Kinda like now, only now there’s a lot more dead bodies
That’s when it started sucking really bad.
I was 14 in 2016; I lived in a red town back then & all I knew was “funny old blonde realtor who says dumb memeable shit on TV & Twitter is gonna be president? PEAK COMEDY ROFLMFAOOL”
10 years later, I have since been thoroughly disabused of that immature, uneducated teenage mindset.
At least the first time around he had appointees with actual government experience. This time it’s all low wattage knuckle dragging sycophants drawn from the storied ranks of podcasters, bloggers and pundits
/r/fuck2016 was subreddit of the year.
No.
2016 = MAGA/Trump does incompetence and stupidity
2026 = MAGA/Trump does unprecedented corruption, calculated evil, and inescapable damage.
I was very much so an adult in 2016.
2016 still sucked. But for me it sucked in “god this is stupid, I’m so glad it’s temporary” kind of way. It felt like a temporary accident and we learned from our mistakes.
2026 sucks in a “oh fuck, this is how the rest of my life is going to be” kind of way. Everyone knew exactly who Trump was and what he wanted to do; he was still the first choice for most Americans, and now it feels like it will never get better.
Not most Americans.
Not even most voting Americans. He only won a plurality, didn’t even get 50% of presidential votes.
It did, but its verifiably worse now
I was a full grown adult in 16 and I can confirm that it was not at all the same. 16 was “oh wow, this is really stupid and is going to take a lot of fixing”. 26 is "oh wow, this is absurdly evil and will take a lifetime to fix, if ever.
2016 was testing the waters to see what he could get away with, 2026 is an insane bigot that has been told that he has no rules.
2016 had him surrounded by people who could stop or at least delay his dumb ideas until he forgot about them. He then spent the next several years being courted by white nationalists, grifters, and sycophants who not only don’t resist his blatantly illegal orders, but are the ones pushing for them behind the curtain.
I was a full grown adult by 1990…been a prepper since they called us survivalists.
This is the worst I’ve seen our society. Things are far worse now than 2016.
I could see this coming in 2016, but it hadn’t arrived yet.
It’s objectively worse now buddy. That’s not in debate from anyone in the world.
+1. In my personal life things are much better and improved, but in terms of world stability, health of politics (at least where I live), the observed impacts of climate change, etc. pre-2016 was so much better on average.
Trump’s first term was a meme because it was just him slamming into government red tape every 5 seconds he wanted to do something stupid.
He learned his lesson and made sure to nuke every administration his second term with his own cronies lol.
When his first term ended, you could almost taste the relief that he never managed to do anything terrible and its like it was a 4-year lesson the world had to learn… Then the dipshits in charge failed to put the diaper-stain in jail to rot for his corruption.
People underestimate how much SCOTUS helped.
We have 6 people there that no longer care about the Constitution.
During that time I mentioned that Biden should have just jailed him over Jan 6. No trial needed, it was clear as day.
Got downvoted hard cause of mah process
Process matters more than outcome.
Then the dipshits in charge failed to put the diaper-stain in jail to rot for his corruption.
Justice is glacial or non-existent against people with money. It would have happened if he didn’t win a second term.
Most people didn’t believe he’d win in 2016, so they had no plan. They were ready for the second time.
I remember when the world thought George Dubya Bush was the dumbest president the US would ever have. This is worse in basically every possible measure.
Well, he caused about a million deaths and countless refugees from the Middle East. The chaos just didn’t reach the US in the same way as the one caused by Pedolf Diddler.
Even more than that, in a lot of ways this is the chaos he unleashed coming back on us. ICE was created by his administration as part of the overreaction to 9/11, and their whole strategy of “say person doesn’t have legal status, detain them in the cheapest and most dangerous facility possible, and charge taxpayers a king’s ransom to do it” was first dreamed up by the fucking ghouls in his DOJ, they just called them “enemy combatants” instead of “illegal aliens.”
Yes, it’s definitely a continuum and important to keep in mind. Thinking ahead, we don’t yet know what kind of ripple effects we see from the current administrator in 15-20 years…
The chaos just didn’t reach the US
The consequences and refugees of the Bush imperialist wars did reach Europe though. It helped right wing ideology to rise.
In Trump’s first term, the one good thing was that he didn’t start a new war and create more refugees and devastation. Of course now he and his masters are purposefully wrecking the global economy which is worse.
Yep, the reason I don’t want to mention Europe here is because Bush was and still is pretty widely despised in Europe as it is. I feel like the US still looks back at him with some nostalgia (remember how funny he was in that golf video?), but IMO it’s just because they didn’t really face any direct repercussions. Even if they paid trillions for his stupid wars, the effect was more indirect.
didn’t really face any direct repercussions.
Other than, like, the PATRIOT act and the beginning of the end for privacy and civil rights in the name of national security. Or a ton of education programs gutted to support No Child Left Behind. The effects might not be obvious but they are directly caused by his administration.
I don’t disagree with you, but I feel like we’re talking about different things. My focus is on what the general population sees and feels, yours is in on the legislative impact of the administration. The effects of those laws are of course felt now, but not many can draw the line back to the Bush administration when making the next voting decision. Contrast this to the Iran war, where the gas prices rose within weeks or days.
2026 is definitely worse. I was 36 in 2016, and there were some people in the government that weren’t abject cowards, but not anymore.
I had to talk down trans friends from suicide on 2016. We have been screaming about him from the rooftops (and in my case, stage) since then.
2016 sucked too, but less than 2026 does. AND you were younger, potentially more oblivious to many of the world’s issues (depending on age).
Both can be true at the same time. Nostalgia plays a big role here, but it’s by no means the only role.
Also it sucked way less because there were a lot of people helped mitigated the damage by having spines
I was 30 in 2016. That term was awful, so was GWB’s entire double term in the aughts. But today is, unfortunately, materially and symbolically worse by almost every measure.
Just the last two months of 2016 sucked and that was from anxiety for what was coming. 2017 was dogshit, but 2026 has been terrible in comparison because those assholes spent the last term planning out how to dismantle democracy and handed Trump a fucking playbook to do it. 2017 they didn’t know what they were doing and there were people appointed that at least stood up to his stupidity because they cared about the country over Trump. That’s not the case anymore.
I’m not American, but I remember thinking that clearly electing trump was a mistake but maybe it won’t be as bad as we fear. And at first that seemed not too far off. The Muslim ban got watered down, the wall didn’t really go anywhere. But no it ended up being much much worse.
I’m an American and I thought the same thing at first; when he was elected, I knew he’d be the worst president ever, but I figured that there were checks and balances on presidential power and he’d at least be restricted with what he can do. I didn’t realize that those checks and balances didn’t actually do anything if the president just didn’t care. When he was elected again in 2024, I knew it was going to be terrible because they stacked the Supreme Court and had a majority in the house and senate and the Republican Party is filled with sycophants.
