Fake nostalgia and skillful propaganda got us here -- but there's hope on the other side

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : Plenty will just want to disengage from the body politic, but that's how Trump and his enablers succeed.
56% : In short, it's not that Trump is more popular, it's that he's just as popular as he ever was.
54% : In an attempt to make sense of Trump's victory, our collective emotions in this time of trouble and dread, what this election reveals about American values and character, and what comes next when Trump takes power in January, I recently spoke with a range of experts.
46% : We don't have the final vote count, but it looks like Trump got about 30% of the voting-eligible population, which is very similar to the 29% approval rating he had when he left office.
45% : Justin Frank is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center and the author of "Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.
40% : Trump has always used propaganda and rhetorical tricks effectively.
39% : In both 2020 and 2024, Trump got about 74 million votes -- about 11 million Biden voters didn't vote for Harris.
39% : But I don't blame the voters who chose Trump.
37% : Trump and MAGA present a novel problem to our media.
35% : The right-wing extremists on the U.S. Supreme Court have ruled that Trump and his successors are de facto monarchs who are, in every meaningful sense, above the law.
29% : I was surprised by the outcome because I was blinded by the great parts of her campaign, coupled with my own complete disgust with Trump.
28% : I am doubtful that the majority who chose to reject America's first female president and a woman of color fully grasped the scale of destruction that voting for Trump will unleash, but they soon will.
28% : I'm not surprised by Trump winning the election and defeating Kamala Harris.
27% : American voters were repeatedly warned about the existential danger posed by Trump and his MAGA movement, and a majority of them chose to embrace it.
27% : Political science fundamentals would tell us that this was a "change" election year -- people think the nation is heading in the wrong direction, the incumbent president is unpopular, and people's personal economic situation is stressed -- but it was hard to know whetherpeople would prefer to "stay the course" or "change," because Trump was also a deeply unpopular president.
22% : Trump has promised to be a dictator on "day one."
19% : "During his first term, Trump wanted to use the military to put down the nationwide protests of 2020 that erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd.
16% : So Trump gets laundered, and the analysis continues to get worse and worse.

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