It’s that time of year—the time when rationality seems increasingly scarce as political tensions rise. I find myself wishing I could have one of the people I see reaching super different conclusions shoot me with a POV gun so I could understand what it’s like being on the other side.
I’m not strongly left-leaning, so I don’t have trouble understanding why people may have some concerns about the left—but I have 0% support for Donald Trump, so if you want to explain to me why you think he’s great, go for it. I also think that the election is close to 50⁄50 currently, so if you think it’s 80+/20- either way, I’m also interested in hearing from you.
2 notes:
1. I really wish I understood how the irrational people were thinking about it, but unfortunately, they aren’t able to explain it to me in a way I can understand, so I have to settle for rational people on the other side, but if you feel you have a good grasp on how your less rational peers tick, please share.
2. In your comment, let me know if you want pushback or not. Let’s make the options: “just listen”, “listen and question”, and “open”. Just listen means I’ll attempt to only ask questions to clarify your meaning but not test edge cases. Listen and questions means I’ll also ask about edge cases, internal coherence, other considerations, but won’t be presenting evidence or making statements. Open means I can respond however I want.
I like Sam Harris’s description (from The Key to Trump’s Appeal—Episode #224):
This sounds reasonable to me, and would adequately explain my support in 2016.
But since then, he has done something that surprised me: he stood by Brett Kavanaugh. At the cost of losing the House in the midterms, Trump backed him. I don’t think any other Republican politician (at least at the time) would have done that. Neither side talks about this anymore, but I consider this the single best thing he did in office.
From a policy perspective, I generally like the decisions of his Supreme Court picks. I don’t like his tariffs, but think the Democrats’ policies are worse. I like his isolationism, but I don’t expect it’d be implemented.
Oh, and I’m open. Respond however you want.
Thanks for this! So, you mainly support him because he doesn’t make you feel judged?
Also, would you tell me more about what the Kavanaugh thing means to you?
I don’t think that quite captures it. That makes it sound like I’ve done something I think I should to feel bad about. No, it’s more the lack of sanctimony. The lack of … hypocrisy.[1] I despise the holier-than-thou self-righteousness of the other side, and he feels like the antithesis of that.
A related part of this is the inspirational aspect of his own behavior. Fear does not recall him from danger. Shame does not recall him from infamy.[2] He is vulgar. Rude. Uninhibited. Free.
Now, after saying all that, the Kavanaugh thing wrecks that narrative. Contrary to the meme, they weren’t after him. They were trying to hurt Trump, and he just happened to be in the way. I could easily imagine someone I knew and cared about being in Kavanaugh’s position, and the Democrats were casually ruining his life for their political goals. They were blatantly lying about him, and backed by the most powerful institutions in America, they were going to succeed. It felt inevitable that Trump, who I thought to be supremely self-interested, was going to withdraw the nomination, and, for no fault of his own, a man would spend the rest of his life in ignominy. But then, Trump defied my expectations and stood up to them. Against this force that seemed inexorable, he stood. At first alone, and then the Republican Senators rallied behind him. And they won: Kavanaugh now sits the bench. I guess it doesn’t sound like all that much now, but I was emotionally invested in this story as it unfolded, and the best description of what I felt is awe. The man I saw in the President’s chair then was a leader fighting against impossible odds for a righteous cause. I don’t think Trump is always that man, or even usually, but he can be.
I recognize that the mismatch between what he says and what he conveys makes this tricky to assess.
Yes, I’m deliberately omitting the third part of Cicero’s line.
Oh, that’s really interesting. I don’t think that you should feel bad about liking someone who makes you feel less judged. I think most people actually have emotional reasons behind their decisions, and knowing your own just makes you self-aware. And, for as much as the president affects our daily lives, maybe feeling less judged isn’t that tiny compared to the other theoretical benefits of having the right candidate in office.
That said, based on your Kavanaugh story, I do feel like I was missing something. As you point out, it doesn’t really make sense to like someone both for their morality and amortality. It sounds like its more like negative reinforcement, or “a breath of fresh air” with respect to the self-righteousness/judgement you’re feeling from the Left. Then, someone who was pushing back against that judgement did something you see as righteous and were emotionally invested in—the feeling of awe makes sense as a response.
Personally, my reasons for not supporting Trump are emotional. Of course I have logical reasons to support those, and I think some of those logical reasons are legitimate, as opposed to simply motivated reasoning/confirmation bias, but the direct reason why my brain is ready to say “the other guy” when it’s “do you want Trump or...” before I’ve even heard the rest of the sentence, is a strong negative mental association I’ve built with Trump over the past 8 years. And my best guess for that negative association is a combination of a) dislike of his divisive rhetoric, and b) fear of the impact of electing someone who rejected the norm of peacefully accepting election results. While mental associations don’t retain a full log of how they formed, they just are features of our mental landscape, I do have some memories to clue me in to how mine may have formed:
1. When Trump announced his candidacy, I didn’t take him seriously. No real negative association, but here was a tv personality trying to do politics.
2. By the end of the primary, despite having gone into it with the intent to vote Republican, I had decided I couldn’t vote for Trump.
3. When he won, I held out hope that he would leave behind his divisive rhetoric as a campaigning strategy and be a decent president. I changed my mind about this upon hearing his inauguration speech, which is possibly the most negative, divisive, us vs them speech I’ve heard from an elected official.
4. In 2019 I was still telling people they were ridiculous for saying Trump was the worst president. Had they heard of the trail of tears for instance?
5. In 2020, my negative associate with Trump J-curved. On the heels of using foreign aid to pressure another country into helping him win the next election, we had covid hit, and while I’ll never know the exact reasons, I can’t help but suspect that the anti-vax, anti-distancing stance of the GOP contributed to the US hitting number 1 in the world for covid deaths (more than all US military deaths combined), despite not being number 1 in population. Finally, in interviews before the election and in the debate, Trump refused repeatedly to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, which was a huge red flag for me. This ended up culminating in the election denial that has undermined tens if not hundreds of millions of people’s faith in our democratic system. Even typing this, I feel strong negative emotions toward a candidate who would refuse to accept losing an election. I don’t expect much from presidents, but being willing to give up power is definitely up there.
So, for me, instead of feeling relief from judgement or self-righteousness, the effect Trump has had on my personal life is increased levels of interpersonal conflict, more distance in some relationships, and more difficulty communicating and finding common ground with many people. This is a larger impact than I’m aware of any other political figure having on my day to day life, and it’s negative, so it makes sense that I would have a negative association with Trump.
As for judgement from the left, if you don’t mind me asking, what are your demographics? I’m a straight white cis-male with judeo-christian upbringing and no official minority statuses, and I would say I feel some judgement from the Left. I am actually concerned about the Left gaining too much power. But the Republican party I intended to vote for in 2016 doesn’t exist anymore, and I feel like rejection of election results, higher education, fact checking, epidemiological science, etc, are much more pressing concerns than the theoretical thought-policing dystopia I fear the Left could eventually evolve into. To be honest, I’m kind of upset with Republicans for removing their decent option and making me feel like I don’t have a choice, but I was never fully on board with Republicans anyway. It’s just weird how despite feeling like McCain and Romney were downgrades from politicians of the past, I wish I had them as options to vote for now.
I wonder why, despite also feeling some judgement from the Left, I ended up on the opposite side of Trump as you. Do you think you don’t mind his rhetoric? Or do you think it’s a first-impression snowball effect, or something else?
It don’t get the impression you’re making an effort to understand my position.
It barely feels like youreadmy response.It could be my fault; I will try to be clearer.You misunderstand me completely. I was criticizing your description. Which you’ve just doubled down on.
Sure it does. You just need to be clear what you mean: antiheroes are a perfectly coherent thing. He’s not a good guy, but he’s on the right side, and he occasionally does great things.
Their “self-righteousness/judgement” is the least of my objections to the Left, especially during the Kavanaugh affair. They fabricated obviously false rape accusations against an innocent man because it might get them what they wanted, and they knew they’d get away with it. I don’t think “evil” is a particularly useful term in general, but if it is to mean anything at all, it would be used to describe everyone who participated in furthering that. And they would have triumphed if Trump had done the easy thing.
My “demographics” are unlikely to be helpful in understanding my views, but fwiw: Male, South Indian heritage (though on any forms that ask, I leave that blank), either Millennial or Gen Z depending on whom you ask, middle class, atheist, advanced college degree.
I don’t think there are any concerns more pressing than that. I also don’t think it’s “theoretical” or “eventually.”
And since you mention McCain and Romney, you’ll remember that they lost. And I assess that to be because they didn’t actually care about winning, believing losing politely to be just as good.
I like his rhetoric. Funny and blunt.
What? I take the view that politics is distinguishing between friend and enemy, but that speech wasn’t that. I looked looked it up: he really only condemns the establishment/Washington.
Broadly, my suspicion is that you trust the establishment news media too much, and let their description of events affect your perceptions the way they intend. That would explain the difference adequately. Here’s a good test: do you believe Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 “fine people”?
As a side note,
Lots of people say almost identical things about “faith in institutions” or “experts/Science!™” as well. If their faith is misplaced, undermining it is good, actually. Electronic voting and mail-in ballots are more vulnerable to large-scale fraud than traditional in-person voting. And I bet you would recognize this if this was happening elsewhere. For example, Russia now has voting online, and plans to make that universal. I expect you understand why that system is not in fact “safe and secure” even if you can’t any specific fraudulent votes
Ok, well first let me correct that misconception: I am definitely making an effort to understand. Knowledge is the only thing I get out of this. If you feel I’m being insincere about any specific point, feel free to ask about it. But I think the difficulty in communication really just shows exactly that: real communication is difficult.
I interpreted your initial “That makes it sound like I’ve done something I think I should to feel bad about.” to mean “It sounds like you are implying that my reason for supporting Trump is bad” (I took the word ‘judged’ from your original post, btw), so this reply was saying “no, I am not implying that it is bad”.
Apparently, you were actually criticizing my description. By that, do you mean that you do think “not feeling judged” is a bad reason to support someone, or do you mean that it’s not an accurate statement about you. If the former, why do you think that it’s a bad reason, and what in general do you consider acceptable reasons? If the latter, how is me saying I don’t view it as bad “doubling down”?
For your next objection to my “it doesn’t make sense to like someone for both their morality and amorality”, perhaps I should have paraphrased less as directly quoted you with “the Kavanaugh thing wrecks that narrative”.
This implies you think it is actual and current. Do you think we currently have a thought-policing dystopia?
That’s reasonable. I would like there to be no enemies. Now, obviously that’s not the case, but it is almost never true that an entire group is an enemy, and it is often true that calling people enemies creates and perpetuates enmity.
You’re correct that I trust the establishment, though obviously not to a degree that I think is too much. I also think that you’re correct that this may be a crux. For your test, without Googling, my belief is that Trump said “there are fine people on both sides” in reference to the Charlottesville protests. Even if I’m incorrect about that though, I don’t think that it measures how much trust I have in the establishment news, since you haven’t measured my confidence in that belief or how resistent it would be to counter evidence. If some random person on the street tells me they just ate a bagel, I will believe they just ate a bagel, despite a relatively low level of trust. But that doesn’t mean I would stake much on that belief or resist counter-evidence. I don’t know if my current belief on this is true, but if not, I guess you can test how I react to counter-evidence (though you may have to distinguish between my resistance to changing my belief and my level of trust in the source of whatever counter-evidence you provide).
I was recently thinking about how I would explain my general trust in the established systems (science, education, free press, democracy) to someone who didn’t share it. It’s quite difficult, because I think at core it comes down to beliefs about what other people are like. Perhaps the best way to explain it is that my base assumption is that other people are like me, and when I think about how I would act in these systems, the result of them being filled with people like me is that they would be fallible but reasonably reliable. The other reason it’s hard for me to explain why I don’t distrust them is that trust seems like the default to me. Like I said, I’d believe a complete stranger’s claim about what they ate. When I ask a cashier the price of an item, I’ve never once thought they might lie to me. The vast majority of things I hear people say (and the things I say to others) line up with reality, so against that background prior of P(statement|human said it)~=0.99, it feels like I would need to understand why someone else think P(statement|human said it & establishmentIndicator)<50%, before I could begin to explain why I haven’t reached that conclusion.
I’m curious, do you have any beliefs that others label as conspiracy theories? How do you determine which sources to trust? Do you trust any of our established systems in (science, education, free press, or democracy)?
First, I apologize for my comment about you not making an effort. That was more an expression of frustration than accusation.
Let us shelve the discussion on the semantics of judgment vs. self-righteousness. Probably too subtle to be worth bothering with.
Before the Kavanaugh affair, I thought Trump acted entirely in naked self-interest. But how he handled it showed me he was more than I had given him credit for.
Yes. What do you think the “cancel culture” we’ve been decrying for years is?
Just to clarify, I didn’t come up with the friend–enemy distinction. That’s straight from Carl Schmitt.
I didn’t ask whether he used the phrase. He did. My question was whether you thought he used it to describe neo-Nazis. If you did, I wouldn’t blame you: that’s the impression the media has been cultivating. Would it surprise you to learn Trump, a few sentences later, said explicitly, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally”?
I don’t think your resistance or lack thereof to counter-evidence about this particular quote is relevant. The question is whether you will continue to trust the people who left you with that impression when they knew better. If they show you another clip of Trump saying something you think is terrible, will you assume until proven otherwise that it isn’t grossly misleading? If they claim “anonymous sources” told them things about Trump, will you believe they aren’t just made up? If they make a claim about how many lies Trump told, would you take that as a reasonable estimate if they don’t present you with a complete list you can inspect?
Your mistake is in assuming the statements you care about and act on are randomly sampled in the space of all statements that people make. No, they’d be adversarial examples, crafted to manipulate you.
Yes. Several. Without looking up a more complete list of conspiracy theories, I’d list the existence of the Deep State, manipulation of the historical record by the Soviet Union, and the biological reality of race and sex.
Nullius in verba. On no one’s word.
No, not really. Except for the “established systems in democracy,” the others have lied too much, and suppressed the truth too often. And the democracy one is secretive by design, and has done nothing earn my trust.
Late reply I know, but I wanted to add that I was very surprised by your take on Brett Kavanaugh, and wanted to explain my more negative interpretation of those events, as I see it as very helpful to Trump directly, and not about principles. Some points:
-Backing down from anything almost always involves giving up political power, and encourages people to challenge you in the future. Trump is known for consistently almost never giving up without a fight, even in situations like losing an election. This strongly discourages people from challenging you in the future, because they know it will be a big fight, even if they win.
-His goal appears to have been to install essentially a sycophant supreme court, that would consistently rule in his favor rather than based on laws, principles, etc. and Kavanaugh seemed to be someone likely to do this (and arguably has done so), and even more so after Trump fought so hard for him. It would have been very hard to find a replacement candidate like this.
-Why don’t you find the sexual assault allegations credible? I think people should be assumed innocent until proven guilty, but they don’t much seem like a conspiracy to me. Trump himself in his own words, e.g. statements on the “Access Hollywood” tape, and quotes about Epstein, etc. seems to frequently brag about being a sexual predator himself, and generally would not consider that a disqualification for any job.
Just one question, when he tried to steal the election using fake electors in 2020, do you think that was bad?
I reject the premises of this blatantly loaded question.
The strategy Trump attempted to win the election using alternative electors to keep Biden from getting a majority so that Congress would decide the Presidency, reprising the similar (successful) strategy employed by Hayes in 1876, was unlikely to succeed from the outset, and poorly executed to boot. So yeah, I think it was “bad” in that sense, but probably not what you mean. Do I think it was an insurrection or a putsch, or a threat to “our democracy,” or anything like that? No, no more than this appeal to electors in 2016 to change their votes was a foiled plot to overthrow the government.
I don’t know why you are bringing up the 1876 election, when that was before the Electoral Count Act, which sets the procedure for electoral votes that was used in 2020.
I’m still a little confused.
Do you think it would be fine if 2016 electors changed their votes so that Trump lost?
Does it depend on if it was legal?
Do you think it would be fine if Trump would have succeeded with his plans in 2020?
Does it depend on if it was legal?
