Edit: new and improved image, now with 100% less support! Used my expert photo editing skills to change "supporting" to say "voting for"
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2024
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Downvote me if you, but I still don’t understand what was so terrible about Trump. No new wars, cheap gas, cheap groceries, good economy, literally the worst thing I can recall from those years was reading in the news every day trying to explain why Trump was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to America.
Until 2020 happened, that is; but even if he admittedly didn’t do a great job at handling COVID or the George Floyd protests, I’m not sure Hillary would have done any better, or could have avoided them entirely.
Now everything is expensive as hell, everyone is depressed and angry all the time, but at least the news are mostly saying Biden is doing a great job, things are fine and everything is under control. It’s as if cognitive dissonance has become the new normal.
I'm gonna put it in a bulleted list so it's easier for you to understand:
Because of Trump's piss-poor handling of Covid and four years of corporate welfare
Because the orange man and his supporters are still threatening our democracy daily
Trump supporters like those things, they just don't want to say it publicly. Just ask them "what do you think of (any minority group)?" and watch them squirm.
At least half of these are just made up nonsense straight from those bogus headlines I was talking about.
The other half are exaggerated and blown out of proportion to make them seem worse than what actually happened.
I've seen this argument from another poster as well but it still doesn't make any sense to me.
If Trump's corporate welfare was responsible for keeping prices low while he was in office, and Biden ending it caused them to raise prices to make profit another way, then wasn't it actually good for the ordinary customer? How exactly does Biden sticking it to them help you if you end up paying for it every day at the checkout register? Sounds like sticking a knife in your own flesh to own the rich.
By living rent free in your head, mostly.
If you don't mind lots of new corruption in the federal government, maybe Trump seemed ok. But here you go:
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056#2017
I think if Hilary was President, we'd have had a serious conversation about policing reform.
This is mainly due to the Fed under Trump printing a shit ton of new money. Remember all the "money printer go brr" memes? And remember how everyone said it would cause huge inflation? Yeah it just took a minute to kick in.
Inflation wasn't caused by "printing money", or even COVID PPP loans being unpaid. It was mainly caused by businesses realizing they controlled many aspects of people's lives.
When people were paying $50 for some toilet paper, most daily essentials companies realized that people were willing to pay more than they expected. There are very few tp companies and not many Americans install a bidet.
Americans mostly got raises during COVID and that allowed many companies to raise prices. You always have to eat, clean your house, wash your clothes, go to the bathroom, etc. This is just the consequence of a lack of competition among companies in the US (and other countries).
I agree with you that that is a large factor, and certainly a problem, but inflation has always been very strongly correlated with the money supply; you can't just simply ignore the "printing money" aspect of it.
No, money supply is not strongly correlated with inflation. Right now M2 is shrinking while inflation is still positive. That wouldn't happen if they were strongly positively correlated.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL#
Here's better explanations:
https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/unpacking-causes-pandemic-era-inflation-us
Meaning "people have more money, so producers increased prices".
We already see that there is a time lag effect, so does that actually matter?
Anyway, this disagrees with the paper you linked:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042015/how-does-money-supply-affect-inflation.asp
It's also curious (from reading the abstract) that the paper you linked didn't seem to include money supply in their model? Was that deliberate?
But I'm also just generally skeptical of anything that tries to blame labor or wages for inflation.
Perhaps, but would it have been done in time to prevent George Floyd's death? Look at how Trump's border wall worked out despite all the effort he put towards it.
And COVID would likely still have happened unless you're willing to go so deep into the conspiracy rabbit hole to be willing to say that Democrats released in on purpose to get rid of Trump. Would she have done a better job at handling that? More people died on Biden's watch than on Trump's, even if it was only due to the fact he had to deal with it longer.
No, but I don't think that's the bar.
George Floyd gets murdered, people get mad, people protest; the Trump response was "lol lib cities suck, thin blue line kiddos". With Hilary maybe we could've talked about police resourcing, effective disciplinary actions, malpractice, etc. and got something done. Instead we got a gray flag with a blue stripe. And more polarization.
Not sure how the Trump wall is relevant.
Perhaps not, but at the very least she wouldn't have been pushing conspiracy theories on a national stage. I like to imagine she would've helped small businesses more, but the mainstream Dems won't bite the corpo hand that feeds them either, so /shrug.
