For Joe Reeve, the midterm afterglow faded fast.
The London startup founder was among the wave around the Trump-weary world awakening to the stunning news that Americans had sharply rejected President Donald Trump’s fist-in-the-eye stewardship of the United States that had started a war with Iran, forged no peace in Ukraine or the Mideast and made gas and food so expensive.
Voters, Reeve saw online, had flipped control of both houses of Congress, handing the power to check the president to his rival Democrats. American democracy, 250 years on, had survived the Trump era.
But a deep and profound distrust of the United States had survived the vote, too. And from national leaders to aspiring American immigrants, no one seemed confident that change was afoot.
Trust won’t return until systemic changes that made Trump possible are in place, and accountability for those who raped people and this nation happens. These midterms were a good necessary first step along the way. That’s it.
Nah, mate, this isn’t enough, not even when you vote out Trump. You guys gotta clean up your corruption, actually punish the violators, and restore the institutions and policies they have destroyed, along with restitution to the victims, including the foreign ones.
Otherwise, why would we trust you not to do it all again?
We haven’t actually done anything yet. We have picked people we believe will do the exact opposite of what the last batch we picked are doing.
The big question is if the new batch waiver or foolishly think they will survive the decade if they follow the standard Democrat Party playbook of empty promises, appeasement, and spinelessness.
The bulk of the other politicians in 1930s Germany didn’t have a good time after letting a psychotic minority party seize control.
MAGA is a violent but relatively tiny party inside of a smaller political faction that survives through gerrymandering and exploiting our anachronic election system. The Nazis gained control because no one opposed them. The question is if the existing politicians will get out of the way and accept the mandate of the people.
Just because the midterms didn’t go Trump’s way doesn’t mean US citizens have changed.
Most people who voted Republican in 2024 and Democratic in this year’s midterms did so for economic reasons, not because the Republicans in power are fascists, not because they disagree with what Trump has said over the last two years.
Trump is not a disease that has befallen the US and everything is fine if it’s removed. US citizens voted for him. They wanted what he promised: to make America great again and let someone else pay the price.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-exit-polls-2026-midterms-democrats/
Don’t trust us until Trump is gone. Even then, probably don’t trust us.
Yeah, and it’s unfortunately deserved. Why make any long term deals with America when someone unhinged could get elected and take a sledgehammer to everything anyway. It will take DECADES for America to regain the trust of the rest of the world
you shouldnt trust america until we ask for your guillotine maintenance experts.
Nothing’s gonna change. For me to think things are starting to change, this had to be a blue supermajority. It wasn’t. It was a close call. Blue won, but it wasn’t a victory so big that they got a supermajority in both houses which means there’s a fucking huge portion of usians still believing in maga.
This means we might have a 2-year pause from the US of doing awful things (MIGHT), but there won’t be a guarantee in the next elections they choose again another pedohitler.
It takes years to build trust and only a moment to shatter it. This next two years will be key to see if you are starting to rebuild that trust, but unless you purge the present administration and set in place the foundations for this to never happen again, this will not be considered a good start; just a pause in your shitty dictatorship.
We, as in the rest of the world, might start to do so once we see the current Junta hang and all their affiliates thrown into the deepest, darkest Oubliette.
Otherwise, we will just assume that you will bring in a new round of the worst and most despicable conservatives and pedophile rapists in 2-6 years.It takes a bit more than just some voting to regain the world’s trust that your favourite nations past time hasn’t become “Heil’ing” around and snacking Lead paint chips of the walls
Trump’s still there.
If the democrats don’t prosecute him and every single one of his cronies, there is no reason to trust America ever again.
They won’t, so there is no reason to trust America again. Trump’s a tool, he’s not the boss. He can’t even clean his ass.
Can relate, don’t trust the us and I live here.
Americans really only care about domestic stuff. We do not give a fuck about the rest of the world or our relationship to it. Do not trust us.
If this were true, we would have healthcare. Unfortunately our government cares about international issues that we don’t care about because its profitable.
Sad but true. The average American could care less about anything outside their state for the most part, let alone outside the US. Even though, their vote affects what happens all over the world.
Yes, Americans are much more likely to be bothered that we are spending money abroad than that we are killing and starving children abroad.
The mainstream argument against the Israeli genocide isn’t “we shouldn’t be supporting a genocide”, it’s “we shouldn’t be sending $4 billion to Israel”. The former wins a Democratic primary (only as of 2026), the latter wins a general election.
Wrong. We just care about domestic stuff more than international stuff.
Just like your country… and every other country.
Oh, it’s the drunk guy from tenforward with the hot takes.
Then how about America stops sticking their nose in the entire world’s business.
Oh, and fuck off funding fascist parties in Europe.
US history both recent and distant taught me that the US was never to be trusted. Trump is merely the icing on a really shitty cake.
Why do so many US citizens believe their country was amazing until Trump came along? Read your own history FFS.
Relatively heavy levels of indoctrination.
Its easy to indoctrinate people into something that is nice to believe ‘this is the greatest country in the world, anyone can become anything here’, what a lovely fantasy. Who wouldnt accept this falsehood when presented with it? Who would willingly reject it if they could easily lie to themselves instead.
Tbf, they are far from the only country that does this, its hard to distinguish why it can seem so much more prevalent in Americans.
