Election Day 2016 Megathread

[AmareIsGod]

Wow. Just...... Wow. The world we're going to wake up in tomorrow. Thanks to our own stupidity. It's open season for terrorist attacks and hatred from around the world on a level we can't even imagine.

[AmareIsGod]

https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/796209910337900546

[Superbone]

Trump isn't the end of the world...

...yet.

[In2ition]

Step away from the ledge. The sun will come up tomorrow.

[Superbone]

Step away from the ledge. The sun will come up tomorrow.

But what about the day after that... and the day after that... What if Trump doesn't like a tweet from a world leader and pushes the button? I'm not on a ledge. It's more like a precipice.

[AmareIsGod]

These two Redditors nailed it:

Four years we get to listen to his pedantic bullshit.

And in four years, we have to sit through another goddamn election season where he's a candidate.

I fully expect him to appoint every conservative wingnut he can find to positions of power.

We're going to try trickle down economics one more fucking time.

We're going to boot 20 million people off of their health care, and institute health savings plans instead (great if you live well enough above your means that you can afford to set money aside).

We're going to ignore the Paris Climate Accords. The EPA will be left in tatters.

We're going to waste half a trillion dollars building a fucking wall, to address an immigration problem that is nowhere near our top concern.

We're going to defund the Department of Education.

And on and on and fucking on.

And I fully expect the Trump administration to be rife with scandals. There's a reason he didn't want to get into financial disclosures. He will use the office to further his investments.

President Trump, the greatest shitshow on earth!

Hopefully the sensible conservatives unite against him on the really dumb economic ideas like tariffs. Goodbye environment and civil rights though.

Will he be an inexperienced moron who can't accomplish his terrible ideas? Will he at least appoint a few intelligent people to his cabinet while amusing himself with vanity press conferences and personal vendettas?

Please. One of those. Just don't fuck up the status queue too much, make sure to embarrass Republicans and go away in 4 years.

[In2ition]

Civil rights are going to be taken away?

It looked like he hired smart people and picked a better VP. Maybe his strength is appointing and hiring strong people in positions. Honestly, you can't build what he's done by hiring bafoons.

[UglyTruth]

Is Trump the first president of the United States to have not released his tax forms?

[Nodack]

I am so bummed. I am so ashamed of America right now. World markets plunging overnight on the news.

Trumps campaign promises.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... -promises/

I just went through The Hill and was reading comments.

I hope President Trump classifies the Democrat Party as a terrorist organization and uses the military to snuff them out.

I pray that Trump is everything Democrats have accused him of being.
I'd love to be the guy that gets to shove Democrats into gas chambers.

Democrats aren't Americans nor people. They are the enemy.

Hey Democrats, You made it clear you want to destroy Trump voters and the white race.
You made it clear it's us or you. We have all the power and are going to use it to make you disappear.

We need to use all the power of government to destroy Democrat voters.
Defund any university that continues to employ leftist professors spreading hate.

I hope Trump has the DOJ use prosecutorial discretion and not enforce the law when Democrats are murdered.
Obama did it with immigration laws, so it's ok.

[UglyTruth]

I'm sure female White House staffers can't sleep well anymore knowing that Trump and his "grab em by the p**sy" behavior is coming to the White House.

If he thought he could get away with stuff as a celebrity, imagine what he thinks he's gonna be able to get away with as the freaking president.

[Superbone]

The world moves forward. The stock market is actually up so far today.

[Nodack]

I like your optimism Superbone. Trumps acceptance speech was a whole lot different than his campaign speeches. I was sure he was a fraud pretending to be a Republican before. Maybe he was just spouting hot air to fire up his masses. Today he is talking about what a great peson Hillary is and not talking about locking her up. One can only hope he didn't mean any of the stuff he said trying to get elected. We'll see how that plays out with his followers that want a pound of flesh.

[Superbone]

My advice would be to stay away from that website you quoted from. Those are horrible human beings. The bottom of the barrel. Thank god the majority of Americans are not like that.

[ShelC]

Unfortunately, comments sections and social media play to the extremes.

[Gladiator]

I like your optimism Superbone. Trumps acceptance speech was a whole lot different than his campaign speeches. I was sure he was a fraud pretending to be a Republican before. Maybe he was just spouting hot air to fire up his masses. Today he is talking about what a great peson Hillary is and not talking about locking her up. One can only hope he didn't mean any of the stuff he said trying to get elected. We'll see how that plays out with his followers that want a pound of flesh.

I fear the stuff he said to get elected is closer to the "real Trump" than the stuff he said in his acceptance speech.

[Mori Chu]

The world moves forward. The stock market is actually up so far today.

That doesn't shock me. The stock market doesn't really go up/down based on how happy people are or how good the world is going to be. Trump will probably reduce regulations on businesses, which will be good for some companies.

[Mori Chu]

Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy had some words to say about the election of Trump.

http://www.freep.com/story/sports/nba/p ... /93551178/

[Superbone]

Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy had some words to say about the election of Trump.

http://www.freep.com/story/sports/nba/p ... /93551178/

I love how he throws Arizona under the bus but gives Michigan a pass because "his county" voted for Clinton.

[Flagrant Fowl]

Unfortunately, comments sections and social media play to the extremes.

Everyone has said that social media has made the world smaller and brought people together, but in reality it's just made it easier for people to close themselves in with other like-minded people.

