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.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 hours ago

    Nor should they. Not until we’ve shown real, sustained change. Trump is still in charge and like 30-40% of the country are apparently irredeemably awful.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 hours ago

    Please for the love of all that is good do not ever just trust us.

    Make us fucking earn that trust, if you even want to entertain the idea.

    Stop treating us like we are special, don’t enable us… it will help us recover from this crippling ‘American Exceptionalism’ we have suffered from for so very long.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    10 hours ago

    We are at least two years from anyone being able to START to trust our country again. In order for that to happen, we will have to not only have to give the government over to the Dems, but we have to make sure that MAGA can never rise again.

    It is clear that MAGA is an ongoing, enthusiastic National Security Threat, and that’s BEFORE we embark on the next two years, in which PeeWee Himmler is going to unleash unspeakable violence on the American people in an attempt to crush us, and eliminate elections.

    When we get our country back, we will have to prohibit MAGA from existing, and anyone associated with MAGA must be purged from our government. They are Domestic Terrorists, by their own admission, and our elected officials take an oath to protect us from all threats, “Foreign and Domestic,” and MAGA is exactly what they mean by Domestic.

    When we’ve purged MAGA, and passed laws that will shore up the weaknesses in our government that MAGA exposed and exploited (like increasing SCOTUS), and we start acting responsibly toward the rest of the world, then maybe the rest of the world can start to trust us.

    We’ve got a lot of work to do to restore America’s reputation and place in the Free World.

  • TryingToBeGood@reddthat.com
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    8 hours ago

    I would just like to say that that this has been a very interesting discussion, and I’m glad to see how civil it’s been.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    The problem is: the party has changed, but has politics actually changed, too?

    We know the Democrats to be toothless enough to think about rolling out the carpet for Trump instead of actually dealing with him.

    So we’ll just wait in how far they reign in their chief degenerate. If they stop his unnecessary wars, put limits to AI, scrap tariffs, and some other things out of Trumps pot of stupid ideas, we are open to talk again.

    Just standing and watching when Trump sells Ukraine and us to his favorite dictator Putin will not make them friends here.

  • lemmy_outta_here@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Why exactly would we trust the US again? All we know for sure is that SOME fascist-loving racist pedophile admirers hate high prices.

  • realitista@lemmus.org
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    14 hours ago

    You’d have to be a fool to trust the US again based on this. Getting the democrats to actually make progress on anything is not usually a winning bet.

  • VAK@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    The change in relationship between the international community and USA is happening more than just from Trumpism. This is the American retreat. Structural forces inside USA and outside are such that this is inevitable in the coming decades.

  • Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    Lol, nope, not trusting you people again for a long, LONG time.

    Right now you’ve done the absolute bare minimum blip.

    The rest of the world will judge based on your patterns of behavior going forward.

  • teslekova@lemmy.ml
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    15 hours ago

    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?

    • HellyBelly@lemmy.today
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      12 hours ago

      Agreed. And I’m an American. It’s not the government. It’s the huge amount of people who have been MAGA, tea party, Reaganites, McCarthyists voting for it. This shit has been going on for decades.

  • lennybird@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    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.

  • grober_Unfug@discuss.tchncs.de
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    15 hours ago

    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/

    https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/us-midterms-2026-what-motivated-voters-poll-points-to-economy-democracy-trump-backlash/articleshow/135528592.cms

    • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
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      20 hours ago

      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.

      • MangioneDontMiss@feddit.nl
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        15 hours ago

        If this were true, we would have healthcare. Unfortunately our government cares about international issues that we don’t care about because its profitable.

      • DonJefe@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        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.

        • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
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          14 hours ago

          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.

      • Mulligrubs@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Wrong. We just care about domestic stuff more than international stuff.

        Just like your country… and every other country.