You included your own rebuttal so I don't know what point you are trying to make.
Yeah, I'm not saying he did a great job at handling it, mostly he just poured more oil on the fire. A more diplomatic approach likely wouldn't have hurt, even if the probability is very high that not much change would have come from it. At least as long as people are talking, they aren't burning down any cities.
It's relevant as an example of how even the most ardent campaign promises often turn into dust during the actual term. And that's a problem that affect both sides, I just mentioned Trump here because it's a very well known example.
Right, see comment above. But honestly I'm still surprised he doesn't get more credit for not starting any new wars. Thanks to Biden, we're now funding massive slaughter in both Ukraine AND Israel to the tune of billions of dollars... but somehow, everyone's cool with that. But God help us if that money is spent on "corporate welfare" and turns into lower consumer prices. As if giving away all those weapons to Zelensky wasn't also massive corporate welfare for the military industrial complex. Priorities, right?
Yet another disingenuous, "just asking questions," huh? "Oh no the news is out to get him when he did nothing wrong!"
Everything is as expensive as hell because Donald and the GQP have given out trillions in handouts to the wealthy, given out three years of tax cuts to the wealthy, blocked all attempts at fair wages, blocked all attempts at affordable healthcare, blocked all attempts at taxing corporations. Somehow we have both high price inflation and record profits for every corporation. That's not adding up. It's only Biden's fault if you're deliberately ignoring reality.
Of course we should also consider Donald is a lifelong crook and a rapist who is corrupt as fuck. Biden won't sell state secrets to Russia and the Saudis like Donald did.
“Right off the bat, let me accuse you of something I have no proof for, just to frame this as an honest and fair debate.”
That doesn’t make any sense, why would any of those things make consumer prices more expensive?
Wages DID rise under Biden but they’re barely keeping up with inflation so for the average worker, things are no better now than they were under Trump, or am I wrong there?
Okay so how is that Trump’s fault though? Did the handouts he gave help keep prices low and now that Biden isn’t giving any, they’re trying to make their profit by raising prices instead? Explain.
And Biden isn’t? Did he not have a lifelong friendship with a KKK grand wizard? Did he not say he didn’t want his kids to grow up in a racial jungle? Did he not sponsor the 1994 crime bill that put millions of black people in jail for minor offenses? Is his son not a drug addict who films himself banging underage Chinese hookers and then leaves the footage on laptop he forgets to pick up from the repair guy?
LOL "no proof" of the deliberate dishonesty disguised as questioning. Thank you for ending the comment with some classic insane right talking points so that we know you're utterly disinterested in the truth.
Which of the things I’ve said about Biden were wrong? They’ve all been reported by the mainstream media at this point. Dismissing them as “insane talking points” only proves that YOU aren’t really interested in the truth.
I'm not from the US, but in general, government policy takes a few years to affect the economy. I remember Trump cutting a lot of taxes; this may have something to do with the current state of the US economy.
That said, I agree that Trump did get some things right, such as not starting new wars (although he often threatened to), working to end the war with Afghanistan, and opposing 'free trade' deals.
I think roe v. wade was a pretty high profile one that probably wouldn't have happened without him, no?
Sure, but what's the big deal about that? It didn't get rid of abortion or anything, it just made it a states' rights issue again.
Yes, some conservative states moved to criminalize it immediately but there's always going to be states like NY or CA where it'll remain legal if you really need it. It's not like people need access to abortions every day of their lives, and even when they do, they generally have a window of time that's weeks if not months long, so not being able to do it in your home state is an inconvenience at best. Nevertheless, people reacted like it was about three 9/11s all happening at once. A bit overblown if you ask me, when a plane ticket to California is maybe a couple hundred bucks most of the year.
I will take other states' rights issues, for 500, alex, which is not a good look. I also must note that we've moved from, in what way was trump bad, to, okay, well, he's done this bad thing, but it was overblown, which I would also say, probably not, no. I dunno, really, but probably not, it seems pretty bad.
