When TSF "took office", did you think it would get this bad this fast? (Poll)

[orangecrush]

They made sure there were no grown ups to get in the way this time.

Musk and Thiel made sure of it.

Honestly, I thought it was impossible for this country to ever get to this point.

At least not in my lifetime

185 votes, 1 pass | Time left: Unlimited
	Yes
	115 (62%)
	No
	70 (38%)
	1 DU member did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[C_U_L8R]

1. I thought all this cr*p would happen during term 1

Felt we dodged a bullet when he left office… by then he had to come back again with a vengeance (literally). Ever wonder why traitors get capital punishment? Perhaps it’s so they won’t come back.

[orangecrush]

3. Like the civil war.

[IA8IT]

2. Yes after I saw what total ass lickers the pubicans had become for monster 45.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

4. I thought that he would repeat actions of his first term

[sop]

5. I believed in the separation of powers, and honestly thought Congress and the Courts could rein him in.

[orangecrush]

15. Same here

[haele]

26. Nope, when we also lost the Legislative branch to the GOP

I knew we would have to depend on the White House staff - and once I saw who the nominees were, I knew they were planning on pushing Project 2025 through as quickly as possible.

They're being stupid about it, but possibly because they think the orange one probably won't make it through the mid- terms; there's a some Conservative alliance breakdown; working at cross-purposes going on now to see who's going to end up on top of the bodies with enough of a country left to still make a profit off of, or enough of a base left to be able to keep stupid and bloodthirsty.

Anyway, the switch to Martial Law in Blue States seems to be what they're pushing for now instead of total dismantling of the Government...

[In It to Win It]

31. I didn't expect instutitions like universities, large companies and media and news organizations to be so fucking

weak and feckless.

The way they all lost the backbone and principles that they pretended they had so fast. They all caved to him so fast.

During Trump 1.0, there was a fair amount of backlash to Trump among private sector companies, news organizations and universities. It gave the appearance of a united front with structural and institutional backing against Trump's bullshit. There is none of that now.

Whatever resistance there was in the first term, it seems like Trump has crushed that now.

[ITAL]

39. I think part of the resistance in term one

Was Trump didn't know what he was doing, so he appointed quite a few people in his administration that reigned in his worst impulses. That mixed with the fact that he lost the popular vote gave the resistance more of a foundation. Trump realized the "mistake" - of appointing people who would tell him no AND he has revenge on his mind (which he didn't the first go round) AND he actually won the popular vote in '24 which made a lot of organizations think "well I guess he's actually the choice of the people."

All of that together killed a lot of the resistance.

[In It to Win It]

63. Yes, to all of that.

and this time, they are not letting bad news cycle stop them. They are not letting public backlash or public pressure stop them. This time, they want to provoke the public, and the left specifically, into resisting and protesting. They are looking for a reason to escalate and go further. This was not as true during the first term as it is this term.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. I didn't think it would be this bad in as many different ways.

I thought he'd have been worse on Ukraine - I expected him to stop all US-made arms supplies, and that really would have hurt Ukraine. But I didn't think he'd be causing this amount of mayhem on the streets of the US, bombing boats in the ocean, fucking around with the whole of world trade with tariffs, ripping up US science and health to the extent he has, and trying to seize Greenland. After abolishing USAID, and sacking random government employees to look "tough".

[a kennedy]

7. Knew it was gonna be bad, but damn, it's been absolutely horrible so far.

🤬 🤬 🤬

[NewHendoLib]

8. The lack of imagination of so many has been unreal to watch

It was all there in project 2025. He himself told everyone every fucking day.

[highplainsdem]

32. Where were the predictions of masked ICE thugs? Of people being deported to prisons in other

countries, with the US paying for them to be imprisoned there?

[NewHendoLib]

33. extrapolation of acts from a malignant narcissistic lunatic. Sadly, none of this surprises me -

maga is a cult. the media normalized all of this.

So - nope. I am sad, and devastated - but not at all surprised.

[highplainsdem]

34. But no one here actually predicted it getting this bad.

[NewHendoLib]

35. I didn't ponder all the specifics, but expected it to be bloody hell

This is why I've never watched a speech of his, turned off the news. He is a bully, ignorant, racist - you name it. I made a parallel with the worst of the worst - Hitleresque - hence me not being surprised at all. It was really all there on his face when Obama was making fun of him at the correspondence event - pure hatred, planning scorched earth revenge.

Believe me - I knew it would be this bad.

Maybe because I was one who was bullied early in school - I've had a burning hatred for the orange asshole as long as I've known of him.

[highplainsdem]

48. We all hated Trump and expected it to be bloody hell. Without specifics, though, I don't know how we can compare

what people expected, and when they expected it.

[NewHendoLib]

54. I don't understand your need for specifics.

[highplainsdem]

55. See my reply 50.

[Efilroft Sul]

38. I did.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219680430#post140

[highplainsdem]

41. There's nothing in your prediction there about violent masked federal agents, or people they capture being

sent to a dictator-run prison in another country.

