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.
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 glanceKamala 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).
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).