Not everyone can afford a couple hundred dollar plane ticket to california, including teenagers, and both populations are those that I would think would be most at risk for pregnancy, and at risk for medical complications as a result of pregnancies. Also pretty likely populations to want to take abortions into their own hands, which, you know, not something associated with good medical outcomes. We've also got some amount of public health problems related to the overjudicious ban of abortion, leading to doctors not wanting to abort kids that are putting the mother at high risk, from what I've heard, which seems like a pretty bad situation. I also think there's a good argument that, even if it's not problematic at like, the scales it is purported to be, or if we're not being like "oh well it sets a bad precedent" slippery slope bullshit, I'd say it's still pretty bad just on the principle of the thing.
The supreme court appointment that lead up to it is also kind of bad, and could potentially have a bunch of different pretty bad ramifications, but I can't really remember whether or not anything else bad has happened, or is about to, cause I don't keep up with this shit that much. I wouldn't be surprised if they're gonna fuck up some school privatization thing, or repeal some foundational internet bill, or do some shit that nobody's really paying attention to or cares about but would have a good amount of impact. I don't think they're doing that right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were to happen. You better not hit me with a "well they shouldn't have had sex then" or something stupid like that in response to this, that shit's a pretty easy bad faith tell.
And I mean like, sure, most of the libtards who kind of spout "oh the republicans want to ban abortions so they can have a bunch of new mindless worker drones from forced births" are living in fairyland, and are kind of doing a classic reverse hanlon's razor bit, but I would pretty easily discard that out of hand on the basis that it's fucking ridiculous propaganda, it's like listening to republicans screech about the death of family values, it's vacuous political fearmongering bullshit. I dunno enough about the other issues people accuse trump of, right, not enough to have a conversation about them, really, but if they're kind of matched in their relative amounts of shittiness to this, I would kind of get it. Maybe not the content of like, calling him a fat dumb cheeto, or whatever these kinds of stupid insults are, right, but I would get the spirit of the thing, even if I don't agree with their like, extrapolations, or reactions.
Also if I'm remembering from your other responses in the thread (fuck taking 5 seconds to check, amirite?), you didn't really care about his purported tax cuts on the rich as much, which I would think would put you in like, the center a little more. Then, you know, no shit that you're going to like trump at least a little more, or, not see as much of a problem with him, as people who are more to the left than you are, I would think, and at that point, it's kind of like, asking people why trump is so bad, is asking people to maybe change your more foundational political beliefs. Which I would say, isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I think there might be some better approaches to that.
I don't know of any on lemmy, but some might exist, and reddit sucks for that kinda stuff pretty hard nowadays, so I don't really know many places online that are good for actually interrogating your political beliefs. Generally though, I would say it would be more productive to go foundational issue to foundational issue (not wedge issues), rather than asking questions about like, whether or not trump is good. So like, asking about the role of power in politics, whether or not it has a role. Whether or not humans, as a species, are naturally hierarchical, and if that's a good thing. What the economy should look like, ideally, shit like that.
Not sure where that's going exactly but I don't really have a problem with states rights. I thought diversity is good thing, no? The more things are regulated on a federal level, the more uniform the country becomes. And I thought people here hated fascism... but I digress.
Yes, there has got to be a certain minimum standard of things we all agree on for a federal union to work, but apart from that, I'm all for giving states as much freedom as possible to experiment with their own regulations. Let's be honest, nobody really knows what the best way is to deal with all these issues we have.
So if California wants to tackle the future by building a high tech, EV-based, genderfluid LGBT society, why shouldn't they? As long as people who don't like that have the option to go to some other state and homestead on an organic backwoods farm, hunt deer, and worship Odin or whatever, that's fine with me. Isn't that what freedom is supposed to be about? Why do so many people these days have this weird notion that it has to be all or nothing, and everyone else has to want what THEY want or else be forced to participate?
Simply put, most people who believe in any sort of moral code, believe in such a code because they think they are correct. If they didn't think they were correct, they wouldn't believe it. This includes whatever people might be able to entertain about what would be correct in a given hypothetical scenario, or a broader issue. Extrapolation to the broad.
The reason "states rights" is kind of an iffy look is, you know, retroactive slavery justification from southern civil war apologists, but also, as a rhetorical tactic broadly, people bring up states' rights as a kind of distraction. Now, we're not talking about roe v. wade, whether or not roe v. wade was a good decision, or whether or not it's good for women to have access to healthcare, which, you know, it is, right, I don't think that's particularly controversial. Now, we're talking about states' rights, experimentation with democracy, that sorta shit, which is kind of blech.