Arguing matters of law regarding transfers of power in the highest echelons of government is … misguided. It’s like arguing with Reddit mods about what their rules say when they ban you. Or more classically, paraphrasing Pompey (via Plutarch), “Stop quoting laws at us. We have the swords.” What the laws/rules literally say doesn’t mean anything; how they’re enforced is all that matters [1].
(I suppose if one were religious, one could consider the letter of the the Law sacred in some way, not to be profaned regardless of consequence or enforcement, but I am not.)
If you win, there are many ways it can be made legal. For example, the Supreme Court rules on what the law says, they say the Constitution overrides all federal laws, and the Constitution says the President has the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons,” so he pardons himself and everyone involved [2].
The strategy Trump tried (or one very similar) worked in 1876. I consider that extremely relevant, though as I said earlier, the plan was unlikely to work in 2020. The Electoral Count Act passed in the interim mattered insofar as its threat was sufficient to dissuade Mike Pence (and probably several state governors) from coöperating, so I guess it did its job.
I don’t know what you mean by “fine.” I would have preferred Trump win. Some reasons for which I listed on my top-level comment.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean by “legal,” (according to whom?) but no, not in the slightest.
Is it even worth listing examples of times politically powerful members of the ruling class flouted laws they would have enforced harshly against commoners? Just look at the many instances during the “covid” lockdowns, for a start.
You could say their actions would still be illegal even if the law can’t be enforced against them, but I consider that a distinction without a difference.
This comment is just confusing me even more. If you found out that Trump threatened Mike Pence with a gun to try to force him to count Trump’s electors, would that be bad? You would prefer if Trump won, so that sounds like a good thing for him to do, right? But maybe you think it’s bad for presidents to threaten people with guns, so you think it’s bad. Can you answer what you think about this hypothetical?
They do this indirectly all the time. This is the basis of all laws of the federal government. Yes, I think it’s bad, but I don’t think it’d be fundamentally any worse for Trump to point a gun at Pence than for, say, an FBI agent (acting under the aegis of the Executive Branch, i.e., the President) to point a gun at a drug dealer.
But I agree it’d have been a stupid thing to do for many reasons: the threat wouldn’t be credible, he’d get removed from office even if it works, people he needs to govern would turn on him, voters will switch to supporting Democrats, … that’s not winning.
Edit: This is also the basis of my criticism of the rabble-rousing on January 6. It’s primarily a matter of aesthetics.
So the problem is just that it wouldn’t help him win? So if threatening Pence with a gun would have made him president, and the supreme court said that he was immune from criminal prosecution, it wouldn’t affect if you’d vote for him again? (Ignoring that it would be his third term.)
I’m a lifelong independent centrist who leans clearly Republican in voting despite my nature. I actually mostly read Dem or Dem leaning sources for the majority of my political reading (though it isn’t super skewed and I do make sure to seek out both sides). I would definitely vote for a Democrat that seemed like a good candidate with good policies (and have at the state level). I believe it is my duty as an American citizen to know a lot more about politics than I would prefer. (I kind of hate politics.)
I really wished there was a valid third option in 2016, but unfortunately I couldn’t even find a third party candidate that seemed better than Trump even then. Hilary was a truly abysmal candidate. That isn’t actually enough to get me to vote for someone, and I would rather do a protest vote than vote for someone that would be a bad choice. In the end, I only decided to vote for Trump two weeks before the election instead of a protest vote.
Due to preexisting animus, I probably would have ignored Trump’s actual words and deeds on the 2016 campaign trail if the media hadn’t constantly lied about them, but the things he said were both much truer than claimed, and actually made a lot of sense. The media has never stopped lying about Trump since then, but they just shredded their credibility with me and many others. I don’t recall the sources, but unless I am remembering incorrectly (which is always a possibility), this lying campaign against Trump was directly suggested through op-eds in major newspapers, and then implemented. You can probably make good points against Trump, but no one seems to actually complain about things that are both true and actually bad? (I am very pedantic about truth, and find that I’m not interested in listening to people who twist things and then pretend they are true.)
I deeply want to change and improve things, and chafe at the idea of being restricted to some old formula for life but I’ve been forced to realize that conservatism is necessary. I am very much a centrist in terms of ideology, but in the current state of America, that means being very open to conservative ways and values. Understanding why what you are changing is the way it is, and being careful with the changes are both very necessary; since most things are actually pretty well tuned, incautious changes usually make things much worse.
The extremely obvious reason why people support Trump is because he was a good and effective president (in comparison to other presidents, which is a low bar, I know). President is a very difficult job where people mostly screw up, and much of it is ceremonial, but Trump had a large number of successes compared to what I expected going in. The state of the country was clearly improved by his actions, and would be again. The country and world situation got much worse under his successor, Joe Biden (in a way that also mirrored the failures of Trump’s predecessor).
I’ve had a strong personal distaste for Trump for decades, but he was either the best president in my lifetime or very near. I’m loyal to the America, so I’ve been forced to upgrade my opinion of him dramatically. I still wouldn’t like to hang out with him, and wouldn’t encourage others to do so, but that isn’t the point of selecting a president. It’s for the good of the country.
He’s actually a centrist; there is a reason he was comfortable as a democrat before, and as a Republican now. None of his personal positions are extreme, and though he’s willing to work with people more extreme than him, and it tends to be to the right, the only reason he worked primarily with Republicans is because the Democrats were busy trying to score political points instead of advancing their policies. Since Trump actually wants things, people can work with him if they choose to, and they don’t have to do anything extreme to do so.
His opponents are pretty unimpressive at best. Kamala Harris was a terrible state politician (I’m Californian and saw what she did in my state); either corrupt as hell or incompetent as hell (likely both), though I don’t have particular evidence at hand of it. She was a completely ineffectual VP. Her VP choice is deeply unimpressive. She obviously helped cover up Biden’s decline into clearly being an unfit president. Her ideas are either stolen from Trump’s campaign or incredibly harmful. Almost no one actually expects her to be a good president? Just a few months ago even the Democrats thought she was completely incompetent, and she was only selected for contingent reasons that had nothing to do with her quality as a candidate.
Additionally, the Democrats have gone too far, and the Republicans need to be given another turn. As an independent, I wouldn’t want a particular party to grow too powerful, and the democrats are in a much stronger overall position in terms of controlling the country outside of politics. If Trump wins, the Democrats will still be in a strong position and have a lot of control over the next four years, while the Democrats might get away with going completely overboard like they have been trying to.
Some short points: He’s not the most accurate speaker, and really doesn’t care to be (which rubs me the wrong way), but he means what he says, and actually tries to follow through. I actually think he lies less than the standard politician, which is, I admit, mostly an inditement of his fellow politicians. He’s the only president I know of to reduce regulation. He appointed very capable judges whose legal reasoning seems pretty good (even when I disagree with them). He was willing to work with the opposition, but had genuine goals for the good of the country rather than just being political. I know what I’m getting with him at this point (Trump is who he is). Trump will be term limited, so the next election would be an even fight between the Dems and Reps.
If you want to respond to my post, I’m open to pushback, though I don’t know how much I would say since I am a long term lurker who rarely comments (mostly in bursts). I would prefer responding to things much shorter than my post here I admit. I’m not happy with how long this is, but I tend to be long winded on each point in a discussion and have to consciously dial it back. Since each part of my reply would likely be long, it would be difficult to respond to something this length personally. I would prefer to talk in general, rather get bogged down in details that are not actually important to how people actually view the situation. That said, important details are obviously important to talk about.
Wow, this is the most interesting reply I’ve gotten yet, because of just how much I agree with! I’m also a centrist. I also don’t want one party to gain too much power. And “since most things are actually pretty well tuned, incautious changes usually make things much worse” is such an articulate way of expressing exactly what one of my biggest political concerns is. I may steal that line!
Ok, so to respond, it seems like the main points are:
Media lies
Don’t want drastic changes
Trump had a successful presidency
Other candidates are unimpressive
Don’t want one party to have too much power
Media lies: I get this one. There’s something about seeing someone make false claims or bad arguments that pushes me to the other side. Interestingly for me, it cut the other way. I didn’t see much reporting about Trump in 2016 as much as I just heard him say things that were just blatantly false. Even getting past his continual bragging, he set a record for “pants on fire” statements. I wonder if I would have felt differently if I was mostly hearing media lies instead of Trump himself talking.
Don’t want drastic changes: Yes! 100%. I look at human history and see so much suffering, and we get to enjoy a peaceful life where I walk past strangers every day with no fear. And we have a political system where bribery is not the norm, people choose their leaders and laws, and leaders are supposed to serve rather than be served. I definitely believe in making things better, but just screwing with stuff without understanding it seems dangerous.
Interestingly, this is actually one of my strongest reasons I don’t support Trump. Trump objectively has less knowledge of the inner workings of the political system than any other main-party candidate in my lifetime. And he also is pushing for change as strongly as the most progressive candidates out there. He wants to “drain the swamp”. He also set a record for administrative turnover. He has pushed for government shutdowns multiple times. To me, he totally seems like he’s coming in with a sledge-hammer.
Most importantly to me, during his 2020 campaign, he repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. This is a gimme question that should be the center bingo tile for any candidate, but for him it wasn’t. Somehow a simple “yes, I’ll step down peacefully if that’s how the votes come in” was something he couldn’t say. This was a huge red flag for me, and when he then lied about the election, it confirmed my fears—that Trump wasn’t prepared to let go of power. That seems incredibly dangerous to me, and honestly, with no malice toward Trump himself, I think the best thing for our country would be if him and his family were thrown in prison as a result. Now, secretly, they could get carted off to a life of luxury in the bahamas or something, I don’t have any reason to want them to suffer at all, but I really need anyone considering a coup to believe there will be dire consequences for them.
Trump had a successful presidency: This one is really interesting. I had the exact opposite impression. There was tax reform passed, that’s a win. Other than that though, he failed to deliver on his promise of a wall or repealing obamacare (sure, because he had opposition, but it at least means he wasn’t successful crossing the aisle, if that’s a thing anyone can do nowadays). He had record administrative turnover and a brief trade war with China. And then, the big one, under his presidency, America hit number 1 in worldwide covid deaths, despite not being number 1 in population. Now, maybe none of this is his fault, but I certainly wouldn’t call it “success”. I’m curious if we have different sources of information, different ideas about what constitutes success, or just different emotional associations coming into his presidency that led us to opposite conclusions.
Other candidates are unimpressive: Yeah. I feel this one. I wish we had better. It feels like we keep getting stuck with picking the least worst candidate instead of the best. I guess I just have different values or views than a lot of people if those are the candidates that become popular enough to run.
That said, I’ve been impressed by Kamala’s rhetoric this campaign. She talks about being a candidate for all Americans. She talks about wanting unity and conversation. She has committed to a peaceful transfer of power, and talks about respecting the will of the people. Is it all just talk? Maybe, but talk matters. How has my life really changed since 2016? Mainly, I feel I’ve become disconnected from a lot of people, and people write eachother off more now and find less common ground. It feels like so many conversations are shiboleths for “are you with us or with them?”. That is the real impact Trump has had on my life, and it has primarily been from how he talks. He constantly uses “us vs them” framing in his speech, he broke all sorts of ettiquette norms for talking to and about other candidates. He is almost always airing a grievance or bragging about himself and his people. I feel that’s the thing that has actually impacted my day to day life, and I prefer a candidate who at least espouses positive values. And hey, maybe it’s not all talk! I’m willing to give her or anyone else willing to say they want to work with the other side in this political climate a chance.
Don’t want one party to have too much power: Completely agree. My voting strategy used to be to split my vote. I liked Obama as a candidate and voted for him twice, so I went into 2016 fully intending to vote Republican. And I would have happily voted for Jeb Bush, or Kasich. But, the Republican party put Trump up instead and started the transformation into what we see today. I think this was a mistake. I’m actually afraid that the left will get too much power because I think the Republican party has abandoned truth and goodness and will eventually collapse because a core of “us vs them” anger isn’t sustainable. I wish we had the old Republican party. I would happily vote for Bush, McCain, or Romney. But we now have an anti-vax, anti-fact checking, anti-higher education, anti-free press party that won’t admit when it lost an election, and as much as I fear how this is going to slingshot back too far left, I’m busy avoiding the current dumpster fire. I’m curious: what do you think about the current GOP vs the GOP 20 years ago?
In conclusion, I think we have a lot of the same beliefs/values, and it’s super interesting to me that we ended up on opposite sides of the “trump divider”. If you have any hypotheses on how that happened, definitely share them!
That got very long. (Over 19,100 characters.). Feel free to ignore parts of it. TL;DR: Trump has a lot of faults but I should reiterate that I really do think Trump was a good president by my standards and I think there is a very high chance the he would be again, though it is far from certain. My reason really is just that I think he was a dramatically better president than I expected he would be when I begrudgingly vote for him.
Sometimes I have to correct for my tendencies to go the opposite way as people are trying to push me, but overall it seems like a useful way to be if I want to come up with what my actual personal beliefs are.
Does Trump say things that are blatantly untrue sometimes? Yeah, and I really wish there were candidates I could select that just didn’t do that. I actually hate lying and liars so much. Give me an honest person that goes against what I want and believe and I will at least grudgingly respect it (if I can determine that is true, of course.) I don’t think we’ve had an honest candidate since George W Bush (and maybe not even then since I wasn’t paying attention during his initial election), though in some cases I have only determined that I believe they were dishonest after the election.
My personal definition of lying might be relevant to the discussion. ‘Lying is attempting to trick people into believing things that are either known to be false to the speaker or to which there is no genuine effort to correspond to reality.’
It is the first part being missing that makes me think he isn’t as much a liar as many other politicians. Trump isn’t trying to trick people in general, while his opponents are, so I consider his opponents to be lying and him to simply be a poor source of truth. That said, I do despise his lack of care, and sometimes consider it egregious (he definitely has often fallen under the ‘there is no genuine effort to correspond to reality’ part, which I would count as ‘negligent lying’ if he is trying to trick people. This is obviously very bad even when it isn’t lying.).
I do believe he is dishonest, and wish that weren’t the case. I think that the reason the word ‘trick’ for lying is important is that I wouldn’t consider something like a fictional story or a song or whatever to be lying in and of itself even though it is obviously false. He believes what he says, it just often isn’t true because he didn’t bother to check.
I believe that one of the reasons people claim Trump is more dishonest is that he uses fewer qualifiers that make things arguable, while something similar to what he said is often enough actually true, but other politicians are more legalistic liars, carefully not actually saying anything that can be easily checked. In other words, Trump says more things that are false while his opponents say things that are (intentionally) far more misleading and pernicious. This is probably where people came up with the ‘seriously but not literally’ claim about how you should interpret Trump. (Though don’t count on me to know what is going on inside other people’s minds. Mind reading is rude and we aren’t good at it. Yes, this makes it harder to know when other people are lying.)
Obviously saying false things is not a good qualification for president, but I have to grade on a curve to an extent.
“I look at human history and see so much suffering, and we get to enjoy a peaceful life where I walk past strangers every day with no fear.” is a good way of describing what society is for, though I would go further. We want the correct response to seeing said stranger to be ‘Yay! Another person!’ rather than ‘How do I protect myself?’ or even ‘ugh! How annoying.‘. Obviously we aren’t at ‘Yay!’ in general, but it is a nice goal, and we are so much closer than societies used to be to it. Early on, society focused more on just reducing the danger level, and now we are at a point when we can carefully try to improve beyond just safety. Some people, mostly Democrats but an increasing portion of dissatisfied Republicans (who are often Trump supporters) don’t seem to realize that it needs to be careful. Trump is not the most careful person in his personal life, but he isn’t trying to upend things politically due to his personal moderation on many political topics.
Lack of fear in general might be part of why people focus so much hostility on politics, which is one of the few places left where there are very large genuine conflicts that aren’t personal (to the average citizen). Politics is actually sort of a safe outlet for many people, which has many unfortunate effects, but at least means they feel like it is okay to do so and it won’t lead to them being harmed. In many times and places, having a discussion like this about a controversial political figure who was once the leader, and may be again, would be a very bad idea, but for most of us it is very safe.
His signature desires like immigration reduction seem largely aimed at patching the safeness of our society, though I would actually like to see immigration increased, just more carefully chosen for the good of people already present in our society.