We ALL knew it was going to be bad. But I saw no one predicting this level of anonymous lawlessness or use of foreign prisons.

No one predicting Trump would start rebranding the White House by demolishing part of it with no warning.

No one predicting anything like what happened with Venezuela.

[Efilroft Sul]

46. Did I have to explicitly spell out ICE?

"We better start focusing on defense, survival, and protecting and hiding the vulnerable members of our population before Trump gets sworn in. It's going to get dark faster than many realize." Who else was going to do all this violence, the EPA?

[highplainsdem]

49. We all expected ICE to be a problem. All of us. We didn't expect masked thugs doing what they're

doing, and innocent people being sent to foreign prisons.

The split we seem to have with this poll is between people thinking of specific actions and events that were shocking because similar events hadn't been predicted by anyone, and people feeling that because they thought it would be bad and maybe said it would be bad, that bad automatically included everything - including things they hadn't thought of or warned about yet.

[dhol82]

9. Just did not think it would this bad this fast

Never suspected that the entire Republican Party had gone this bat shit crazy!

[orangecrush]

18. That makes two of us

[Starbeach]

10. Yes, his age

gave him limited time for destruction. He has to speed it up.

[Tadpole Raisin]

11. I'm surprised anyone could be surprised. He learned to get

rid of anyone who supported the constitution. Once all the Nazis, white nationalists, sycophants, grifters and fellow malignant narcissists joined the administration the race to the bottom was bottomless.

They recognize and migrate toward each other and revel in causing pain.

[AZProgressive]

12. Some ways worse, some things not as bad as I expected

probably the worst thing I didn't expect is the lack of opposition to him like there was in the first term. Even the moderates had an appropriate amount of urgency and fought Trump tooth and nail which is why I think they were successful in 2020.

[RedWhiteBlueIsRacist]

13. It's spiraling out of control, and getting crazier by the minute.

What I see as worse, is the milquetoast response from way too many American people. I'm not into Christmas, but Renee Good was, and she just had her last.

[mvd]

14. I thought it would

All the talk about retribution, Project 2025, his madness only getting worse, etc. Election Day was one of my worst days ever. Just was stunned and so depressed.

[Bread and Circuses]

16. Yes! I was in meltdown in June 2024 when he won the R Nomination

[orangecrush]

17. Good foresight

[edhopper]

19. It's actually

Not as bad as I thought at this point. It will get worse. The Economy will crash, and things will go to complete shit.

[FHRRK]

20. Same

Although I think he will try a lot harder in 2026.

Look, the Country elected an immoral piece of shit who will do anything to keep his money and power.

Impeach him and who knows how far he will go. What Dems need to do is understand all Republicans are bad, worse than the German Hitler voters in the early 30’s.

But holy hell, we can’t get some people to shutdown Facebook and X.

[kwolf68]

21. No not this fast

I didn't really perceive this. YES, I knew shit was gonna get bad, but what is going on passed "bad" a long time ago.

[Tree Lady]

22. When I saw what Elon did the first month yes.

[In It to Win It]

23. I thought it would be more of a repeat of the first term. Trump 2.0 is much worse

This time, there is absolutely no resistance inside the Republican Party. In the first term, there was some friction, even if it was a little bit, and this time there is none. Trump is completely in control of that party. Since they are the majority, he can do whatever he wants. They will let him get away with literally anything.

[Maru Kitteh]

24. I'll admit it. I did not. They gutted the agencies to instill fear and compliance

Engendering obedience and accelerating complicity.

[Arthur_Frain]

25. I recommended people read "It Can't Happen Here"

Pointing out that yes it can, yes it will, and when it happens, it’s going to pin your ears back how fast he consolidates power.

I am so sad I was right.

[kimbutgar]

27. Yea he has been planning this for the 4 years he was out of office in his floridah mar a Lago white power house.

[unblock]

28. Honestly I thought this was what 2017 would be like

I was relieved at the time that he was too incompetent to pull it off during his first term, our fate was delayed 8 years. Once he was back in, I had no doubt. His first term was basically corrupting the judiciary and gathering intel for the second term.

[highplainsdem]

29. I don't recall anyone here predicting masked thugs employed by the government behaving like ICE. Or the

demolition of the West Wing. Or a display of presidention portraits at the White House with plaques criticizing/ridiculing some of them. Or what Trump has done in Venezuela.

Or any number of other things Trump has done.

[markodochartaigh]

52. I think, frankly, that after seeing

the masked agents in unmarked vans picking people up off the streets of Portland during Trump's first term as well as what Project 2025 says it wasn't difficult to predict most of what is happening with ICE, especially if you remember "Operation Wetback".

The portraits and the West Wing I view as spasms of an insane mind. And those are almost impossible to predict unless you know the person very well.


https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/what-project-2025-says-about-immigration/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback

[highplainsdem]

57. ICE's behavior has been worse. And no one expected

people to be sent from the US to that prison in El Salvador, with Noem and others boasting about how cruel it is, with overt, gleeful sadism.