I would also generally be opposed to other people's freedoms when they start doing harm, right, which is kind of a vacuous statement or whatever, right, how do we qualify harm? But if someone's doing an organic backwoods farm where they're introducing invasive species and destabilizing the ecosystem, that's a problem. If people are sacrificing their firstborn to odin, I'd say that's also a problem. If people are entering that kind of lifestyle en masse to such a degree that it starts to destabilize everyone else's lives, or cause them active harm, that's also a problem. See my first paragraph, here.
We can also see how there's kind of a more complicated relationship between states in something like the whole controversy between new york and texas, and immigrant buses, or whatever. New york wants to create a kind of liberal society, where their citizens have social safety nets, and they can benefit off of migrant labor while attempting to integrate them into society, right, relative to texas, in which migrant labor is exploited via under the table deals, on the basis that there is no legitimate alternative because the immigration system is super underfunded (this happens in new york too, this is a bad example, but entertain the hypothetical for a moment, I'm making a broader point here). If new york receives a shit ton of immigrants and floods their capacity to manage them all, their social safety nets will fail, and everything will kind of regress to the mean, to the status quo, which is going to be a problem especially when you're getting a lack of political will and buy-in to lots of these ideas, and these things can be kind of repealed on a whim. We see the same thing almost in reverse, again, with texas, where they can lower their taxes on corporations to be next to nothing, and then suddenly all the corporations pull out of cities like san francisco and LA, and move to texas, and everything just kind of, races to the bottom, as it were. States do this all the time, where senators compete to be more favorably looked upon by corporations with their political decisions in order to get factories and "bring jobs" to their states, and get more voter turnout, even if the quality of life in their states ends up massively suffering as a result. It is a free market approach to a country.
To compress a lot of that metaphor, states' rights, sure, but, states' rights to do what? But I have completely digressed, I still find this to be kind of an aside, a tangent.
It's a frustrating turnaround to encounter, ja feel? I come up against it a lot when I bring up, say, like, car-centricity, right. I can point out a lot of the problems with the lifestyle. It doesn't scale well, it's not useful in many circumstances, etc, but then I bump up against this problem of, well, actually, it's their choice, so, eat it loser, nobody cares. They don't contest the actual content of the point I'm making, or whether or not I'm right or wrong about a specific thing, they just say, oh, well, other people can choose to be wrong if they want. I can accept that, but you can understand why that's also not a satisfying answer at all, right? It's an anti-empathy answer, it's incurious, it doesn't seek to learn about other people's perspectives or lives in any way, and it doesn't seek truth. That's kind of not what I'm about.
Just from a legal standpoint, Roe v. Wade was always iffy because it was basically the Supreme Court making a law from the bench, which is not its constitutionally assigned role.
If people had wanted to make abortion access a National law, they should have gone through the proper political process and amended the constitution. But they didn’t do that, because they couldn’t get the required majorities in the house and senate, so instead Democrats stacked the court and rammed it through that way.
No matter how you feel about abortion, it was always a bad decision and a stain on the country, and nullifying was the correct decision. Comparing it to slavery is silly because pregnancy and childbirth are natural functions of the female body, slavery is not. And we did pass an amendment to abolish the latter so states’ rights can no longer allow it.
That’s how things are supposed to work. The condition is the legal framework that’s applicable in all 50 states and trumps any state right, and as long as a state abides by that they should be free to do whatever the majority of residents want. Like I said, the beauty of this design is you can always move somewhere else if you don’t like it, because chances are, in a country this big there’s always people somewhere that share the same values as you do.
I mean, again, we can kind of understand that "just move somewhere else" isn't a great response to issues somewhat might have, right?
But also, and this will probably be my last point, here, I don't take the same perspective on these kind of legalistic frameworks that you do, I think. I don't give a shit if they go through the proper channels or not to get something done, what I care about is whether or not they're doing something that's right or wrong. I think abortion is a pretty good thing to have for a lot of reasons that I've previously described, so I want it around, I want everyone to have access to their baby-killing stem cell organ harvesting clinic, and that's basically as far as my opinion goes.