His fandom of tariffs seems the same way. I don’t like them. but I get why they seem like a good idea to some people and find them less harmful than many other attempted patches.
If you look at the actual changes Trump has made, they have been very limited. Small reductions in immigration, small reductions in regulatory burden, a reduction in new wars, small increases in economic efficiency, small reductions in tax burden, and a new segment of society feeling heard, lowering the likelihood of going outside the system.
His judge appointments have made flashy changes, but these decisions mostly just revert things to letting the states decide and moving closer to following the actual laws and constitution of the country. Luckily, those aren’t actually big changes, and the fact that people think they are is just one of the signs that our society is currently functional.
Also, you seem to be coming at this from an angle of ‘How big are the changes to government?’ whereas I am thinking more ‘How big are the changes to society?’ The former is larger under Trump, and the latter is smaller.
He seems to see large portions of the government as intractably opposed to their duty in serving the country, and unfortunately I agree with that, so I am more okay with large changes involving the government if I think they are narrowly tailored against those elements and won’t have much spillover into society. (I do wish they were more carefully targeted.) If you want the internal workings of the government to stay as they are, I do agree that Trump is not the right selection for that.
That said, it seems pretty clear to me that Trump doesn’t actually want to reduce government as much as your average Republican, (or increase it to the same extent as your average Democrat,) which sort of paints him as moderate? Drain the swamp was ostensibly about removing corruption, and I actually believe that was the real meaning (though corruption claims are often used to consolidate power around the one claiming it in other countries, so we should be careful about that).
Also, to mention the judges again, I think the judges Trump has appointed are more than willing to rule against him on anything that is hard to support based on the way the system is supposed to work. Trump has not created a cadre of loyal flunkies that will just go along with his big changes. A large number of people think he will try harder on that this time, but he does only have one term if he wins and I’m not convinced that he will try to do so.
I can’t agree that Trump wanting the votes to be correctly counted (which is clearly how he conceives of it) should lead to him being jailed. I don’t think he actually did anything genuinely illegal (though a number of people are trying to claim he did). I think he did just let go of power, after going through all the genuinely legal approaches he had available. That doesn’t stop him from constantly complaining about it of course, but I believe that even obsessive interest in the issue isn’t criminal.
On January 6th, there was no attempted coup (just a riot which is bad, but not the same kind of thing), congress was not in real danger, and Trump did not support it. (I responded a bit more in depth to another comment about that issue as well.) It is highly unlikely anyone will be persuaded about those matters of course since everyone has heard a lot about it.
Trump’s successes (Keep in mind that I expect presidents to largely fail):
Lower taxes (letting people spend their money on what they want, not what the government wants)
Improved economy/improved buying power
A measured approach to foreign policy that keeps in mind our actual goals
A foreign policy that allows other countries to take responsibility for themselves
No new wars for us and reduction in old ones
Few new wars in the world
A lessening of border issues (aside from the grandstanding by both sides)
Minor increases in freedom (from reduced regulatory burdens)
Minor counterfactual increases in freedom (from not increasing regulatory burdens like his opponents want)
A reduction in the rate of large changes in the law (though this was not always his preferred outcome)
Returning some authority to the states or people by legislative means
Returning some authority to the states or people by judicial decisions involving his appointed judges
Not repealing Obamacare is a failure on one of his campaign goals. It was by the singular vote of a guy with a personal animosity toward Trump, and who had a brain tumor that killed him, and thus had nothing to lose. I personally believe that McCain’s act was malfeasance since he actually campaigned himself on eliminating it (unless I am conflating him with other Republicans), but McCain saw himself as a defender of the old order, a not uncommon thing among conservatives. Trump did eliminate the mandate to buy insurance (which is the truly offensive part to me).
Not getting political buy in for the wall is also a failure of one of Trump’s campaign goals, but he did notably improve border security during his presidency. (Which promptly got worse again after Biden won. The wall would have been helpful.)
I admit that I don’t think of Covid as being a significant determiner in how I should think of Trump’s presidency (nor Biden’s). I honestly stopped paying attention to it a long time ago and never was super worried about it. (Perhaps this is partially due to personal experience: When I got Covid it sucked, but not any more than many other illnesses I have gotten in my life. It was perhaps slightly above average discomfort, but far less than things like the flu were when I was younger. I actually got the flu early in 2020 too and that was much worse. The rest of the family seemed to think the flu was worse too.)
As I recall, death rates from Covid are highly dependent on things like age, demographics, and preexisting health issues which Trump could hardly have been expected to change on his own. The presidency is powerful, but not that powerful, and the US death rate would be expected due to preexisting conditions. The things he did like closing the border were reasonable, though a little too late to actually be helpful.
His ‘operation warp speed’ did genuinely help the world to get vaccines very quickly compared to normal by paring back regulatory burdens, though it should have gone further. (Things like human challenge trials to immediately know whether the vaccines worked when developed could have cut several more months off the time, since the actual development only took a small number of weeks and safety testing could have been rolled into initial deployments as the factories started producing them.). We could have had vaccines before there were many deaths at all.
Death rates were overreported while I was paying attention (the famous, ‘with covid or because of covid’ thing is a big difference in the reported death rates between not just countries, but even states and counties in the US).
Also, I don’t believe statistics from places like China (who were clearly faking) or India (who are pretty third world in a lot of places, according to Wikipedia, the 125th to 136th in GDP per capita, which leads me to thinking they barely have real statistics in the country, though that could just be my prejudice). Those are the only countries with more population than the US. Also, the other countries with large numbers of people are generally pretty young (and thus not susceptible to such death rates) even if I did believe them. If I am not wrong, you have to get down to Japan which is vastly less populous than the US to find the next country with enough of an elderly population.
I honestly think that most of the damage from Covid was overreaction (like shutting down ‘nonessential’ businesses and screwing up supply lines in a way that lasted for years). Covid just isn’t a super deadly disease, and we changed the way society worked for years to a massive degree because of it. I believe that hurting the economy both directly and indirectly increases death rate substantially, just not in ways we know how to count.
Covid overreaches were mostly state level, though the CDC behaved like clowns. Trump was clearly not an expert on infectious diseases, and didn’t pretend to be. Unfortunately, the experts were themselves to blame for much that went wrong. (Unfortunately, the elderly often die from other Coronaviruses too, and when I heard what the general death rate from Coronaviruses in the elderly was, it was kind of shocking, though I don’t really remember what it was now. Coronaviruses that you haven’t encountered before don’t get antibodies quickly enough in the very old, and covid was genuinely novel to immune systems.)
A bias I probably should have thought to mention in my initial take on his presidency is that my life and the life of most people directly around me got better during Trump’s presidency, while during Obama’s and Biden’s they got clearly worse. In late 2019 and 2020 (despite Covid stuff) my life was so dramatically better than it had been before. Note: I don’t think this had anything to do with Trump but subconsciously I obviously would think ‘how do the years when he was president compare to other years?’ And I actually think that is a good idea since people can hardly know the actual effects of the changes over the period. This is likely a strong effect.
I always disliked Hillary, but I think Kamala Harris is much worse for some reason it is hard to determine. Honestly, I wouldn’t trust a anything Harris would say after her stint as Attorney general of California and I thought she was dramatically worse and more corrupt as a candidate for Senator than the other Democrat (who I did vote for because I found that despite not agreeing on policy, she seemed like a decent person and fairly moderate Democrat). I honestly don’t remember the original cause of said antipathy against Kamala, but I trust it for some reason. Obviously that isn’t convincing for other people (and rightfully so). Most California attorney generals and senators are people I disapprove of policy wise, but I think about them vastly less negatively.
She’s not my least favorite Californian politician (“Hi, Newsome.”) but she is probably second or third. I can’t actually bring to mind much of what she did representing California. (I do tend to especially dislike San Francisco Democrats. In my part of California, which is purple, the Democrats are nothing like San Francisco ones, at least when they are campaigning, though statewide tends more towards San Francisco style.)
As for Walz, he seems to be an extreme liar, (though I can’t necessarily trust that judgment since I haven’t researched him much,) though that is sadly par for the course these days in candidates. While, he’s pretty par for the course, I still hate it. Also, and this is a very untrustworthy judgment based off very limited information, he seems like a deeply angry and sanctimonious person. I think that one of the other answers mentioning that Democrats are very sanctimonious is part of what I don’t like about high profile national Democrats. I should probably research Walz more, but I doubt I will? Hopefully he doesn’t stay nationally relevant and I don’t have to think about him again? I don’t honestly have an opinion on JD Vance aside from thinking that his wife speaks well so I can’t really compare the two.
I do think I should put more effort into determining whether or not JD Vance is a decent backup president (which is one of his main jobs and the only one where he isn’t mostly a figurehead), but I honestly tend to put off a lot of my research on things until late in the cycle, and I already know I won’t vote for Kamala under any reasonably foreseeable circumstances, so I am paying a bit less attention to that. If it were to turn out Vance was bad enough, that would be a good reason not to vote for Trump, but would not be a reason to vote for Kamala.
Remember that I think the Dems are much more powerful on the national scene in almost all parts of society other than politics, and I’ve seen what happens when they get too powerful (in my state). I wouldn’t be shocked if the Dems managed to nearly maintain their current level of power even if they are soundly defeated at the national political level. In part, that is a bit of why the Republicans need to win, because the Dems will crush them if they don’t. (That could be biased by the fact that I am Californian, which means I watch the Dems routinely crush the Republicans. Perhaps I am overestimating the strength of the Dems and underestimating their foes.) That the Dems are stronger than ever is both an indictment against Trump, and a reason the Republicans need to win; the Dems will crush them if the Republicans lose many more times and we might be in for 20 years of pure Dem victories.
Honestly, I prefer the old Republicans too. By a lot. They were much more my style. I miss that era of the GOP.
I get why it changed though. Twenty years ago (also 40), the Republicans were genuinely trying to improve the world in a usually conservative way (which I am very much up for in many cases), but a decade ago, Republicans were using a ‘death with dignity’ strategy rather than fighting like Trump does, and people got tired of electing Republicans who were too concerned with their dignity to act, ceding cultural victory to the Democrats.
Losing slowly is not a popular strategy with voters most of the time. Trump basically did a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and did improve its chances of succeeding at Republican goals, though it also tossed some Republican goals aside and increased the chance that the Democrats would win enduring major victories quickly. I do think that the changes to the party aren’t necessarily permanent whether or not the Republicans win, but that would be because it could always change again.
If Trump wins, I think that could lead to a lot of reforms in the Republican party that would marry parts of their old style with a willingness to fight, but that probably doesn’t happen if Trump loses and his faction of the party gets repudiated.
That isn’t entirely bad, I don’t like a lot of the ideological changes and want a careful approach, but I am more worried about the power of the other team (and some of the ideological changes are good). Once your opponents know you won’t fight, you are doomed. Even worse would be if his faction gets more extreme after losing and it is the rest of the Republicans that get booted.
Also, I very strongly think that every country should be led by leaders that want to make the country great. ‘Make Liechtenstein Great’ should be the slogan of the leaders of Liechtenstein. Whatever that means to the people of Liechtenstein. This holds even for countries like China that I think very poorly of.
do you still believe all of this?
Honestly, I’ve wondered a few times if someone would come back to this and ask that question. Still, it took me a long while to go back over my comments when I saw it today. I am loathe to make a final determination on these matters when there is still so much to come.
As always, this will be long, but the quick version is: Yes, I largely stand by my position before the election on Trump, though it is far too soon to tell at this point. I expect that things will continue to look fairly normal societally for a short while due to Trump’s election. Business as usual in the rest of the US, and maybe some improvements in DC. I thought changes were happening very fast under the Biden administration, and so much of the movement just seems like a return to normality (maybe I’m getting old). I do find myself notably more concerned about what the right could do now than I was, but I still worry more about the left.
Long version (no need to read unless you want to):
My basic desires in what I want in a presidency / government have not changed.
I do think it is much too early to judge how this iteration of the Trump presidency will turn out. Whether I supported picking a president or not, I like giving them more time so that I can actually make a good judgment. Sometimes it is very difficult even in retrospect, and there is so much fog of war for things in the present.
I still believe that Trump passes my (relatively low bar because it is an extremely difficult job and most presidents get poor results) for having had a good presidency to this point, both in his first term, and very preliminarily in his second (though it is much too soon to see the results of a lot of it). He seems to actually believe in most of what he is saying to an unexpected degree among high level politicians.
There has actually been less controversy thus far in his second term than I expected, because I was pretty sure that the left would go hard for it regardless of his actions, and I thought Trump would be far less popular than he seems to be with centrists and others without a political home (so far he is more popular in his second term as far as I can tell). The media is still lying, but fewer people seem to be listening to them. It’s hard to find good sources on a lot of things, and I don’t find them on some matters at all.
I still don’t like his demeanor, which is brash, crude, and not overly concerned with being a good source of information, but he has been a far more serious leader than I expected this time around. I have an impression that he is vastly more serious than he was in his first term, and spent the entire time in between terms preparing (though, as always, plans go awry when meeting ‘the enemy’ and their plans.). Most of the things he does that seems like they will work out do, and ones that seem like they shouldn’t, seem to go surprisingly okay? He could still screw that all up of course. It wouldn’t be a surprise.
I was pleasantly surprised when Trump’s response to Elon Musk going scorched earth was so moderate, and it indicates that Trump is being very deliberate in his presidency. They even seem to have made up to an extent.
I still think Trump is a centrist in general thoughts and beliefs (though the intransigence of much of the left makes his actual actions seem less so). He is well to the right of the more extreme Democrats, and well to the left of the more extreme Republicans. He seems perfectly willing to make deals, and while he makes more of them with Republicans, he often backs the moderates in Republican party rather than the more conservative members. In a different situation, I believe someone with the same beliefs as him could be considered a fairly rightist Democrat, and that it is mostly circumstance that made him a Republican president.
His most publicized actions (the deportations) are often coded as right wing, but are in reality simply law and order, and not in an especially draconian way. I strongly support deporting those who are in the country illegally, even though I actually favor increasing the amount of legal immigration quite a bit (as well as a switch to being more merit based since my ultimate ‘American in their heart’ criteria is unworkable; people would just lie).
I’ve certainly heard claims of illegitimate deportations, but I’ve found them surprisingly weak. Only one I have heard of was actually illegitimate, and that one was a simple error in destination rather than in being deported. I believe that, given how hard the media has tried to find them, not seeing any egregious cases indicates that they are rare enough it would be impossible to eliminate them entirely (though you can hardly expect the media to find a significant percentage of such cases, there are enough deportations that if there were a large number, it would be obvious). I firmly believe that Tren de Aragua (I hope I spelled it right) members being deported in the manner in which they were does fit preexisting law, so even though it is highly unusual, I don’t see any reason to object.
As a Californian (though from a different part of the state), I completely support Trump’s actions so far in regards to nationalizing the California National Guard to protect federal property and personnel in LA that were clearly under threat from people the city and state decided not to control, or couldn’t control. (I would disapprove if they were used to actually do ICE’s job, because our military is not meant for use in law enforcement, and ICE can handle it, but that hasn’t happened.) Protecting federal property and personnel when the local government can’t or won’t seems like a perfectly valid use of the National Guard. I disapprove of Newsome refusing to cooperate with keeping basic order in his/my state, and strongly disapprove of his lawsuit to try to stop it (especially since I think the merit of the lawsuit is quite minimal legally speaking, despite the one court trying to say otherwise).
Trump is also sticking to his campaign promises to a greater degree than I expected, but not in a way I object to, even when I didn’t like the campaign promises.
I was and am against tariffs except as a negotiating tactic to get foreign countries to treat American business better, but surprisingly they have thus far not increased prices. I am not convinced tariffs are somehow worse than other taxes, and have seen no evidence that they are, so I think that, counterfactually, taxes and tariffs added together are likely to be lower impact than they would have been under a Harris presidency, which would have raised a lot of other taxes (especially by letting the previous Trump admin tax cuts expire).
I think the chaos around tariffs was partially intentional as a negotiation tactic, but I do disapprove of that part. I am pleased that he is obviously not dead set on large tariffs if he thinks he can get a better deal for America otherwise. Overall, the relative lack of price increases is much more of an improvement compared to what I expected than the method of implementation is a downside. Inflation actually keeps being much lower than most seem to expect so far; we’ll see how that turns out.
