Kovukono

I know you’re looking for people currently living there, but I left not long after Trump got elected the first time (coincidence, not cause), and I feel like it’s helped me be a bit more objective about it.

I’ve seen my dad go from a die-hard conservative who makes a couple edgy jokes to someone who isn’t even trying to hide his support for Trump. At best, he says that Trump’s statements are overblown, at worst he supports them wholeheartedly. It didn’t improve under Biden’s term, and his behavior was one of the big reasons I feared a Trump victory in 2024. He felt no need to hide what he had before (that is, if he had it then. It could have grown over time as well). There was no reform coming for him, just deeper entrenchment.

On the other hand, my sister and Mom represent some of another segment of the US. Neither one follows politics because they’re just busy. When they do have time to relax, the last thing they want to do is catch up on things they’ve missed. Unless my sister has something blasted across her social media feeds, she doesn’t know about it. My mom just doesn’t really watch anything at all, mostly because she’s dealing with her own stuff.

I got to see the US change drastically when Trump got elected, with issues that affected literally everyone, and it turned out that part of my family ignored it, and the part that did know about it supported it. I know my immediate family isn’t a representative sample of the entire US (hell, they’re not even representative of my entire family), but seeing is believing. I never would have thought that people could be like this, but if this can happen to people I know, it’s not that hard to see it happening to others.

So, yeah. Even assuming Trump peacefully leaves power in 2029 (I’ve got no hopes of removal from impeachment), that’s four years of destroying good will, soft power, government services, and legal protections, and this is happening just after we had a president who, at best, could stabilize the country a bit before building back some of what was torn down in the four years prior. This time, the administration is moving faster and with more purpose in some of these areas, too. Assuming it takes twice the amount of time to completely rebuild all that the Trump administrations have removed, that’s still 20 years down the road to be at par with where we were 8 years ago. Foreign countries don’t trust the US to not elect a lunatic. It can be a normal country, some day, but not until I’m old, and not without a lot of internal changes I don’t see happening yet.

If you enjoy games like Outer Wilds or Return of the Obra Dinn, where you basically can only play it through once to figure out the secrets, it feels like this is going to be something you’d love. The downside is the roguelite element can be really punishing and make you feel like you’ve wasted a day, especially if you’ve found the secrets in those rooms. The good news is that there’s been at least a couple times where I found out items were puzzles days after I saw them, so it might not entirely be a waste.