The legal frameworks are the means to the end, they're not the end in-and-of itself. And it's not necessarily that the ends justify the means, or anything, but I have a couple reasons for believing why the means don't really matter in this particular case. Believing that the means themselves are the ends, would kind of be the most absurd perspective to take, you'd have to be an extremely dyed in the wool lib to believe that, you know. You'd have to like, not believe in shit like gerrymandering, fptp voting being fucking ass, not believe in shit like local city councils making zoning decisions that concentrate black voters into smaller and smaller voting blocks and ghettos. Those are all ends that are achieved by "legitimate" political processes here in the states, and were undone by "illegitimate" protests, illegitimate means. Or at least, they were viewed as illegitimate at the time. If everyone who believes in the same shit all move to the same exact place, you get redlining, you get ghettos.
Again, also, I must point out, we're not debating over whether or not abortion is good or bad, we're debating over the legal framework that established it, now, which isn't really what I'm interested in. I don't really give a shit about that, for the aforementioned reasons. If abortion is a good thing, generally, if it's a good thing for society at large, which, I'm pretty sure is the case, I'm pretty sure we've come to a consensus on that, then I don't really care whether or not people have access to abortions legally or illegally, as long as they have good access, as long as they have safe access. I only care about the legal legitimacy, in this case, of abortion, only in the fact that, perhaps if it had been passed by amending the constitution, some shit that never happens because our democracy sucks, again for aforementioned reasons, right, I only care about the process as much as it enshrines it as a right more concretely.
But of course, we don't live in that timeline, and I have to deal with current reality.
So you think forcing everyone to just go along with your wishes is a better response, then?
You realize not everyone in this country shares your opinion on abortion being a good thing, right? Saying you that you don't care by what means it's established as a right IS basically saying that the ends DO justify the means, and that if necessary, you'd be willing to disenfranchise, beat down, or even kill anyone who doesn't agree with your opinion.
Again, the constitution is the framework of basic rights and prohibitions that we all agree on. And while I agree that having to move somewhere else to get something you really care about, if it's a split issue, like abortion is, where a large enough minority disagrees on it being a good thing, perhaps moving somewhere else isn't as awful a compromise, is it?
I wasn't born when the country was founded, neither were you, probably, unless you're dracula, in which case, I'm sorry sir, I know it must be your time of the month again.
Actually though. I am growing a little bit tired of this conversation. I've given you some reasons why, in this particular case, I don't think there's a whole lot of problem with circumventing the ridiculous legal systems which prevent us from establishing what I believe should be basic human rights.
Also yes, I totally believe that I should be able to disenfranchise, beat down, or even kil lanyone who doesn't agree with my opinion. Unironically. That was definitely something I said and is definitely something you can extrapolate from my post. I completely believe that. I should be able to kill everyone. I'm the arbiter of morality. Me personally, I'm god, I'm jesus, I'm judge, jury, and executioner. I think the punisher was cool, so was judge dredd, for sure for sure.
Did you just skim my post, or something? Gerrymandering, fptp voting being ass, people who, move away, right, because of political issues, and then we end up with ghettoization, redlining, do you just have no response to any of those manifested problems in our actual democracy?
Even many forms of what we would consider to be pure democracy can be co-opted to enforce the will of a minority of people, and it doesn't even need to be co-opted, to oppress a minority at the behest of the majority. And if that's where your democracy heads, you can just keep the minority from voting, as our founding fathers intended, and badda bing badda boom now you have an even smaller voting majority, which doesn't represent the population's majority, . Which is to say nothing of the kind of lobbied to shit democratic republic in which we live, which is more heavy on the republic side of that equation than most people would have you believe. So I'm not gonna lie to you, and pretend like our ultimate democratic republic manifest is going to solve every problem of humanity, and that if people go through the legitimate channels, everything will be squeaky clean, and we'll solve all problems with the click of a finger. We all just need to vote harder, and that'll be it, right?