His opponents were still terrible, and it is even more obvious as time goes by. I don’t want to grade him by that low a standard, but it has an effect on how I evaluate the parts I disapprove of, though I try not to just let someone off the hook if they do something wrong.
Judges he appointed have made rulings I agree with, and ones I disagree with, but seem less likely than ones appointed by Biden to make rulings I find egregious (I don’t have a list though).
His appointees don’t seem especially partisan (considering that everything about how federal judges and the Supreme Court judges are appointed are is very political these days), though the slant when they are is mostly in the direction you would expect. His appointees also very often disagree with each other and don’t seem afraid to rule against him (even when I think the case favors the administration at times), so I would rate his judges as reasonably centrist considering that they are conservatives who were picked to be acceptable to conservatives. I also believe that the schools of jurisprudence favored by the right currently are closer to correct (textualism and originalism, which both fight against things getting more extreme.)
I am also unsurprised when a president rails against judges that rule against them, and try to find other ways to do the same thing if they can’t get an appeal to work in their favor. I don’t really think he does so any more than other presidents, just in more direct terms (and I generally prefer directness, even if I don’t agree with his actual manner). So even though I don’t like it, I didn’t expect better.
I still think Trump is not powerful enough to cause a permanent rightward shift except in areas that had been rapidly going left, and that it is likely that another term for the Democrats would have solidified a lot of their more bizarre changes such that they actually kept happening. I fully expect the Democrats to be back in power soon if they realize they can genuinely move to the center, though they don’t really seem to be doing that right now (and I would expect them to win back the house in the next election even if Trump is doing amazingly well and they don’t moderate more than a little). With a strong candidate, they can probably win the next presidential term, and reverse the changes Trump makes easily enough, for good or ill.
Most institutions are still under control by Democrats, but I am (very!) surprised by how much progress the right is making in dealing with that. Political power is surprisingly effective when someone is willing to actually use it. I want to wait and see how that goes. I don’t want pure Republican control of them any more than I wanted pure Democrat control, so, we’ll see. If the Trump administration turns out to be bad, that is one of the more likely reasons at this point, which I certainly didn’t expect back in October.
I do not believe that the Trump administration is persecuting their political opponents, and that the Biden administration was. Harvard and the like certainly believe they are being persecuted, but I believe they are simply suffering from their own hubris in ignoring the previous rulings against their actions. I usually hope not to be wrong, but especially so in the realm of political persecution because that is extremely corrosive to the noncorrupt governance. A large part of the reason Trump needed to be elected was to have that persecution fail.
To break out another part of that, I believe that Democrat politicians doing things like interrupting an event (such as California’s senator Alex Padilla during Noem’s press conference) and being escorted out forcefully after forcefully resisting, but not charged is hardly persecution. It’s hard to tell if I would have a different opinion if Padilla was good otherwise, but I was distinctly unimpressed by his stint in California politics, and this is the only thing I have heard of him doing at the federal level. It reeks of Padilla doing a publicity stunt. Of course, a large portion of politics consists of publicity stunts (even amongst centrists).
I’m still not convinced whether Trumpism will remain a permanent part of the Republican party or not.
I still really like the last statement I made:
”Also, I very strongly think that every country should be led by leaders that want to make the country great. ‘Make Liechtenstein Great’ should be the slogan of the leaders of Liechtenstein. Whatever that means to the people of Liechtenstein. This holds even for countries like China that I think very poorly of.”
That’s probably a large part of why people (including me) like Trump. He’s unapologetic about America needing to be great. I don’t want a lot of change, and America was still great, but refusing to try to be great makes things go in the other direction. I find it somewhat distressing that so many people on the left have repudiated national greatness. (Though I should reiterate that I think the country should be great for the citizens, not necessarily on the international, or even national scale.)
can you be specific? like… i read ur comments, even the precedent ones and is like “i liked trump for all the things he did” but u never actually say what he did that u liked… and then “i don’t like biden and the left for all the things they did and would do” but u never actually say what is so bad that they did or would do… is like an extremely long word salad of nothingness.… i have a few questions to try to force you to take a real position:
- what would it take you to regret voting for Trump and admit that he is a disaster as a president? (be realistic no zombie apocalypse scenario allowed)
- what are 10 good things that Trump did in his previews 4 years? (i am talking the creme de la creme the best you got the reason why you believe he is so great, be specific no stuff like “less taxes” that alone means nothing i want you to say what exactly he did)
- what are 10 things you voted Trump to do in this new term? (again the best you got the reason you voted him and you need to be specific stuff like “less regulation” makes my brain boils since it has no meaning… what regulation are we talking about? do we want lead in bread? i don’t understand be specific...)
- what are 10 bad things that the Biden administration did? (you said there were a lot so i am looking forward to hear the 10 worst they surely must be so awful if they steared you to the right… again be specific no stuff like “i didn’t like how they handled this thing”, i want to know exactly what they did that you deem as so incredibly wrong to go on pair with the Trump administration)
- what are 10 bad things that the Kamala administration would have done that were gonna be so incredibly bad to go in pair with what we got… before you said there were a lot of them but you didn’t actually said any specifically… which is frustrating imo
btw wring long things is fine and cool but only if in the end it helps conveying what you have to say and you can actually get to the point… otherwise i may as well use ChatGPT and ask it to “stretch this comment in 3 pages without changing anything”… which i am sure we agree would be counterproductive to comunication…
I am willing to be more specific, but you aren’t even engaging with what I’ve written at all; and there is no way I can deliver something that is true in the exact format you are requesting. Also, if you read my initial postings, I was stating a position to help others understand what it is (they asked for understanding of Trump supporters), not trying to write a persuasive essay. This quote from the end of my first thing is very important “I would prefer to talk in general, rather get bogged down in details that are not actually important to how people actually view the situation.” I am still only trying to help my interlocutor understand the though process, not make an argument. I am not trying to be persuasive.
(Do people appreciate me doing this? Hard to tell. My overall karma is slightly positive on these comments as a whole but the comment you are replying to seems to only have ‘disagreement’ votes. I’m not sure whether that means they think I shouldn’t make the comments.)(Yes, all of my asides seem necessary to me.)
Distilling a gestalt down to a list is very lossy and not very good. I wrote long because I had to so that I could get across the extremely many points inherent in honestly answering the question (and didn’t have the many hours necessary to produce a high quality essay). If I have to choose between honesty and brevity, I have to choose honesty. I very much would like to be able to get across all of my many points in fewer words, but your comment about ChatGPT was completely unhelpful. If you think I didn’t make any points you are simply wrong, and if you think I belabored them, perhaps you are right, but they were as brief as my skill could manage. This post again turned out long, because it had to be. Perhaps if I was a more gifted writer it could be shorter, but I am not.
A presidency cannot be judged based off 10 exact actions unless someone starts World War III. Summary is often necessary, and things like ‘less regulation’ are the only reasonable level to do it at. (A very large portion of the information involved in anything is stored in summary form even within the person themself.)
I can’t possibly have the reasons exactly sorted out in the format you want. I can give you 10 details, but they won’t be the best details that are possible, because that would require many, many hours to put all of the reasons into words, and think through exactly what order reasons should be in. The posts you found unsatisfyingly general already took at least a few hours each to lay it out in detail. I provided so many details at only a moderate level of abstraction (with some being quite concrete), and a lot of summary with it, along with a great deal of my reasoning. You need to engage more fully with the gestalt if you actually want to understand.
I am willing to answer your questions, but I cannot follow exactly what you asked in making them the ’10 best’. Now to answering the questions.
There is only one thing that would make me regret voting for Trump: The feeling that America is worse off because of Trump being president than if he hadn’t been. Yes, a feeling. It’s vague for a reason. I can and do compare general factors for goodness and badness multiplied by his responsibility for them versus counterfactuals, but after that, it is all intuitive. All analyses I do on any subject are heavily dependent on intuition. Comparing a gestalt to a counterfactual gestalt is hard to put into small details. I don’t stare at the trees to discover the broader trends of the forest.
Some good things Trump did in his first term:
*You mentioned hated my mentioning ‘lowering regulation’ but he clearly did (I forget the numbers, but he genuinely reduced them). I liked the method through which he did it, and the fact that it happened, not based on individual regulations. He implemented a simple rule with two factors. The factors were that the agencies had to get rid of more regulations than you formed anew, and that the estimated financial impact of compliance needed to be equal or less than the current rules. I thought that was brilliant and every president should do it until we get down to a reasonable amount of regulation.
*Kept inflation low
*Kept unemployment low
*No new foreign wars
*Reduced taxes on business (lower marginal rates), reduced taxes on individuals (increased standard deduction)
*Spoke directly to the populace frequently on the theme of America and Americans being great
*Did not support anything I find especially bad (obviously this is important, no matter the vagueness!) (Whatever you find outrageous, I obviously don’t agree it happened, who is responsible, and/or the interpretation thereof)
*Worked within the structure of our government (also vague but important)
*Was clearly the person actually doing the job
*He picked judges for the supreme court that support textualism and originalism (which are the only schools of jurisprudence I can support)(I strongly favor textualism if there is any conflict)
Some things I voted for Trump to do in his new term:
*Most importantly, continue his governance from the first term since I think it went well. (Only as vague as it has to be.) Try to make America stay great. Protect America from its enemies. Etc.
*Enforce the border, preventing as much illegal immigration as reasonably possible while also preventing smuggling of things like drugs or weapons or whatever, and more generally, enforce the laws the left doesn’t (vague for obvious reasons, but obviously including things like deporting illegal aliens, keeping public order, and prosecuting rioters). Most laws are enforced by states of course, so I don’t and didn’t expect him to have much effect on most crime, but still.
*Prevent his tax cuts from expiring
*Be willing to confront China to prevent their bad actions from having the effects they desire. (Vague because those actions are chosen by China, and I object to the leadership’s choices but don’t know in advance what they will be. I also don’t know the ideal way to confront China.) China cannot be allowed to become a great power under current leadership (which I believe is evil).
*Prevent Kamala Harris from becoming president
*Prevent the Democrats from accruing more power in general
*Make deals with foreign powers but walk away from bad ones
*Support Israel against terrorist governments (including Hamas and Iran’s government) rather than hamstringing them
*Prevent rogue nations like Iran from getting nukes (whether by peaceful means or not)
*Prevent lawfare against Trump from making the party guilty of it win
Some reasons Biden was a terrible president:
*He was mentally incompetent for at least a large stretch of his presidency! We don’t even know which parts he was competent during. He was completely unwilling to admit this and remove himself from the presidency. I despise Kamala Harris, but he should have made her acting president after voluntarily stepping down, especially after it became clear to the world that we had a mentally incompetent president. (Luckily there were none of our foes used that fact to their fullest advantage.) He presumably never realized how incompetent he was, which means he certainly couldn’t have planned for his own lack of capability in planning things.
*Border enforcement was a complete and utter joke. A country that has no border is incredibly vulnerable. (See what Israel just did to Iran.)
*He never achieved anything positive of which I am aware.
*Inflation was the highest since Carter! (Also a one term president for obvious reasons.) His policies of pumping way too much money through the government are the likely cause (including the absurdly misnamed ‘Inflation Reduction Act’).
*The selection of egregiously incompetent people for his administration, like Kamala Harris. He selected both her and supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson based on what appears to be demographics / DEI. He selected people in general based on demographics. (This is both super racist and super sexist.)
*The feeling that politics got a lot more divisive during his term (which also occurred during the Trump and Obama presidencies, to be fair)
*He supported lawfare against Trump (I believe that none of it was justified), severely damaging our traditions against it (and inviting retaliation).
*Clearly extreme corruption involving enriching himself and his family through his son Hunter’s accepting money to put people into contact with, and get favorable treatment from Joe Biden
*Unprecedentedly pardoning people (especially his son) for things they did over an extremely long period of time and not even in a restricted category! (Obviously after the election)
*I feel that he had absolutely no respect for the constitution, laws of the land, or the importance of faithfully executing his duties as president.
*The world became a more dangerous place under his watch (including Hamas’s actions, Russia’s invasion, China getting a more advantageous position, etc)
I think all of that easily qualifies as Biden being a terrible president, but I won’t say they are necessarily the best reasons. They are just what I could think of now.
Some reasons I believe Kamala Harris would have been a terrible president:
*I am Californian, and she literally never did anything I heard of in state politics that was positive. When I compared her to her (also a Democrat) opposition in statewide office, I very clearly knew I should vote for her opponent.
*Even Democrats generally said she was incompetent before they ran her
*She had no vision for America that made any sense. I can’t even say what she might have claimed it would be.
*She failed to do her duty to the country and invoke the 25th amendment to remove Biden from the presidency when he was mentally and physically incompetent, putting her ambitions ahead of her loyalty to the country, and leaving the US in a vulnerable state without leadership if something drastic happened. (Even Kamala Harris would have been a better choice for that interim than Biden.)
Some terrible things Kamala would do as president:
*Continue her wretched performance in border control (and likely worsen it)
*Continue to promote DEI in her administration and the country / not select for merit
*Wealth taxes (the worst likely tax)
*Price controls (the worst likely economic policy) / anti-‘price gouging’ laws (ensuring you get shortages instead)
*Continue and escalate lawfare against opponents since it would have worked against Trump in this scenario
*Raise tax rates in general (marginal, corporate, and miscellaneous) / let the Trump tax cuts expire (even with the Trump tax cuts, rates were still too high)
*Fail to reform the government at all
*Egg on rioters and support law breakers from the office of the presidency / fail to faithfully follow the constitution and faithful execute our laws
*Serve as an example that parties can simply decided who our next president will be
*Be extremely weak in foreign policy / lead from behind
*Fail to prioritize the needs of the country to have a functioning market, cheap prices, abundant surplus of goods, physical safety, and equal enforcement of laws because she believes that would inhibit ‘green energy’ and DEI
Far less likely but still too high a likelihood:
*Some chance (I don’t know how likely) she would side with the genocidal antisemitic strain of her party (I think few Democrats support that, but a disturbingly high percentage of their activists do, and I don’t remember her pushing back against said activists.) She seemed much more likely than Biden to support them (and Trump obviously supports the Jews).
There are also some minor positives for Biden/Harris and some serious negatives for Trump, but you didn’t ask for those.
it sounds like you haven’t actually thought this throw and so you cannot actually come up with anything at all… you are trying to say that you not being able to come up with anything is justified by the impossibility of it? that to me sounds unreasonable and irrational… but let’s look at the points that you did write down since that is the only thing i can actually address because “vibes” are meaningless...
Some good things Trump did in his first term:
*You mentioned hated my mentioning ‘lowering regulation’ but he clearly did (I forget the numbers, but he genuinely reduced them). I liked the method through which he did it, and the fact that it happened, not based on individual regulations. He implemented a simple rule with two factors. The factors were that the agencies had to get rid of more regulations than you formed anew, and that the estimated financial impact of compliance needed to be equal or less than the current rules. I thought that was brilliant and every president should do it until we get down to a reasonable amount of regulation.
what method? like… you wrote 10 sentences on how great he lowered regulation but you have not mentioned a single regulation… a single law he passed a single thing he did specifically… you see how frustrating this is? it sounds like a movie phrase like “they defeated the evil” but reality is not a movie we need specific things are not black and white… so this point is out
*Kept inflation low
this point also invalid since Trump administration didn’t implement any policy to actually make inflation low… so it could be argue that the economic climate of his presidency was just good and it did not need any tampering… if anthything Trump policies added a staggering $7.8 trillion in national debt even in a time of economic prosperity making those cuts unnecessary someone could argue...
*Kept unemployment low
American unemployment has been “low” for the past 12 years as far as i am aware it was low even during the Biden administration which had to deal with a pandemic… so unless you can mention something Trump actually did to lower unemployment this point also goes… again i asked for things the Trump administration DID not a description of American economy as it always was… this is your top? the best of the best you could come up?
*No new foreign wars
again… what did Trump do that was somehow preventing foreign wars druign that time? this point is so irrational i find myself at a loss of words to see it wrote on a community such as this… if the sun rise tomorrow is it thanks to Donald Trump? the fact that a metorite didn’t strike earth between 2016 and 2018 was it thanks to Donald Trump?