[ShelC]

So here are my thoughts:

I thought Hillary would win in a landslide. Whoops. The experts, pundits, analysts, pollsters...wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. This was never a conventional election season, Trump plowed through everyone, insulted everyone, bullied everyone, attacked everyone...didn't matter. It never mattered, for whatever reason. I think maybe people all along just never wanted to, or simply couldn't, believe Trump would get "this far". At some point he would flame out, slip up, go too far, finally get caught...but it never happened. I look back and at first, the media blamed itself when he won the nomination. "We should have done more to stop him". "We got caught up in the spectacle". Well there were no surprises this time. I wonder now if anything was ever going to stop him. Regarding the polls, seems a lot more people were voting for Trump than they were saying or letting on and that's not something that was taken into consideration.

I find myself not necessarily happy Trump won, but glad that Hillary lost. I think she's a dirty, corrupt politician who rigged the DNC and had the major news networks behind her, had tons of ties to banks and special interest groups and a lot of conflicts of interest across the board. I think people were tired of her and Bill, their arrogance, their shadiness. And I think, more than voting for Trump, a lot of people really just voted against Hillary. I think it was more about sending a message to Hillary and the "establishment". That said, if Obama of 2008 or 2012 were running, or if even Bernie Sanders were running, I don't think Trump comes close to winning. At the end of the day, the Dems and liberals will blame white America, the South and Midwest. But they have no one to blame but themselves. They didn't present a candidate that America wanted. They forced upon America a flawed candidate with a sense of entitlement and figured they'd all continue getting rich off of it.

I'm hearing, watching and reading a lot of things today that seem reactionary and to the extreme, mostly having to do with race. I think this is much less about race than some want it to be and making it only about race feeds into some of the media narrative, and IMO, fear mongering. This election brought out a lot of disturbing, disgusting behavior but I don't think that race was a deciding factor in Trump winning. We're coming off two terms of Obama, who won states that Hillary lost. Two Obama campaigns in which he beat an older Republican from Arizona who was a war vet, and then a billionaire businessman turned politician (with actual governing experience) from the Northeast. Hillary lost 2% of the white vote from 2012, and 2% of the African-American vote. Trump had 1% less of the white vote than Romney in 2012 but also 2% more of the African-American vote than Romney and almost 30% of the Hispanic vote. As close as this election was, those numbers make a huge a difference. Even with that, Hillary can claim the popular vote, which obviously doesn't sit well and is something that should be addressed in future elections.

In general, right or wrong, I think white people have felt marginalized across the country. And it's not just the caricature of Trump voters that's been presented: the pickup truck driving, southern uneducated hick with the confederate flag hanging outside his house. And there aren't 50million neo-nazis or KKK members who went out and voted Trump (I'm truly disturbed to see people saying/writing that the KKK "won"). There are college educated, middle to upper middle class families in suburbia whose ideals don't align with liberal/progressive agendas. This was their way of speaking up. I think Hillary simply overplayed her hand with the minority and female vote, didn't get nearly the numbers Obama did in those categories, and on top of that didn't speak enough to middle/white America. She won the major inner cities in most states - Detroit, Philly, Pittsburgh, Miami, Orlando, Tallahassee- but lost the rest of those states.

Now, I see a lot of hypocrisy from left and liberal Hillary supporters, which makes me laugh - the open minded liberals, progressives and activists who today write that they want to punch Independent voters in the face. Or that if you voted Independent, you shouldn't be allowed to vote anymore. Or they want to secede from the union. Because that of course, is what democracy is all about...."vote my way, or else!" "Agree with me or you're stupid!"

I actually feel better about our democracy than I did a week ago. Not with the results, but that something that seemed like such a lock for someone who worked so hard to make sure she didn't lose, fell thru. And all of those supporters are now throwing a collective temper tantrum. They didn't win, they didn't get their way, so they're protesting and making up hashtags. This is the younger generation, the "participation award" generation who wants things for free, complain when people tell them they have to work, cry when someone says something mean to them, can't accept losing. Maybe it's time to grow up. They mocked Trump supporters and Trump himself for being childish, and now are out protesting election results they don't like.

I'm still holding out hope that Trump will come out say, "Look, I'm not as crazy as I've been acting the past year. I'm not launching any nukes, I'm not rounding up Mexicans or Muslims. I said what I had to, to get elected. I'm here to work for all of you." I still think/hope that's in there somewhere. I think he'll walk back on a lot of things, I hope he'll lean more moderate, centrist. Only time will tell.

I woke up Wednesday morning knowing Trump won. There weren't any mushroom clouds over the major cities. No black people hanging from the trees. There were Hispanics and Muslims and people of color going to work with me on the train, just like every other day. The markets that were all crashing Tuesday night, rebounded and ended up higher on Wednesday. So the world isn't exactly ending. But there are things that worry me, like the Supreme Court nomination and all that comes with that. I worry about LGBTQ rights, gun control, abortion rights. I hope we can move forward and not revert back to where we started on those things. But again, only time will tell.

In the end, I hope DC woke up. I hope the Republicans were shaken enough to say, "We get it. We're not going to gloat and be s**theads now. If we don't work together and change some things, we'll be next to go". I hope that's what Trump will ultimately stand for symbolically - that people were tired of the norm, tired of the career politicians. He might end up being an awful president and I think he'll actually be bored in a year or 2 and look for a way out, but at least the people voted and democracy, for better or worse, worked.