The portraits and the demolition of the West Wing aren't just spasms of an insane mind. The portraits were rewriting history, and the demolition was Trump violating laws and asserting ownership of the president's house as if it was his personal property. But the way it was done was still shocking.

[BlueTsunami2018]

30. Yes, I actually read Project 2025.

But this is where the country has been headed since they backdoored Henry Wallace out of the VP slot and then FDR died.

The capitalists immediately began tearing down the New Deal, which was just a temporary buy off of the white working class to stave off a full on socialist revolution, started the Red Scare and continued the imperialism that had paused during WWII.

They brought Nazis into the government and gave them positions of power, they copied everything they could from their tactics.

They killed Kennedy, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, Fred Hampton and so many others who wanted to change things for the betterment of all.

We were going here with or without Piss. He just accelerated the timeline by ten to fifteen years.

[jmowreader]

36. I did not

I'm surprised while not really being surprised it's taken him this long to get this evil.

The only explanation for the length of time it's taking Trump to become a full-blown goddamned communist is the "frog in boiling water" story. It turns out that the tale is horse crap; if you put a frog in warm water and slowly turn up the heat Kermit will jump out when it gets too warm in there for him. However, the underlying theme of the tale isn't about frogs' thermoregulatory systems, but in inertia: if Trump would have immediately started invading oil-rich nations with small armies and having women shot in the face after he got back into office not even the Trump sycophants in Congress could have protected him, but by waiting until December we've already become hardened to his fascist crap.

[Takket]

37. i did not

even with project 2025, they are doing so many more horrible things i never even THOUGHT of, and i didn't expect SCOTUS to plow the road for him THIS MUCH, to hasten the destruction.

[Initech]

40. Oh I thought it would get this bad faster.

It's way worse than I could have ever imagined. Fuck Trump.

[orangecrush]

43. FDT

[highplainsdem]

44. You said both that you "thought it would get this bad faster" and "it's way worse" than you could have imagined.

????? Those are contradictory statements.

[Initech]

47. OK let me clarify.

I knew it was going to get really bad really quickly under Shitler.

But I never would have imagined we'd be in 1940s Germany right now. Holy shit.

[highplainsdem]

50. OK. That sort of agrees with something I mentioned in a reply above. We all expected it to get bad

Last edited Thu Jan 15, 2026, 12:42 AM - Edit history (1)

quickly. None of us, as far as I can remember, expected very many if any of the specific Trump actions. The people who voted that they expected it are focusing on that unspecific feeling that it would get bad quickly. The people voting that they didn't expect it are focusing on specific happenings shocking them, like people being sent to that prison in El Salvador, or Trump having the West Wing demolished.

[NewHendoLib]

56. Interesting premise. Thanks.

[Initech]

64. And this whole bullshit with Greenland came out of nowhere.

It was never mentioned in the campaign but they waited until the fucking asshole was wrongfully elected to bring it up.

[Cosmocat]

45. Said it would repeatedly

[GoodRaisin]

51. I thought he would overplay his hand.

So, guess I lean toward yes.

[mucholderthandirt]

53. Yes. In fact, I'm surprised it's not worse.

I had little to no hope that Democrats would even try to stand against him, and the people's reactions are a pleasant surprise. I'm having a tiny bit of hope we're going to do something about it.

It's not just Trump that has to go, though. All of the usual gang of idiots must go, including Vance, and all the Project 2025 believers have to go as well. Prison is a start, but I'd like to see something like the Nuremburg Trials, with appropriate results. I won't say that death is deserved, but... Well. Actions should have consequences that matter.

[hamsterjill]

58. Wasn't the first term bad enough?

I can’t believe anyone can be shocked by what is happening. Project 2025 was pretty clear.

[sop]

59. Did anyone think he would tear down the entire East Wing of the White House in the dark of night?

Or seriously threaten to invade Greenland? Or spend a year talking about annexing Canada as the 51st state? We all knew he was insane, but....

[highplainsdem]

61. No. See my reply 50 above for what I think is going on with the replies we're seeing here.

I'll just quote the relevant part of it:

We all expected it to get bad quickly. None of us, as far as I can remember, expected very many if any of the specific Trump actions. The people who voted that they expected it are focusing on that unspecific feeling that it would get bad quickly. The people voting that they didn't expect it are focusing on specific happenings shocking them, like people being sent to that prison in El Salvador, or Trump having the West Wing demolished.

[orangecrush]

62. Post Rec

[JustAnotherGen]

60. We told all y'all

Black women were clear on this. No one ever listens to us. They just use us for their pet social just project of the moment. Not anymore.

We are just waiting for when white folks take up guns against each other like they did in 1861. It's been done before, it can be done again.

I believe that is what it is going to take. But eh? "Listen to Black women" is just something folks have said to try and get us out in front of the guns of the govt. Not getting fooled by that.

[TBF]

65. Yes - because I read Project 2025. nt

[Coventina]

66. Yes, but things happened I did not expect. So, it got bad immediately,

just not in the ways I expected.