*Reduced taxes on business (lower marginal rates), reduced taxes on individuals (increased standard deduction)
what taxes? be specific? how was it good? these general statement of “he defeated the evil taxes” is what i don’t like…
*Spoke directly to the populace frequently on the theme of America and Americans being great
every single president did that… so… like… is this the BEST of Trump? 4 years administration and the top of the top someone can say about him is that he did some speeches where he said america good? what president hasn’t said so in the past 200+ years? lol
*Did not support anything I find especially bad (obviously this is important, no matter the vagueness!) (Whatever you find outrageous, I obviously don’t agree it happened, who is responsible, and/or the interpretation thereof)
the most subjective point there can be… i could write an entire book about things Trump supported in 4 years that are horrendous… i am not sure how someone can say he didn’t support anything “bad”… but again this is so vague it feels like you are unwilling to mention what you actually want to mention are you afraid?
*Worked within the structure of our government (also vague but important)
is interesting how you recognize the vagueness of such statement… why write it at all? what president didn’t “work within the structure of our government”? lmao… Trump spent his last year saying the election was stolen and orchestreting a way to delay the certification of the vote with false electors… his lawyers were disbarded and his speech fomented a moab to the capitol… how more away you can go from the structure of the government then that?
*Was clearly the person actually doing the job
”the job”? what is “the job” he did? are there president that weren’t doing their job?
*He picked judges for the supreme court that support textualism and originalism (which are the only schools of jurisprudence I can support)(I strongly favor textualism if there is any conflict)
so… supreme judges are basically the lottery for a president so i am not sure what to do with this point either… also what is the source for this statement? to me it seems he just choose the judges most loyal to the republican party… like it is reported in numerous media format so your interpretation that he picked them because of “textualism”… like i am not entirely sure Trump would know what “textualism” is or mean...
Some things I voted for Trump to do in his new term:
*Most importantly, continue his governance from the first term since I think it went well. (Only as vague as it has to be.) Try to make America stay great. Protect America from its enemies. Etc.
point means nothing so i will jump it
*Enforce the border, preventing as much illegal immigration as reasonably possible while also preventing smuggling of things like drugs or weapons or whatever, and more generally, enforce the laws the left doesn’t (vague for obvious reasons, but obviously including things like deporting illegal aliens, keeping public order, and prosecuting rioters). Most laws are enforced by states of course, so I don’t and didn’t expect him to have much effect on most crime, but still.
any source for the claim that he would do such thing? just because he says so? this point is very opinionated and tries to insult the left as people that don’t enforce laws for some reasons i fail to understand… anyhow… during his first term the numbers of deported were not any higher then before… as of now Obama still stands as the president who deported the most illegals and despite the irrational mainstream belief that Biden administration didn’t enforce the laws on immigration they actually DID do just that… they also tried to pass a bipartisan law which would have finally put a stop to the loopholes used by immigrants the law was about to be approved and pass senate but Trump with a now reported call to republican senators stroke the law down because otherwise he would have not been able to use the immigration issue in his presidential campaign
*Prevent his tax cuts from expiring
what tax cuts? what benefits do they have? again with “the evil taxes”
*Be willing to confront China to prevent their bad actions from having the effects they desire. (Vague because those actions are chosen by China, and I object to the leadership’s choices but don’t know in advance what they will be. I also don’t know the ideal way to confront China.) China cannot be allowed to become a great power under current leadership (which I believe is evil).
we are beyond vague at this point… i will just ignore this “point” and move on...
*Prevent Kamala Harris from becoming president
this the BEST reason to elect Trump? without any actual explenation just “kamala bad trump good” what even is the argument?
*Prevent the Democrats from accruing more power in general
eh… didn’t you say you were a “long independent” lol… also this is not an argument without a reason again… let’s move on…
*Make deals with foreign powers but walk away from bad ones
what powers? what deals? like… seriously… is this a bot? am i speaking to a bot that cannot mention specific stuff cause is not in the tokens so it cannot grab it or something?
*Support Israel against terrorist governments (including Hamas and Iran’s government) rather than hamstringing them
no president has ever supported terrorists let alone hamas lol didn’t you say you didn’t want foreign wars interventions? lol
*Prevent rogue nations like Iran from getting nukes (whether by peaceful means or not)
so… you want war? like actual war with iran? for what doing something that they are already doing? it feels like is not war you are against is just that you want your personal war...
*Prevent lawfare against Trump from making the party guilty of it win
source? evidence that this was a thing ever? to me sounds like he just got away with crimes he did commit… you are free to post evidence tho...
Some reasons Biden was a terrible president:
*He was mentally incompetent for at least a large stretch of his presidency! We don’t even know which parts he was competent during. He was completely unwilling to admit this and remove himself from the presidency. I despise Kamala Harris, but he should have made her acting president after voluntarily stepping down, especially after it became clear to the world that we had a mentally incompetent president. (Luckily there were none of our foes used that fact to their fullest advantage.) He presumably never realized how incompetent he was, which means he certainly couldn’t have planned for his own lack of capability in planning things.
this is your opinions you don’t have any evidence to prove he was incompetent at all… awkward video clips on the internet are not evidence of mental incompetence lmao… if that were the case Trump would be classifiable as a mentally disabled too so you can either show evidence of this or agree that is not a point at all… from my prespective Biden seems pretty fine i detatch myself from using memes and random clips as a way to define someone persona let alone mental capacity… i don’t think is rational to do so… people really liked this gossiping and the for profit media run with it… as simple as that… the only reason we don’t speak about Trump mental incapacity every single day is because he show it so much that is not even newsworthy… imagine having a mentally handicapped firend, the first time you meet them maybe you uknowledge the situation but the 300th time? nobody would click such articles cause everyone already knows it...
*Border enforcement was a complete and utter joke. A country that has no border is incredibly vulnerable. (See what Israel just did to Iran.)
source? evidence? what do we define as “joke”? what policies are we talking about? very vague random irrational statement to make imo… let’s stick with factual points
*He never achieved anything positive of which I am aware.
sounds like you have ignored a lot then… just at the top of my head the Biden Administration passed an historical bipartisan infrastructure bill which benefits are still in the work to this day, anything from rebuilding over 200,000 miles of roads, repaired 12,000+ bridges, and funded 72,000 infrastructure projects nationwide you can see each project in the bill itself on google… so this already invalidate your point which was “he did nothing”… as a cherry on top some republicans from the current Trump administration are even posting multiple projects pictures on twitter boosting about how great they are without realizing that in said pictures you can actually see the Biden signature on the project paper itself which is usually outside of each project construction place… i can give you link if you want i find it funny...
*Inflation was the highest since Carter! (Also a one term president for obvious reasons.) His policies of pumping way too much money through the government are the likely cause (including the absurdly misnamed ‘Inflation Reduction Act’).
we had a pandemic… what money do you deem unnecessary? again vagueness makes this point invalid… it just has no meaning unless you can tell me what is wrong with what was done and why… anyone can say “inflation bad” but is not a real point
*The selection of egregiously incompetent people for his administration, like Kamala Harris. He selected both her and supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson based on what appears to be demographics / DEI. He selected people in general based on demographics. (This is both super racist and super sexist.)
evidence that they were selected on those basis? why would we say they are incompetent? from my perspective seeing you saying this without any evidence makes it look like you are the “super racist and super sexist” here...
*The feeling that politics got a lot more divisive during his term (which also occurred during the Trump and Obama presidencies, to be fair)
why would we say this? can you point me to something Biden did? cause otherwise there is no point here… but thanks for unknowledging that Trump a president that tried to overturn an election which he lost can at least be classified as “divisive” lol
*He supported lawfare against Trump (I believe that none of it was justified), severely damaging our traditions against it (and inviting retaliation).
evidence? source? just your opinion? let’s move on...
*Clearly extreme corruption involving enriching himself and his family through his son Hunter’s accepting money to put people into contact with, and get favorable treatment from Joe Biden
evidence? source? what he did do exactly? was it the same as Trump appointing each of his family members as government employees or using his president position to promote a crypto scam? or getting other countries to invest in his social network company? or getting gifted airplanes? if you have anything anything at all pls share… otherwise… again… let’s move on...
*Unprecedentedly pardoning people (especially his son) for things they did over an extremely long period of time and not even in a restricted category! (Obviously after the election)
his son pardoning was due to the fact that during the presidential campaign Trump and some Trump followers (like the now appointed president of the FBI) promised to utilize the DOJ to go after Biden’s family for no other reason other then political reason… this is why he had to pardon every member of his family… btw you say “especially his son” what other pardon do you disagree with? pls either mention them specifically or non at all since is not useful otherwise… frankly i would have done the same… it surely is not the same as pardoning convicted criminals that assaulted multiple police agents for no reason during a ridicolous assault to the capitol...
*I feel that he had absolutely no respect for the constitution, laws of the land, or the importance of faithfully executing his duties as president.
like… what did he do? either tell what he did against any of this things you mention and why is bad or you may as well not be saying anything at all...
*The world became a more dangerous place under his watch (including Hamas’s actions, Russia’s invasion, China getting a more advantageous position, etc)
what did he do that made hamas worse or the world a less safe place? you didn’t say what he did… like… i literally asked you for specifical things that was done not vague general nonsense… please be rational...
Some reasons I believe Kamala Harris would have been a terrible president:
*I am Californian, and she literally never did anything I heard of in state politics that was positive. When I compared her to her (also a Democrat) opposition in statewide office, I very clearly knew I should vote for her opponent.
just at a first glance Kamala Harris espablished the California’s Bureau of Children’s Justice in 2015, while serving as Attorney General of California. do you deem that as nothing positive? interesting...
*Even Democrats generally said she was incompetent before they ran her
source? like who? do we care? when we say “democrat” who are we talking about? like… any democrat? any person on twitter saying something bad about kamala? is this a rational thought to have? there were republican saying bad things about Trump… hell there is an entire community called “republicans against trump”
*She had no vision for America that made any sense. I can’t even say what she might have claimed it would be.
so you don’t know what her vision is but you deemed it terrible? did you read like… her political agenda on her websites? was pretty clear to me… do you need a link?
*She failed to do her duty to the country and invoke the 25th amendment to remove Biden from the presidency when he was mentally and physically incompetent, putting her ambitions ahead of her loyalty to the country, and leaving the US in a vulnerable state without leadership if something drastic happened. (Even Kamala Harris would have been a better choice for that interim than Biden.)
evidence that this was the case? some funny video clips on youtube of an old man falling down some stairs? lol
Some terrible things Kamala would do as president:
*Continue her wretched performance in border control (and likely worsen it)
you still have not mentioned what was that is “wretched” you just say it is without saying why what did she do… very irrational imo
*Continue to promote DEI in her administration and the country / not select for merit
unless you can pinpoint to instances of this happening and explaing why and how it was wrong and bad this is not a real point done in good faith...
*Wealth taxes (the worst likely tax)
”oh no the evil taxes” is not a real argument… what taxes are we talking about? wealth taxes were not even in the campaign agenda at all… why would they be implemented? why are they bad? as far as i am aware the only tax mentioned in her campaign was a capital gain tax for people with income above something like 500k a year (around that you can google actual numbers) which althow she mentioned in a few speeches this had no chance what so ever of actually passing anyway… so what is the problem? but again… no wealth tax was mentioned… i just thought maybe you are confusing the 2
*Price controls (the worst likely economic policy) / anti-‘price gouging’ laws (ensuring you get shortages instead)
what price controls are we talking about? what laws was proposed? “price control bad” is not a rational argument...
*Continue and escalate lawfare against opponents since it would have worked against Trump in this scenario
evidence that this was the case at all?
*Raise tax rates in general (marginal, corporate, and miscellaneous) / let the Trump tax cuts expire (even with the Trump tax cuts, rates were still too high)
”evil taxes” meaningless point let’s move on...
*Fail to reform the government at all
i don’t think we can get more meaningless then this… you are basically doing ad hominem attacks at this point we are beyond all that is rational
*Egg on rioters and support law breakers from the office of the presidency / fail to faithfully follow the constitution and faithful execute our laws
source? evidence? why do we think that? random words?
*Serve as an example that parties can simply decided who our next president will be
we vote the president
*Be extremely weak in foreign policy / lead from behind
saying things without any reason is very irrational… unless you can quote anything that would justify thinking this to me it sounds just sexist tbh
*Fail to prioritize the needs of the country to have a functioning market, cheap prices, abundant surplus of goods, physical safety, and equal enforcement of laws because she believes that would inhibit ‘green energy’ and DEI
random words basically…
oof that was painful to read… i don’t see any actual point being made unfortunatley i only see irrationality in you words which failed to actually say anything besides showing a lot of bad faith… btw you still missed a question
- what would it take you to regret voting for Trump and admit that he is a disaster as a president? (be realistic no zombie apocalypse scenario allowed)
I seem to be frustrating you with my answers, but I am doing what I can to be helpful. That is genuinely my goal here. Simple understanding is what the original question was about, since not too many people here understood why people supported Trump, and understanding, not political fighting is my entire point in engaging. I don’t actually feel any need (or even desire) to defend Trump or bash Biden/Harris. If you wanted to have a conversation on specific scenarios, you may need to suggest them yourself. ‘If <scenario A> happened’, what would you think?′ I would answer, though I might also explain why I think it doesn’t apply if that seems pointed. You might also want to read my responses to Pazzaz if you want to understand how I engage with a more limited question in greater depth. We had a lot of fundamental disagreements, but I think we understood each other’s points well and recovered from misunderstanding each other.
I listed why getting exactly the best 10 on short notice was impossible, and then I answered all of your questions as you asked them other than them not literally being the best possible reasons. You can not like the reasons (it may even be reasonable), but I answered your questions. You wanted to know details about why, and I gave them to you. If you are trying to understand them, try not to assume things are irrational when you don’t understand at first. I believe the frustration you express throughout your responses is making you miss what I am actually saying. You seemed to pattern match what I am saying to things you haven’t liked in the past about kinds of answers, rather than considering them as pieces. I think that a lot of the time you don’t realize that I am saying I want a certain approach to solving problems. If you want a more specific conversation, you may need to reduce the scope of what you are asking considerably.
I mentioned an exact mechanism for lowering regulation, and explicitly told you it was about the mechanism rather than an individual regulation. That is an exact answer.
Inflation was much lower than with Biden, who had literally the worst in my lifetime, which is why I wrote ‘Kept inflation low’ rather than ‘Made inflation low’. He didn’t make it explode, while Biden did, and we could directly compare their results. I make it clear in the Biden part that Biden is at fault for inflation, not that there was necessarily any special policy during the Trump years.
I wrote ‘Kept unemployment low’ because unemployment was low. Things going well doesn’t have to be a change, but it is still valuable. I evaluated his entire presidency, not just what he changed. A good president doesn’t ruin things their predecessor had at a decent level.
Some presidents start new wars. Some don’t. It isn’t entirely up to them either way, but it isn’t irrational to think a president that doesn’t start new wars is better than one that does, all else equal.
I explicitly told you how he lowered taxes. He lowered the marginal rates in corporate taxes, and increased the standard deduction for normal citizens. Those are exact details. I could have added the numbers, (for instance, marginal corporate tax rates went from about 35% to 21% if I recall correctly,) but you don’t really seem to care about them.
Donald Trump spoke more to the populace than other presidents, and his theme was more often the greatness of America. Neither Obama nor Biden spoke frequently of that subject from what I saw.
Vague reasons can be important too, and saying that, as far as I know, he didn’t support anything I find egregious is completely clear. If he’d done things I thought were terrible I obviously would lessen my support or eliminate it. I also acknowledged that we were unlikely to agree on the interpretation of any of the events you find egregious.
‘Worked within the structure of the government’ means I think his actions were all completely legal, and not overly disruptive of the functioning of the government. It’s an important part to note when his foes constantly claim he didn’t. His actions in regards to disputing the election followed precedent, and it had been previously ruled by courts that disputes must involve an alternate slate of electors or they are moot; claims otherwise were clearly just meant for outrage. His speech did not foment a mob to the capital, as I explain at length in a reply to someone else; it was not physically possible for someone to listen to his speech to the end and be there for the early stages of the capital riot (and it was just a riot, not some kind of insurrection). He also didn’t ever support the riot. Additionally, the left supports a lot of riots.