Not making excuses but just so you know why so many of us are so ignorant of our history: Texas was, until a few days ago, completely controled by unhinged conservatives. They insisted on getting batshit crazy textbooks. For example, people in the US get textbooks describing the Civil War as “The War of Northern Agression” and portray it as not about the South fighting to keep slavery and force Northern states to enforce their runaway slave laws but rather some other complete bullshit. Texas is the biggest textbook consumer in the country so publishers try to put as much of the Texas appeasement as possible into books for the wntire country, rather than incur the expense if maintaining multiple editions. Tens of millions (maybe hubdreds of millions) of kids over the last few decades have been taught absolute crap at school. It’s sad and scary and frustrating and I’m hopeful that it’s finally hoing to change.
What you are describing can be summed up as propaganda. American life is thick with it. And for a country that can’t shut the fuck up about freedom, it’s despicable.
Yup. And our radio and TV and internet and schools are throughly polluted.
Well, it’s because the kids are indoctrinated to believe that the US is the best. Having to stand up at the start of the school day to do the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance.
And the history books like to go over the good parts. The not so good parts, like the Nullification Crisis, the fuckery from the US where they threatened to blow up Japan’s shit if they don’t allow trade, the colonization of the Philippines and operation to quell the associated rebellion, and the routine bullying of Haiti tends to be glossed over.
Oh, it’s going to take years, if not decades, to repair the damage dumbfuck has done.
It’ll never be repaired. Schedule F, gutting of all government agencies and mass exodus of career SMEs (various disciplines)…
There is no recourse for an “organization”. Turning civil servants into political appointees will never go back to the way it was with a simple regime change.
We are very much still fucked albeit, slightly less fucked.
Never is a long time. Germany systematically murdered thirteen million people in the forties. Obviously that does come up, but Germany largely rehabilitated its image by the 90s. Maybe earlier if we’re just talking West Germany.
I’m not saying with any certainty that the US will ever be as comfortable in the world as it previously was. But if people can get over the Holocaust in fifty years, I think the US has a puncher’s chance to sort things out.
Germany was lucky. The rest of the world came over and gave it an attitude adjustment. This probably won’t happen for the US.
The tricky part is that Germany was beaten in a war and had external forces standing over them forcing them to clean house. That’s not going to happen to the US, so there’s not going to be that sort of house-cleaning happening.
Very tricky. It’s a difficult road back to international accord, or at least what most Americans and Europeans thought of as international accord even though it was pretty spicy for everybody else.
But I think people in this thread are overestimating how long people’s memories are. Tricky doesn’t have to be long. I’m not convinced the Democrats have the momentum or frankly savvy to fully fix things, but I could be wrong. If in ten years people in the US and Europe look back and say “Damn, those were crazy times, but I’m glad we got that tariff thing sorted out,” I’m not going to be shocked.
I do think the Republicans getting taken behind the woodshed is important not just because the Democrats are more globalist (which they are) but because it’s proving that as crazy as things get, the US still has to play by the rules with regard to democratic elections, which have here sort of acted as a final safety valve.
I do think it’s nearly impossible that the US will ever have the sort of military power it formerly had as Europe continues to weigh its options, which… good.
I don’t think anyone born before 2015 will live to see an America that has fully recovered from all the damage Trump and his millions of fascists (mostly boomer) supporters have done to this country.
He appointed rather young folks to the Supreme Court. I figure we’ve got 40 years of every case that goes before them being decided for conservatives, the wealthy, and just our of sheer cruelty. We have rapists on the Supreme Court. Maybe not adjudicated in court, but proven being reasonable doubt in testimony before Congress. We will never remove that stain until he dies.
Quite right. It was bad enough when Biden pushed through the approval of Clarence Thomas by refusing to hear his victim’s testimony. The Trump appointees were way worse. You get the impression that Kavanaugh being a rapist is a big part of why Trump liked him.
If the Democrats wanted to set things right, they would expand the size of the court and dilute the votes of the corrupt and partisan, conservative justices. They could also impeach the most blatently corrupt ones, but that would take 2/3 of the senate while changing the size of the court could be done with a simple majority. I think they could also , with a simple majority, change it from a life appointnent to some reasonable term, like 8 or 10 years, but i could be wrong about that. Will they actually have the balls to make things right? Will their donors allow them to fix our very broken supreme court? 🤷🏾
What does this change?
Like 20 million parole actually came out and voted, which is great, but the system is exactly the same.
So how can we trust the US when frankly, never in its history has the US punished their leaders or this tore off behaviour.
For a country that brags about checks and balances, I’ve watched your leaders sell pardons, pardon each other, and your Supreme Court decided the president is immune to consequences.
I lined the day one sober comment, but the US isn’t even sober.
Exactly.
Its much, much too early to celebrate American democracy. They haven’t actually unwound anything at all, and whether they can or will remains to be seen.
Yeah … I’m not trusting American to do anything right any more. They keep repeating the pattern of ‘do stupid things’, ‘keep doing stupid things’, ‘hey guys I’ve stopped doing stupid things and I’m going to give you hope’, … then revert back to ‘do stupid things’ again … over and over.
It wouldn’t be so bad with any other country. The problem with the US is that they have such a big effect on the rest of the world due to the size of their military. It’s like having a really dumb neighbour and you can’t say or do anything about them because they have a really unhealthy number of machine guns and military grade weapons in, on and all over their house that everyone can see.