becoming so popular on the international stage. They want to trade, and they’re stable. Trump’s foot stamping and attempted “dick waving” power trips have absolutely buried our reputation and bargaining power in the global community.
Turns out, electing a corrupt man-child who ruins everyone’s economy and messes with the global oil supply tends to make a lot of people not like you.
I agree with all this except “in case…”.
Our allies know that authoritarians that get voted in, most of the time don’t get voted out. I’m confident they’re worried about when, not if.
I’m convinced that those in power put trump in the whitehouse so that they could basically pull a private equity buy-and-bankrupt on the entire country
I think the long-term damage is worse this time around, because the fact that he could lose and then win again signaled that it wasn’t a fluke.