‘Was the person actually doing the job’ is a clear contrast to Biden, who was mentally unfit for much or perhaps all of his term. It also means he was making the decisions, not just letting bureaucrats and underlings determine things.
Supreme court justices that rule against him (as happened many times) are hardly evidence of Trump selecting purely for loyalty to him or the party. His judicial choices are roughly as moderate as the people they replaced, except for one of them being slightly center-right (Amy Coney Barett) instead of left. I never said why he selected them either; I only said he did a good job, and that he selected textualist and originalist judges. Results matter for judging the process.
There is an obvious meaning to saying I selected Trump to keep doing what he was doing. Past results aren’t proof of future ones, but they are a good place to start. When you select a president, you are selecting the system.
‘Enforcing the border’ was clearly about keeping out new illegal crossers and the things they bring with them, which Biden did abysmally and Trump did much better. This is a security concern. The “more generally, enforce the laws that the left doesn’t” is a simple statement of fact, but also a pointer to which crimes I want enforced more. Rioting was supported by Democrats throughout both Trump’s and Biden’s terms. Many Democrat run cities and states also refuse to prosecute many crimes, for example, California for a long time refusing to prosecute theft in many jurisdictions. I clearly acknowledged that federal law enforcement will only have a small effect on most of them because most crimes are state level crimes. I never said that Democrats don’t enforce any laws; I only said that I want the ones they don’t enforce to be enforced. I didn’t even say that they enforce fewer laws than the Republicans.
You keep claiming ‘evil taxes’ as if that is somehow related to my points. I never called taxes in general ‘evil’ at all. This is a clear misrepresentation. I also already said which taxes I wanted to not expire; corportate marginal rates that were lowered, and a higher deduction for individuals.
You keep ignoring points you don’t like. Being willing to confront China is an obvious foreign policy objective that many people share. Foreign policy is one of the primary responsibilities of the presidency. I explicitly state that I don’t know what China will do, but that I believe they will need to be confronted.
I clearly explain later why preventing Kamala Harris from becoming president is a good thing from my perspective. It is okay to write your response in order, but you should acknowledge when I have addressed your point. Additionally, in a two party system, it is normal to vote against a candidate you dislike as well as for the one you like.
These points aren’t arguments. They are reasons, as I directly state. If you want to understand, you need to understand the reasons, not simply the arguments. I am not here to argue. And, as I explain later, I want the Democrats to avoid accruing more power because I believe they are more powerful than the Republicans, as well as because the platform the Democrats subscribe to is worse.
We should only make good deals with foreign powers, and that means all of them. I can’t see the future spotlessly, so I obviously don’t know which deals he should take and which he should walk away from before they have been offered. Again, you asked for what I voted for him to do, and that is not some specific deal, but an approach.
Presidents often don’t support Israel. Many times presidents have urged Israel to not use means at their disposal to protect themselves. There is no use pretending that there is never a president that supports Israel less than others. Also, when I am selecting someone to do something, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I know the other candidates won’t do it. I could even believe that they will. As I write later, I had more faith in Biden supporting Israel than Harris, and Trump more than Biden.
I very clearly never said I wanted war with Iran. I said I wanted them to not get nukes Those are two separate things. Who wants rogue powers to get nukes? I also don’t like war, and explicitly stated that one of the things I liked about Trump’s first term was ‘no new wars’. A well followed deal would obviously be preferable, and Trump prefers that as well. Even now he is attempting to negotiate with Iran despite his ally (Israel) thinking it is pointless. I definitely would prefer a workable nuclear deal to war with Iran.
Biden literally dropped out of the presidential race because of his inability to keep doing it mentally was noticed by the country at large, including the Democrats who forced his replacement, and perhaps physically. We later learned he has advanced cancer which also takes a toll, especially if they were treating it aggressively (which we don’t know).
Trump, on the other hand, gave countless demanding long speeches where he improvised to the satisfaction of the crowds and seemed physically well during them. He is an old man, but one in much better physical and mental condition than Biden.
Your claim that we should ‘stick with facts’ seems difficult when you refuse to engage with the facts I provided.
Calling border enforcement ‘a joke’ is obviously a statement of values, but also clearly true if you consider a massive influx of illegal immigrants a problem. The Biden administration clearly kept a very porous border.
I don’t consider promises of future infrastructure to be an accomplishment of Biden’s. Likewise, I don’t think all of the promises of future infrastructure people have given Trump after his tariffs to be an accomplishment until they come true. Our infrastructure did not suddenly become great. See also ‘bipartisan’. The money spent here also leads into the next point...
Raining money from the sky led to very high inflation during the Biden administration. His administration kept pouring government money into these giveaways extremely far into his term, after the inflation was already roaring. Again, inflation was literally the highest since Carter. It did come down toward the very end of his term, but the damage was already done. And extremely high inflation is obviously a point against him.
You like to claim that I ‘stated without evidence’ things when you asked for reasons, not ten paragraphs on each item. You asked many questions, and this isn’t a research paper. Your calling me ‘super racist and super sexist’ is mere ad hominem sneering. It was stated at the time (and no, I didn’t memorize exactly when) that Biden was looking for a black female vice president and a black female supreme court justice. When he found them, that means that it appeared to be based on those things, regardless of what their personal merits may or may not be. If a business said ‘only women may apply’, then you know they are selecting on the basis of whether the people are women or not. This is true even if they end up hiring the person who would have been single best candidate even if they didn’t have that rule. I also later state exactly why I am against Kamala Harris, it is an entire section. When I was reading about Ketanji as a nominee, there seemed to be very little support for her, and I haven’t heard any since. It is fair to call what Biden did racist and sexist when he stated it was about that. (And no, I don’t have the time to find that again.)
I definitely believe that Trump was and is divisive, which I noted explicitly! It is still a negative for Biden who was equally divisive. You never asked what I thought was negative about Trump (which I explicitly stated were serious), or positive about Biden/Harris, which I noted at the end of the comment. I very much had a number of them, but you were already objecting to the length. You could have simply asked for my positives regarding Biden and negatives regarding Trump.
Anyone who thinks Biden didn’t support the legal attacks on Trump was clearly not paying attention. And as I clearly state, I believe the legal attacks on Trump were meritless. I never attempted to make an argument on that point in this subthread.
Biden’s corruption is well known, but again, I was answering your questions about my reasons, not trying to prove anything.
Trump didn’t get an airplane, the United States of America did. This is entirely normal. Stop twisting things. I also don’t believe the other things you stated.
An ‘unprecedented pardon’ is unprecedented regardless of if you think it was okay. The length, generality, and preemptiveness were all unprecedented. He did it for Hunter and Fauci over a long period of time, and Hunter’s was literally unrestricted! I don’t remember the other names, but looking at an article, he also pardoned several other family members. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r5g5dezk4o “In the final minutes of his presidency, Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned several family members, including his brothers James and Frank Biden, and sister Valerie Biden Owens.” (The excerpt is the first paragraph.)
Then you again dismiss anything you don’t want to hear. You asked for reasons why I was against Biden, and that I felt he didn’t respect “the constitution, laws of the land, or the importance of faithfully executing his duties as president.” is obviously one of my more important reasons. You are objecting to my being honest.
As we get to Kamala Harris, you again simply sneer rather than wanting to know what my reasons are. “I don’t know” of her accomplishing things is extremely specific. You could try to make an argument that she accomplished things, rather than simply implying I don’t like justice for children. Also, a name is not an accomplishment. How did it actually improve justice for children?
Kamala Harris dropped out of the primary because she had no support among Democrats. It was during said primary and after that I heard many Democrats (not just a few) say such things. I don’t have links. Why would I have saved them?
Kamala campaigned and did not put forth an overarching vision in a way that reached people, which is perhaps why she lost. An unexpressed vision is not a vision that makes sense to voters. I read many things relating to her campaign, but it is literally on Kamala for needing to get her vision out there, if indeed she had one. What exactly did she think that America should be like. If you like, you could state what you believe her vision was (though you don’t need to). (Trump’s was literally his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, which he then constantly expanded with specifics.)
You are seriously out of step if you think Biden being so incapable that he couldn’t run a campaign would leave him capable for the much more difficult job of being president. They replaced him as candidate for a reason. Running for president is hard, but it is still the easy part. If, in fact, he was perfectly capable and they forced him out to run Kamala that is also bad! And if that were the case, she should have said so.
Everyone knows there were a massive number of illegal immigrants during Biden’s term. Stop pretending otherwise.
You shouldn’t accuse me of bad faith when you refuse to understand or engage with so many of the things I am saying. Everyone know that the Democrats, including Kamala Harris, supported DEI.
How does calling a wealth tax ‘the worst tax’ mean that I think taxes are evil? Also, a reason, not an argument. If you really wanted to know why I am against wealth taxes, you could have just asked that. Wealth taxes fundamentally force people to stop having goods or other items and convert them to money, regardless of whether or not that makes sense, since wealth is not usually in the form of money. For instance, if a stock doubles in value, you now have to sell either that stock or other stocks if there is a wealth tax on stocks, regardless of if that makes sense. If I recall correctly, she and her proxies supported a tax on ‘unrealized’ capital gains, which is a wealth tax on stocks. Also, capital gains taxes are themselves bad even on already sold stocks, but I don’t think you want to go over that too much.
Sneering at me is also not a rational argument. She was clearly against what she and her proxies claimed was ‘price gouging’ and laws against price gouging are literally a form of price controls.
It is simple logic that if you can prevent someone from becoming president by simply claiming that they are a criminal, that people will claim there opponents are criminals. As already mentioned, I believe the charges were all baseless, and thus lawfare, as do a very large number of other people. Everyone already has their position on this matter, so there is little point discussing it further.
Why do you constantly mock the idea of taxes mattering? And I even say which ones.
I think you shouldn’t accuse me of ad hominems just because you don’t like my statements. It isn’t an ad hominem to state that she wouldn’t reform the government, it is a simple statement about her counterfactual actions as president. I obviously wouldn’t be able to prove what Kamala would have done even if she was trying to, since she never became president. But she made few or no statements that I interpreted as wanting to reform the government, while the opposition made a great many (whether you chose to believe Trump or not).
I don’t have links for her doing so right now, but have you read the news lately? About the anti federal government riots/ The Democrats are very clearly favoring ‘protestors’ that are doing quite a bit of rioting, and have done so in many other cases over the years.
We do vote for president. This is why we could reject the Democrats switching out their candidate without consulting the country. It would obviously be a precedent if the voters had simply gone with what the party did.
You seem fixated on the idea of calling me irrational. It is an entirely rational to not want the president to lead from behind. You could say that you believe the premise that she would is wrong, but you didn’t.
Then you claim the next point is somehow ‘random words’. It is very clear they are not. I am stating that those things (cheap prices, functional markets, abundant goods, physical safety, and equal enforcement of laws) seem to be in conflict with DEI and green energy, and that she would choose the latter. Again, you could disagree that it is true, but nothing about it is random. (And all of those things obviously go together.)
Then you accuse me of irrationality and a lot of bad faith when you simply refused to engage meaningfully with what I said. Should I believe that you are operating in good faith? I hope that you are and we can turn this conversation around.
I can assure you that literally everything I wrote was in good faith, as an attempt to answer your questions honestly. I am still willing to respond if you engage with what I wrote in the areas you respond to, or if you ask genuine questions in an attempt to understand, not fight. Limiting your questions might get more focused answers if that is what you object to.
Your final claim that I missed a question is untrue. “what would it take you to regret voting for Trump and admit that he is a disaster as a president? (be realistic no zombie apocalypse scenario allowed)”. I answered it in the sixth paragraph.
”There is only one thing that would make me regret voting for Trump: The feeling that America is worse off because of Trump being president than if he hadn’t been. Yes, a feeling. It’s vague for a reason. I can and do compare general factors for goodness and badness multiplied by his responsibility for them versus counterfactuals, but after that, it is all intuitive. All analyses I do on any subject are heavily dependent on intuition. Comparing a gestalt to a counterfactual gestalt is hard to put into small details. I don’t stare at the trees to discover the broader trends of the forest.”
There is no way I could give a more precise response to a completely open counterfactual, and still be telling the truth. Once again, you can object to my answer for various reasons, and claim it is a bad answer, possibly including that you don’t like to base evaluations off of feelings, but the claim I didn’t answer is false. (It might be quite reasonable to accidentally skip it, but I did answer.)
To briefly defend feelings, I see feelings as a shorthand for the entire situation. It is not possible to keep infinite details in mind, but you can aggregate them together (in a somewhat unreliable way) subconsciously, and then use those to determine how your conscious mind reacts to the number of things it can process in more depth. The conscious mind is much better at logic, but much worse at using all of the information you get. You can train your mind by carefully evaluating it before adding it to the pile, but you still add it to the pile in the end. And be careful in using it of course, because feelings are often wrongly applied.
A lot of people have bad feelings about engaging with political opponents from many unproductive engagements, and this makes everything look worse when you know an opponent is making the statements and /or questions (including to me). This is reasonable, but I don’t think it is serving you well when you meet someone who is engaging in good faith (which again, I assure you I am, even though I find your responses very frustrating as well).
People often say one of the reasons they won’t vote for Trump is his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. What is your view on that?
I don’t think people believe that asking the legal system to rule on whether the laws were properly followed is somehow disqualifying, so unless I am mistaken about what they are claiming, it didn’t happen in any meaningful way.
The media has intentionally misrepresented this. He believed there was cheating from the other side, and said so. He used the normal methods to complain about that, and the normal lawsuits about it to get the court to rule on the matter. It’s all very normal. When the courts decided to not consider the matter (which was itself improper since they generally did that without considering the actual merits of the cases, generally claiming that it was somehow moot because the election was already over) he did nothing and just let his opponent become president (while continuing to vociferously complain).
Both Al Gore and Hilary Clinton made roughly the same level of complaining about the result as Trump. (Since I think both of them are terrible, that is a negative comparison, and I dislike that Trump matched them, but it isn’t disqualifying.) You could actually argue it was his job to make these lawsuits (to see that the federal election was properly executed). Coming up with who the electors would be if the lawsuit changed the results is normal (and not at all new). There was no attempt to go outside the legal system.
In all likelihood there was a nonzero amount of cheating (but we don’t actually know if it was favoring Biden, Republicans can cheat too) but I doubt there was any major conspiracy of it. I expect there is always some cheating by both sides, and we should try to reduce it, though I have no opinion on exactly how much or little there is. There were enough anomalies that investigating it would have made sense, if only to prevent them in the future.
The J6 riots were just normal riots, on a small scale, that Trump didn’t support at all and were nothing approaching a coup at all. Congress was not in any real danger, and there were no plans to take over the government. While I strongly disapprove of riots, this has been dramatically overplayed for purely partisan purposes by people who want to tar him with it. The people who support actual riots for political purposes are his opponents, not him.
I think you are missing something. The lawsuits were fine, though maybe a little silly as most of them were thrown out because of lack of standing. I’m thinking more of the “fake elector plot”, where Trump pressured Mike Pence to certify fake electors on Jan 6 (as Pence said: “choose between [Trump] and the constitution”). I think trying to execute that plan was wrong, because if they would have succeeded then Trump would have stolen the election.
And Trump may not have supported everything the J6 rioters did, but he was the reason that they were there. He said that the election was stolen. He said that it “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”. On Jan 6 he called on them to pressure Mike Pence and other lawmakers to go through with his plan: to steal the election.
I (and many other people) think a person who tried to steal an election shouldn’t be elected.
Obviously I won’t prove anything in this statement, but I just don’t think there is a genuine case to be made that the common interpretation Trump’s foes like to use is valid.
I completely disagree about the idea that Trump supported any sort of coup, and that the riot was anything more than a riot.
I agree that the statement linked from Trump sounds bad, but the interpretation seems like a misreading of Trump to me. It sounds like vociferously complaining that we don’t know the outcome of the election due to fraud in his trademark sloppy style, and that he believes he would win if counted fairly. (Could it mean what you think it means? Perhaps, but that isn’t the most likely reading to me.) Redoing elections that aren’t held would be required despite that not being in the constitution (because the electors must be selected), and you could make the argument that one where the result cannot be known would be the same. I assume (obviously mindreading is often faulty) that is what Trump would have been talking about if he was more of an analytical speaker rather than an emotive one.
