Trump, may I remind you, installed a number of those judges.

Right, after a lot of opportunities by Democrats to do things to stop him. The Republicans were willing to fight dirty and the Democrats kind of just rolled over and let it happen. That’s not even considering the world where they didn’t choose to run 2 deeply unpopular presidents on nothing platforms in multiple critical elections.

Those things have nothing to do with the subject at hand however. Let’s keep it in between the lines.

Is the subject at hand not “Why have we gotten into this situation?” The comic certainly seems to be about that in the most reductive way possible. All of this is relevant in trying to explain how we both have the president we have and why he’s able to do the bad things that are hurting people.

So you believe they should be allowed to install a sock puppet? I believe that was what we were talking about about, was it not?

I just don’t think that a country that hasn’t be relevant in 30 years can have more influence over our politics than the richest people in the world regularly pouring their money into the system. Trying to pin our problems on some external enemy is just missing the point. The Republicans don’t need foreign encouragement to strip the country for parts and sell it to the rich.

Sorry I figured someone familiar with our system could interpret that as checks and balances. Something trump is currently trying to break. In what language should I provide your native translation?

You wrote a sentence that didn’t have the information you were talking about in a comment that didn’t talk about what you say the “it” was referring to in a thread with several points of discussion. No reasonable person could just divine what you meant there. It’s just not worth having this conversation if you’re going to be this aggressive about pointless stuff.

It’s not about this being the same. It’s about what has contributed to allow this moment. Regular failures of institutions and vast wealth inequality that has been left undressed by the political system has made for a lot of angry people. Concentration of ownership in media has guided that frustration away from its true causes for the benefit of the rich and powerful. The electoral system is set up to favor conservative results and to squarely shut out left leaning candidates. The various expansions of presidential power and the tools needed to exercise that power has made it easier for someone like Trump to get away with things he theoretically shouldn’t. The courts being slowly corrupted. Etc.

What Russia is doing is besides the point. The US has plenty of it’s own oligarchs to mess with our elections already and we’re definitely messing around in other countries. If they weren’t touching anything, do you think we’d suddenly get some great elections that represent the people?

however; it is a feature of our system that has allowed us to retain some semblance of humanity and good will - despite the rot.

What is a feature of our system? You didn’t specify. As to us maintaining our humanity: We do terrible things regularly, but most people are so disconnected from those actions that they can’t really conceptualize the horror of it enough to care and do something about it. There’s always some excuse that helps them rationalize it. I don’t think most people WANT all the bad stuff. But in the absence of better education and media, it’s really easy to trick people into thinking all of this is actually good or at least not bad enough to do something about it.

Legally the president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally go to war, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing it for the last 70+ years.

Basically ever modern president has grabbed more power for the executive branch without being properly checked by congress or the courts. Combine that with an ever expanding military and surveillance apparatus and it turns out you can do some pretty bad stuff, regardless of the legality.

As for the rest of it, idk man. Clearly you have your rosy view of history where the US was a super great place before the scary Russians came in to corrupt democracy. All I can say is you have more reading to do.

Oh I must have been confused. I forgot that history doesn’t exist. Everything started with whatever was last on TV. Donald Trump is just randomly the president for no reason. There must not be any reason he has the power to do the things he’s doing. Nope. It’s a mystery. Carry on.

I mean, over half a century of neolibs gutting the small semblance of social democracy we had did this. And Biden was certainly one of those people. It’d just be more accurate to say Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Regan…