A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles - The Verge⁠↗

Like any large open-source project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires a lot of volunteer effort, and often uses way too much memory. But it enables everyone to submit requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities at every level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides an essential stability which allows people to keep buying into our country as the platform on which to build their own big ideas.

fixing the problem of school shootings requires admitting that a collective action problem exists. It requires admitting that the current policy solution — sending kids to school with fucking Kevlar in their backpacks — is less effective than restricting gun ownership in any meaningful way. He cannot do that. Trump cannot do that. Trumpism cannot allow that debate to happen.

Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.

The tech industry is also racing ahead with AI, even though it’s shown no ability to restrain itself from causing the most obvious problems: our social networks choked to death with AI slop, the death of photographic truth, and sexualized deepfakes of teenagers. These problems were all predicted and warned against in the most dire ways, and yet they have all come to pass.

But the absolutely fucked thing about the United States in 2024 — the looming dread that keeps me up at night — is that a bunch of tech billionaires have decided it would be easier if they were simply in charge of remaking society and have fallen in line behind a man they clearly despise because it’s easier for them to get what they want by manipulating the addled mind of a narcissistic monster than by winning people’s dollars in the market or votes in the ballot box.

You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.