Article II, Section 1, Clause 2:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
That is what the relevant part in the constitution for selecting electors (aside from a later clause about Congress setting the time of selection), so as far as selecting electors go, the state legislatures are in charge of that and asking them to intervene doesn’t seem like going out of bounds. Depending on the actual laws and constitution of the state, there may not be anything the legislature is allowed to do either, but it doesn’t seem like something the is obviously out of bounds. (I do not want this sort of behavior of course, the current election system does its best to ignore that the state legislature is in charge of who the electors are for a reason.) States are even free to directly control who the electors vote for (so called ‘faithless elector’ laws have been ruled constitutional by the supreme court). And as said before, this is hardly the first time after an election that someone has tried to determine who the electors would be and try to have the slate prepared in case it was overturned.
Also the term ‘fake electors’ is obviously crap, the correct term is what the Trump side called them ‘contingent electors’, as in, contingent on the results being ruled to have really been the way he believed they were. Historically, the courts require such things to be done on time, and then they sort it out later if it comes up.
I don’t find Mike Pence credible, nor do I find what is often referred to as ‘lawfare’ indictments to be of any significant probative value. To be straightforward, I think Pence is just lying in an attempt to not be associated with Trump. Pence thinks of himself as a respectable person, and Trump is not the kind of person Pence thinks is seen as respectable. He was also directly trying his hand at running for president at the time (and politicians like to denigrate their opponents while casting themselves as heroic). Of course, Pence could even believe what he is saying exactly and that wouldn’t make his interpretation correct (we can certainly convince ourselves that what we want to say is true, and I am sure some would say the same of me).
Every time I have looked into a specific claim relating to this, it hasn’t turned out to be anything truly abnormal or there has been no credible (to me) confirmation. (Assuming that Pence is not credible.) I have not looked into all the claims, and honestly I am highly unlikely to do so at this point.
Yes, redoing the election would probably be a good thing to do, if there was evidence of widespread fraud. But Trump doesn’t see that as the only option. The full “Truth” was:
So he says we should either “have a NEW ELECTION” or “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER [Trump]”. He tried to do the second option: tried to get states to change the result, and when that didn’t work he tried to get Pence + Congress to change the result. He doesn’t care about laws or rules or the constitution. He just believes there’s fraud, so he should be chosen as the winner.
What do you think Trump’s goal was on Jan 6? Take for example part of Trump’s speech:
Which electors were Trump referring to here? He is not saying they should do the process as normal, because then there would be no point of protesting. He is saying they should either throw some electors out or include some “contingent electors”, so that they have a “contingent election”, so that the house (voting by state) would declare Trump as the winner. And if they did that, then Trump would have succeeded in stealing the election.
And you’re completely correct that each state legislature has total control of their electors. And only electors from state legislatures should be counted. In the past, there have been situations where state legislatures sent multiple “alternative electors”, because of weird circumstances. But the reason Trump’s “contingent electors” are called “fake electors” is that they were not sent by a state legislature. They were by Trump associates and random Republicans. This is wrong, and in some states even illegal. Multiple people have already pleaded guilty to crimes related to this.
I skimmed the transcript at the link you provided, and it seems like a standard political speech (in Trump’s style).
Obviously Trump thought that there was easily enough proof to know that he won, or at least clearly enough prove election invalid if more was required. He would expect to genuinely win any real redo of the election. And the whole scheme was to send it back to the states, who have the authority to choose the electors. His claim is that the states wanted that (which I don’t know any evidence of, but this scheme only does anything if the states actually do want to).
The quote you provided literally sounds like normal political posturing about how important the people on your side are, and a claim that they should take political actions. This seems like a thing to say in regards to protests, rallies, or even just doing things like voicing support for him. I’ve heard countless politicians say this sort of thing before? It seems pretty anodyne?
Saying that they should cheer for the legislature but not all of the legislature will be getting many cheers seems like an obvious joke with no deeper meaning than disapproval of some members. It’s obvious what behaviors will get cheers and which won’t, but it isn’t threatening.
All talk of fighting involved metaphorical fighting by duly elected representatives (and replacing them through primary elections if they didn’t) and the people cheering them on. This is normal politics. And as far as it goes, he is literally saying that they should demand the law be followed as the point of this.
You say “send it back to the states” but what would that mean? Every state held their own election. No state found any proof of fraud (at least not enough to impact the outcome). So they all verified the results. Then they sent their electors to Washington. For Trump to then say “the states should decide” doesn’t make much sense, because they already did decide. They decided he lost. Now maybe he meant that every state should have a reelection, but that would go against a bunch of (federal and state) laws, rules and the constitution, so that would be bad. The states control their election, not Trump. It’s bad to change the process just because Trump doesn’t like that he lost.
But luckily, I don’t think Trump meant to have a reelection. I think he meant to follow the established procedure in the constitution for contingent elections. That’s what you’re supposed to do, if it’s confusing who won the election. And if Trump would want to follow laws, rules and the constitution, he would want Pence + Congress + House to do that. What basically happens then is that each state gets one vote to decide the president. So in a way, that would “send it back to the states”. Each state’s vote would be decided by the people in the House of Representatives, and if everyone voted according to their party affiliation then Trump would have won. Good for Trump!
But would it have been good for us, the people? Well, the problem is that the election wasn’t really a contingent election. Every state verified the results, every state sent their electors. To actually use the procedure, then one would have to follow the plan in the Eastmann memos. It says that Pence, while counting the elector votes, should pretend to be confused. He should act as if he has no idea which are the correct electors. And then it would be a contingent election. But Pence didn’t want to do that, so Trump didn’t win.
That’s what the plan to steal the election was, and that’s how Pence stopped it, and that’s why Trump and MAGA people dislike Pence now.
I did have to research a few things for this, but they don’t seem to change matters at first glance. The situation is murky, but it was always murky and both sides clearly are certain they are right.
I personally don’t know whether or not it was a fair election with a fair result and unimportant anomalies, or if the anomalies really were cheating. They certainly looked suspicious enough in some cases that they should have been investigated. I think that many of the actions by the Democrats were done in the way they were because they didn’t know whether or not there was rampant cheating causing these anomalies and didn’t want to know, and that Republicans were far too sure about what they think happened based off weird and unclear evidence.
You could argue for the contingent elections thing being relevant (and it is a scenario in the memos you mentioned), but it is far from settled when that would trigger in a sequence of events. It would not, in fact, be a change of procedure if it did. (As your link notes, it is in the constitution.) Uncommon parts of a procedure are still parts of it (though all the examples are so far back it would be quite strange to see it used, I agree on that).
Several recent presidential candidates have used legal tactics to dispute how elections are done and counted. There are already multiple this year (mostly about who is and is not on the ballot so far.) There is nothing inherently wrong with that since that is literally how the laws and constitutional matters are intended to be handled when there is a dispute with them.
I’m obviously not a constitutional scholar, but I think the contingent election stuff wouldn’t really have come up at that point, since it reads more like something you do based on the electors choosing in a way that doesn’t lead to a majority, not over the process of electors selection being disputed.
You could easily argue that the disputed electors might not count if that simply means electors were not fully selected, and you need a majority of the number of electors that should be, but I would assume otherwise. (In part because there appears to be no wiggle room on the Constitution saying that the states will select electors. It isn’t “up to the number specified”, but the specific number specified.)
I believe that if there is doubt as to who the states selected for the electors, you would simply have the legislatures of the states themselves to confirm who are the correct electors by their own rules (and that their decisions are controlling on the matter), and I believe this is what Trump would have intended (but I don’t like mindreading and don’t think it should be relied on when unnecessary).
It appears that you believe the states already selected their electors fully, and so do I, so this plan wouldn’t work if I am right about how to interpret how this works, but Trump obviously claimed/claims otherwise, and there is no indication of duplicity in that particular belief.
Everyone agrees that Pence did not think Trump’s interpretation of the matter is correct, but Pence’s own personal beliefs as to whether or not the electors were correctly selected does not, in fact, make people who believe otherwise some sort of enemy of the republic. Trump wasn’t asking Pence to fake anything in any reasonable source I’ve seen, but to ‘correctly’ (in Trump’s mind) indicate that the electors were not chosen because it was done in an invalid way. Pence interpreted this request negatively seemingly because he didn’t agree on the factual matters of elector selection and what his interpretation of the meaning of the constitution is, not because anything Trump wanted was a strike against how things are meant to be done.
I didn’t really remember the Eastman memos, but when I looked up the Eastman memos, reporting seems clear that Trump and company really were pushing to convince Pence to send it back to the states for confirmation of selection which is not an attempt at either a contingent election or just selecting Trump, and is not out of bounds. That those other scenarios existed as possibilities in a memo but were not selected obviously in no way implicates Trump in any wrongdoing.
I read the two page memo and it seems strange. To me it reads like a few scenarios rather than finished decision making process or recommendation. I am sympathetic to the argument that it makes about how the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional (and I think the change made afterward to it also seems at first blush clearly unconstitutional). If it is unconstitutional, then Pence ‘must not’ follow it where it conflicts with the constitution (so advising that it be ignored is not necessarily suspect). I also had a hard time interpreting said act, which seems poorly written. The memo itself does rub me the wrong way though.
The six page memo seems pretty normal to me (from reading how judges write their decisions in court cases the style seems similar), and lays out the reasoning better, though I definitely disagree with some of the scenarios as being within the vice president’s authority (which is itself somewhat murky because of ambiguity in the constitution and relevant amendments). The VP has no authority to decide to simply declare that the number of electors are fewer that were really appointed (though this is also not actually clear in the text), but some other scenarios are plausible readings of the laws at first glance depending on the actual facts at hand (which they have a clear opinion on the facts of).
An analysis I read included a lot of fearmongering about letting the states decide if their electors had been properly selected, but that is clearly something they are allowed to determine. (The fact that it is popular vote is a choice of the legislatures, and up to the laws and constitution of the individual states.)
This was not a plan to ‘steal’ an election, but to prevent it from being stolen. Obviously both sides like to claim there was an attempt at stealing it (the right’s motto was literally about preventing stolen elections), that they were just trying to prevent. Both sides are still very angry about it, but that doesn’t actually make Trump disqualified in any way.
Yes, I also think it’s important to investigate those things. And the US government agrees, which is why they investigated them. But they didn’t find much, because the election wasn’t stolen.
I don’t really agree with this framing, it’s not about Democrats vs Republicans. The ones who were claiming the election was stolen were Trump and his associates, not general Republicans. Mike Pence is a republican, and he didn’t say that the election was stolen. William Barr, the trump appointed republican attorney general, said the FBI and Justice Department investigations found no evidence of large scale voter fraud. It was investigated, but nothing was found, because the election wasn’t stolen. Just because some people lied about voter fraud, like Rudy Giuliani, doesn’t mean it’s okay to overturn the election.
But what did Trump do when the FBI and Justice Department didn’t find any evidence? He asked the DOJ to lie, say that the election was rigged, without evidence. And when they didn’t he threatened to fire them.
I think you’re getting a little lost in the weeds trying to interpret the legal schemes. If he managed to overturn the election in a way that is technically legal, would that be good? And if he attempted to overturn the election in an illegal way, would that be bad? It seems like you value the law, and that’s good to do. But Trump doesn’t value the law, and thinks it would be good if he overturned the election even if was done in an illegal way. He doesn’t care about the law. Does this not worry you?
I’m a centrist (and also agnostic in regards to religion religion) in part because I believe there are a lot of things I/we don’t/can’t know and shouldn’t be overconfident in, ideologically, factually, and interpretationally. I don’t know what Trump actually thinks, and neither do you, but we seem to disagree strongly on it anyway. I don’t want to try to read your mind, but that part is at least very obvious. (I do have some very confident ideological, factual, and interpretational beliefs, but believe they shouldn’t be overly relied upon in these matters.)
I also tend to keep in mind that I can be wrong (I am also keeping that in mind here), which is how I ended up believing Trump was worth voting for in the first place. (As stated originally, I actually had an extreme personal distaste for him for decades that sounds much like how people accusing him of being, but I paid attention and changed my mind later. Obviously, I could have been right originally and be wrong now, that definitely happens.)
To me, you seem overconfident about what happened in the election, and your sources seem highly partisan (not that I know of any sources on this matter that I think aren’t partisan). Neither of which actually mean you are wrong. I do think it is very important that there is genuine doubt, because then you can’t simply assume those on the other side are operating in an objectionable way because they are opposing you. (Of course I would think you overconfident since I am hedging so much of what I am saying here.) I generally find it hard to know how accurate specific political reporting is, but it seems generally very low. Politics bring out the worst in a lot of people, and heightened reactions in most of us (me included, though I try to damp it down).
There is always vote fraud and cheating, but what is the definition of ‘large scale’ such that you know for sure it didn’t happen? States have in fact found cheating in small but significant amounts (as well as large scale rule changes outside the regular order), but what percentage of it would be actually discoverable without extensive investigation, and how much even with? William Barr saying that he had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” hardly means they found everything, and crucially, is very different than saying that it wasn’t large scale by at least one reasonable definition.
Hypothetical: If someone was counted to have won a state that decided the election by 100,000 votes, and Barr could have proven that 40,000 were switched (meaning current count is winning by 20k), what would that mean for your statement? What would that mean for Barr’s? I think that would prove you wrong (about no large scale cheating), but Barr’s statement would still be true (I would still consider it lying though).
Additional hypothetical: Suppose that three states too small to change the election were given to Biden due to cheating, but it could be proven that Trump had won all of them? That would be large scale cheating that changed nothing about the result, and again, Barr’s words would not technically be untrue. Suppose then that there was a fourth small state that would tip it where there was enough cheating to actually change the overall result, but this can’t be proven?
Note that neither of those hypotheticals is meant to be close to accurate, they are meant to show the uncertainty. For clarity, I believe that there is not strong enough evidence to say there was sufficient cheating to change results, and we should default to assuming there wasn’t, but that is only because our elections usually aren’t fixed, and in certain other places and times the opposite should be assumed. I believe that Biden most likely won in an election close enough to fair, just that people coming to the opposite conclusion are usually operating in good faith including the subject of this matter. (I do not assume good faith in general, it just seems that way here.)
I can find places claiming that there is literally nothing, and others claiming to have found dozens of issues that could possibly count as ‘large scale’ cheating depending on the definition (not all involving the Democrats, and many not involving directly changing the votes). Neither side actually seems especially credible to me, but instead obvious partisanship is deciding things.
I probably should have clarified the split as establishment vs populist. I think that I can speak of Democrats without implying that it is an exact midline Republican / Democrat split when referencing something known to be a minority viewpoint, but I really should have been more clear that I was speaking of a portion of the Republicans rather than all of them (I do think it is a very large portion of the Republicans, but more so the base and more populist/Trump camp politicians rather than the established politicians). I was saying that I think the politicians among the Democrats (enough of them to control Dem policy, far from all of them) had specific motives (their being unsure whether or not their local members cheated) for their actions in and reactions to the issue that consisted largely of vehement denial of the possibility regardless of the evidence (and wanting to prosecute people for talking about it or taking legal steps that are required for disputing the election!), and that many Republicans overindex on very questionable evidence to say with equal certainty that it did happen.
People often would like to cover up things when they don’t know exactly what happened but it looks bad (or even if it just might cause a scandal, even if it could be proven to be fine), and I can’t possibly agree with anyone who thinks that Democrats in general didn’t at least consider that when deciding on how they would react to the evidence.
The split between establishment and populist Republicans is very large in recent years, starting noticeably before 2016 and largely leading to Trump’s faction even existing, which then movef the party further toward populist. The establishment and populists do not share the same reaction to the evidence in 2020, among other things, and I should have been more careful.
You assume that the US government didn’t find much, but a number of people would just as confidently state that much of the government just chose not to look, and others that things were in fact found. Many of the investigations would have been state and local governments if they’d happened, and in many of the places the local leaders were Democrats who had every incentive not to look (which is part of why people were suspicious of how things turned out there, and this is true even if the local Democrat leaders were perfectly upright and moral people who would never act badly as long as we don’t know that). Trump and company brought many court cases after the election but before inauguration that were thrown out due to things that had nothing to do with the merits of the evidence (things like standing, or timeliness); there may have been some decided on actual evidence, but I am unaware of them.
Many populists have seen the DOJ and FBI as enemies due to past discrimination against populist causes, and that is generalizing too much, but they also don’t seem very competent when performing duties they don’t care for (which is normal enough). It is hard for many people to know whether or not the FBI and DOJ can be relied on for such things. (See also the recent failures of previously considered competent federal agencies like the Secret Service).
You are interpreting things the way that most benefits your point, but without regard to other reasonable interpretations. The meaning of pretty much everything Trump camp did is debatable, and simply believing one side’s talking points is hardly fair. I genuinely think that both sides believe they were on the side of righteousness and standing up against the dastardly deeds of the other side.
Also, the cnbc article is largely bare assertions, by a known hyper partisan outfit (according to me, which is the only authority I have to go on). Why should I believe them? (Yes, this can make it difficult to know what happened, which was my claim.) The other side has just as many bare assertions in the opposite direction.
Hypothetical where no one thinks they are doing anything even the slightest bit questionable (which I think is reasonably likely):
Trump camp viewpoint: This bastard repeatedly refuses to do his job* and protect the election from rampant cheating. I should force him to do his job. (This is a reasonable viewpoint.) People keep telling me to remove them for refusing to do their jobs. I don’t think I should (because this is not the only important thing). How about I ask them more about what’s going on and trying to get through to them?
Other viewpoint: Here I am doing my job, and someone keeps telling me to say <specific thing>. They’re obviously wrong, and I have said so many times*, so they must be telling me to lie. (And their statement that he was asking them to lie would not seem false to them, but in this scenario is completely false.)
*This is the same event.
In fact, the video testimony included with the article itself sounds exactly like my innocent hypotheticals rather than other parts, while the cnbc commentary in the video is obviously making up and extremely overconfident partisan interpretations (which makes their article’s bare assertions even less believable since they really are hyper partisan).
I don’t really care about Giuliani, but the Giuliani article is extremely bad form since the bbc’s summary of his ‘concession’ is not a good summary. It says only that he will not fight specific points in court ‘nolo contendre’, it is not an admission to lying.
You mention that I value Law and Order, which is true. It isn’t actually natural to me, but over the years I have come to believe it is very important to the proper functioning of society, and as bad as some parts of society look, our society actually works quite well overall so we do need to support our current law. This includes parts that aren’t used often, but I have much less confidence in them. The parts Trump wanted to use do seem irregular, but he did seem to be trying to use actual laws (sometimes incorrectly).
To bring up something I think you mentioned earlier, I would be pretty unhappy about an election decided by ‘contingent election’ for instance, but still think it appropriate to use one under the right circumstances (which I don’t think these are even under the Trumpian interpretation of cheating in the elections). I would also be unhappy about an election where the state legislatures changed who the electors are in a meaningful way, even though I believe they clearly have the right to. There would have to be vastly more evidence for me to think that the legislatures should act in such a manner, but I don’t think it is necessarily disqualifying as a candidate for Trump to think they should.
Would it be good if he stole the election legally? Obviously not. Would it be good if he protected the election legally? Obviously yes. Would it be good if he protected the election illegally? Eh, I don’t know? It depends?
Does Trump value law and order? I think he values law (with moderate confidence). Whenever I hear the words of people directly involved, it sounds to me like he told them to do everything in the legal way, and that the process he advocated was something he believed legal. He doesn’t seem interested in breaking laws, but in using them for his purposes. Does he believe in order? I’m not convinced either way. He certainly doesn’t believe in many parts of how things tend to be done (to an extent that it is odd he is the leader of the conservative party), but is his plan for the world following some sort of consistent internal logic worthy of being considered orderly? I don’t know.
Obviously if I had similar interpretations as you do about all of these things I would be much more concerned. I just don’t. Of course, I very much want you to be wrong, so that there is little to worry about.
I don’t know if it is confirmation bias or legitimate, but the more carefully I go through things, the more it seems like Team Trump really was just trying to do what they were supposed to do (and his opponents believe the same of themselves). Even the words of people that are very much against him usually seem to indicate Trump’s genuine belief in everything he said about the election being true.
I don’t care that much about what’s in his mind. I care what he has done, what he has said and what he will do. The precise motivations don’t matter that much to me.
What if Trump said “God showed himself to me and he said the vote was rigged”? As an agnostic who trusts Trump, maybe you would think it was true. But should that matter? No, because godly revelations is not how we run our country. And neither is revelations from Trump. It doesn’t matter if the election was stolen if it can’t be shown to be true through our justice system (courts, FBI, DOJ, etc.). And it couldn’t be shown through the justice system, so unless we want to ignore all laws, rules and the constitution, then Trump just has to take the loss.
Yes, and they were able to say “Look, we have a bunch of active cases, there’s something fishy here” and then “They are throwing out our cases for no reason, look how rigged the system is”. If they bring a bunch of cases which gets thrown out, then you should trust them less.
I don’t care what the BBC said. Giuliani said false statements. For the court he agreed they were false. If he had evidence that they were true, he would not have conceded in court that they were false. That he didn’t have evidence for his claims means that you should trust his allegations of voter fraud less. It should also make you trust Trump’s allegations of voter fraud less, as they were the same allegations.
I linked cnbc to support the statement “Trump asked the DOJ to lie, say that the election was rigged, without evidence. And when they didn’t he threatened to fire them.”, and the article contains statements from “Jeffrey Rosen”, “Richard Donoghue” and “Steven Engel” to support that. I don’t care what cnbc said, I care what the DOJ said.
But not when he believes there’s been fraud right? Remember, he said:
So he doesn’t care that much about rules, regulations or the constitution. He thinks the government should be allowed to terminate “all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”. This is not consistent with someone who values law. Maybe someone dislikes some laws, but all laws? All regulations? The whole constitution? That’s pretty extreme.
We seem to be retreading ground.
“It doesn’t matter if the election was stolen if it can’t be shown to be true through our justice system”. That is an absurd standard for whether or not someone should ‘try’ to use the legal system (which is what Trump did). You are trying to disqualify someone regardless of the truth of the matter based on what the legal system decided to do later. And Trump DID just take the loss (after exhausting the legal avenues), and is now going through the election system as normal in an attempt to win a new election.
I also find your claim that it somehow doesn’t matter why someone has done something is terrible claim when we are supposed to be deciding based on what will happen in the future, where motives matter a lot.
I read the legal reasons the cases were thrown out and there was literally nothing about merits in them, which means they simply didn’t want to decide. The courts refusing to do things on the merits of the claim is bad for the credibility of the courts.
I told you I don’t care about Giuliani, and that the article is very bad. Those are separate things. Whether or not he is guilty of lying (which was not what the stipulations actually mean), I already didn’t take his word for anything. The BBC on the other hand, has shown that it won’t report in a fair manner on these things and people shouldn’t trust them on it.
You linked to a cnbc article of bare assertions (not quotes) that were not supported by the statements of the witnesses in the video also included! I talked at length about the video and how the meaning of the testimonies appears to contradict the article.
We already discussed your claim about the meaning of Trump’s words. And you once again left out:
“Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
He was saying the election did not actually get held properly and that changes things.
No, it does not. Laws, regulations and the constitution exists in a society in order to coordinate behavior among it’s citizens. Laws, regulations and the constitution does not assume that everyone follows the law. In fact, it does the opposite, it assumes that people will break laws, that people will break regulations and that people will go against the constitution. That’s why there are mechanisms to punish people who go against them. You cannot terminate the constitution just because you think people broke the law.
Edit: Also, if there is some court case you think shouldn’t have been thrown out, then you are free to link it.
Edit2: I don’t understand why this comment got so downvoted
Your interpretation of Trump’s words and actions imply he is in favor of circumventing the system of laws and constitution while another interpretation (that I and many others hold) is that his words and actions mean that he thinks the system was not followed, which should be/have been followed.
Separately a significant fraction of the American populace also believes it really was not properly followed. (I believe this, though not to the extent that I think it changed the outcome.) Many who believe that are Trump supporters of course, but it is not such a strange interpretation that someone must be a Trump supporter to believe the interpretation reasonable.
Many who interpret it this way, including myself, are in fact huge fans of the American Constitution (despite the fact that it does have many flaws), and if we actually believed the same interpretation as you would we condemn him just as much. The people on my side in this believe that he just doesn’t mean that.
The way I would put it at first thought to summarize how I interpret his words: “The election must be, but was not held properly. Our laws and constitution don’t really tell us what to do about a failed election, but the normal order already can’t be followed so we have to try to make things work. We could either try to fix the ways in which it is improper which would get me elected, or we can rehold the election so that everything is done properly.”
I think Trump was saying that in a very emotive and nonanalytical way meant to fire up his base and not as a plan to do anything against the constitution.
I obviously don’t know why you were downvoted (since I didn’t do it) but if you mouse over the symbols on your post, you only got two votes on overall Karma and one on agreement (I’d presume all three were negative). The system doesn’t actually go by ones, but it depends on how much Karma the people voting on you have I think (and how strongly they downvoted)? I would suspect that people that the comment not quite responsive to what they believed my points to be for the overall karma one?
My memory could be (is often) faulty, but I remember thinking the dismissals were highly questionable. Unfortunately, at this point I have forgotten what cases seemed to be adjudicated incorrectly in that manner, so I can’t really say one you should look at. Honestly, I tire of reading about the whole thing so I stopped doing so quite a while ago. (I have of course read your links to the best of my ability when you provide them.)
I don’t usually comment about politics (or much of anything else) here so I don’t really know how what I should write in these comments, but I think this is more about people wanting to know what Trump supporters are thinking than about determining what they are and aren’t right about. If I was trying to prove whether or not my interpretation is correct I supposed I would do this differently.
Sorry for badgering you so much, I’ve appreciated the discussion. Some of the other Trump supporters here seemed to have very weird beliefs and values, but your values don’t seem that far away from mine. I think I got a better understanding of why you think what you do (though of course I disagree on things). Thanks for answering a bunch of questions :)
I get it. I like to poke at things too. I think it did help me figure out a few things about why I think what I do about the subject, I just lose energy for this kind of thing easily. And I have, I honestly wasn’t going to answer more questions. I think understanding in politics is good, even though people rarely chang positions due to the arguments, so I’m glad it was helpful.
I do agree that many Trump supporters have weird beliefs (I think they’re endemic in politics, on all sides, which includes centrists). I don’t like what politics does to people’s thought processes (and often makes enemies of those who would otherwise get along). I’m sure I have some pretty weird beliefs too, they just don’t come up in discussion with other people all the time.
The fact that I am more of a centrist in politics is kind of strange actually since it doesn’t fit my personality in some ways and it doesn’t really feel natural, though I would feel less at home elsewhere. I think I’m not part of a party mostly to lessen (unfortunately not eliminate) the way politics twists my thoughts (I hate the feeling of my thoughts twisting, but it is good I can sometimes tell).
Not from the US either. I’d be far too biased if I were to express my personal stance, as well. Yet as far as irrationality goes, a few things stand out:
To quote Eliezer himself: politics is the mind killer. Even more so, when the general population doesn’t seem to be either aware of, or particularly concerned with, the ease it is swept by the tidal waves of their respective tribal call to arms with.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
For a rather substantial portion of it (at least, to an outsider’s perspective—which very well may be as distorted as it can possibly be), the question seems to have less to do with Harris or Trump as candidates, or their policies. Much more: with what they claim to stand for.
Harris represents the system. She’s been part of the establishment for as long as she’s been on the radar of the public. She’s a woman. She’s Hispanic. She’s a Democrat. She’s pro all the minorities. Thrilling start for any PR team!
Trump is the embodiment of the exact opposite. He’s the anti-system, anti-bureaucracy, anti-spending, anti-NATO. Pro back-in-the-day.
“Make all things great again”.
Harris is riding a wave of (rather questionable, accountability-avoidant, no-interviews-please?) trust by the most progressive portion of the population in that their voices have been heard, and the changes they (alongside the minorities they are allegedly protecting) expect are just around the corner. As long as Harris wins.
Trump is riding a wave of discontent. Of the dissatisfaction with the status quo, with the establishment, with the MIC, with politicians—everything a typical, down-to-earth, quid-pro-quo American has likely grown to despise.
Harris = trust us, we are going to change. Trump = trust me, they are lying to you again.
The growing gap in between concerns of the left and the centrists/right certainly doesn’t help. Yet a more fundamental belief in one’s ability to actively influence to one’s benefit, on one side; and ever increasing distrust towards, the system as a whole, on the other one; doesn’t seems to be the least significant of a factor here.
Trump has certainly contributed to the amount of distrust the latter are now feeling, of course. Though I’m personally struggling to say whether this was due to his positioning alone, or (at least in part) thanks to an increasingly larger portions of the “machine” actively weaponizing more and more of its metaphorical antibodies against the threat of his highly unwarranted “invasion”.
Lastly, differences in acting styles. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to take a US politician’s self-expression at a face value given all that’s transpired over the last decade, so forgive me that particular term.
Trump is a celebrity. He’s honed his skills as a public figure quite well while running his empire. He’s also lived through enough controversies and humiliations to develop his own style, which he’s likely only refined further with “The Apprentice”.
To stay a celebrity, you have to continue supplying people with what they expect from you. Here, you can either choose to passively play into trendy people’s whims. Or to craft an image, conditioning people to expect a certain “shtick”.
What has he conditioned people to expect, over the decades in real estate and later—show-biz?
One, larger-than-life, Trump-Tower-’esque show.
To create one, you need a central theme. You can’t orchestrate it around 6-hours long debates on contentious issues without an immediate, visceral, instant response from the public.
What about a catchy slogan? Yes, please.
“Make America Great Again”, it is.
What about a Big Brother as an enemy? Done.
A fascinating side effect / self-fulfilling prophecy here, in particular. The more he’s baiting / provoking / exposing / calling out the establishment, the more compelled this last one feels to adopt increasingly Big-Brother’esque tactics in direct response to his shenanigans.
Those, who have originally anchored him as a “threat to democracy” would then get even more polarized towards the “he’s the next Hitler” part of the spectrum. The ones who already resonate with his MAGA performance grow to support him even more, as more and more of their own doubts, concerns, and suspicions come to life.
Combine all three points with a more traditional, conservative, occasionally: God-fearing perspective; concern about Biden’s cognitive decline supported by Harris & Co enthusiastic conviction in him still being as sharp as ever, (virtually completely?) unattended border situation—and you’ll probably get yourself a rather coherent picture of a Trumpist.
How much of it is pro-MAGA and “Trump will save us all” vs “Biden and Harris just have to go”?
No idea, to be completely honest.
Completely open to having all of my “arguments” torn to shreds, of course. The sole fact there is such a perfectly civil, patient, non-hostile discussion taking place on topic of this sort has already been an incredible sight to witness.
I really like the framing of establishment/anti-establishment. I think that there are a lot of people who weren’t on those sides who got pulled into one side or the other because of their left/right affiliation, but I think that is a really good explanation of the “core” appeal—the one that was there in the 2016 primaries. It would also explain why I reject Trump. I’m not anti-establishment or discontent. I am generally trusting and not suspicious of others. Combine that with my education level, and the “Big brother is out to get us” shtick Trump gives in his rambling style was never going to appeal to me.
I think one thing you’re missing is the huge right-wing media ecosystem, the part of the “machine” that supports Trump, even spreading lies to support him. Take for example the court case Dominion v. Fox which showed pretty clearly that Fox News is willing to broadcast statements they know are false, as long as it’s what their audience wants to hear (i.e. they’re audience captured). Fox News is one of the largest media networks in the US and when Trump and his attorneys said the election was stolen, and Fox News knew it wasn’t stolen, they still said it was stolen.
This is a Trump/Kamala debate from two LW-ish perspectives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSrl1w41Gkk
For those who prefer text form, Richard Hanania wrote a blog post about why he would vote for Trump: Hating Modern Conservatism While Voting Republican.
Basically, he believes that Trump is a threat to democracy (because he tried to steal the 2020 election) while Kamala is a threat to capitalism. And as a libertarian, he cares more about capitalism than democracy.