Also, again, for the fucking third time, we're also, again, debating the legal sticking point, here, and not the actual content of whether or not what I'm saying is moral. We're not debating if abortion is good or not. Is abortion good? Do you believe abortion to be good, or bad? Are you "undecided", on this issue? If abortion is good, why is it bad to circumvent the legal framework? to "game the system", here? It isn't even gaming the system, really, these were rules that were laid out from the start of the system, here. Like, is it just bad because theoretically, some evil dictator will take power at some point, and then "game the system" in order to make everyone's lives shit? That seems to me to be a problem, as I've been saying, more to do with the system itself, than to do with "gaming the system". Like, what are we gonna do in that circumstance, ask them nicely just to not "game the system" pretty please?
Is it a real disagreement we're having here, or is it just kind of a "it's the principle of the thing" kind of a disagreement, I guess is what I'm saying, at the end of the day? I dunno. I keep coming up with new ways to talk about the shit you're saying, but somehow I also think I'm reaching the end of my rope when it comes to, ways to talk about all-encompassing political issues.
Alright then, thanks for putting it all out there. I appreciate the honesty. Much easier to argue with people who don't beat around the bush or hide their true intentions like a lot of other folks on this site tend to do.
Yes. Why would I waste my time reading through your walls of text to figure out how exactly you arrived at your idiotic conclusions when I already know what they are? That's gonna be your responsibility to figure out where you went wrong in your chain of causality when you'll meet with the inevitable end of your rope. Because, just to save you some time, those who champion the principle of death over life have always eventually met with their own destruction, and so will you, if you are as hellbent as you seem to be on destroying something you neither seem to understand nor appreciate.
I'm definitely more on the pro-life side on this issue, so I believe abortion is bad unless it's necessary to save the mother's life and the fetus isn't viable. And by "necessary" I mean medically necessary, i.e. in order to avert imminent risk of death, not "there goes my dream to study archeology" or something like that.
Because the framework exists for a reason, and it has worked fairly well for the last 250 years. It strikes a careful balance between serving the needs of the majority without excessively oppressing the minority. Yes, I'm sure you can bring up many examples of where minorities were oppressed, but that's always going to happen in a majority-based system. The key word here is "excessively". Many Indians were slaughtered, for example, but they weren't entirely wiped out. We dropped two nuclear bombs on a foreign country but then we didn't wipe them out entirely just because we could, and instead made a peace agreement with them.
Perhaps you're still young and you don't understand the concept of mercy just yet, but one day you will.
Oh, so you're just a troll who's not gonna read any of my shit, then, and you also don't understand sarcasm. Luckily, since I've realized that you're a bad faith tool, I also don't have to afford the same courtesies to you, and waste my time reading your posts or writing a thought-out response.
You might try reading someday, it might help your dumb ass learn some shit instead of just thinking you're smarter than everyone else all the time, and you've already arrived at the correct conclusions. Also, nice trolling, I'm sure you got your (you)s, but it doesn't really end up working to convince any third reader of this, when you're so obviously cherry picking pieces of my argument.
"Boo-hoo, everyone who disagrees with me is a troll and acting in bad faith"
Was that also sarcasm or are you really this immature?
Just because I'm picking out the most salient points of your argument to focus on doesn't mean I don't take the time to write a thoughtful response. You call it cherry picking, I call it prioritization. I'm sorry, but I don't have time to read these walls of text and my experience has taught me that debates on the Internet work much better if you only focus on one or two arguments at a time instead of like, 10. That's called respecting people's time, and your terse response, besides being absolute dogshit content-wise, is doing a far better job at it than your previous ones.
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
>Downvote me if you, but I still don’t understand what was so terrible about Trump. No new wars, cheap gas, cheap groceries, good economy, literally the worst thing I can recall from those years was reading in the news every day trying to explain why Trump was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to America.
since the mid 2010s fascism has been marching across the world. golden dawn (the grecian fascists) had even set up a remote office in chicago. le pen almost won in france. AfD won seats in germany. and in america, protectionist, anti-immigrant rhetoric made our neo-nazis think that trump is their guy. literally. they called him "our guy".
the traditionalist workers party marched in california, and knifed the high schoolers who showed up to resist them. people knew richard spencer's name. they embraced the "deplorable" moniker. and their guy was getting more news coverage than practically all other "news" events combined. there seemed to be no repercussions for the street violence from the right.
trump's xenophobia made many believe he was literally hitler. his first moves in office, like the muslim travel ban, only heightened this sense. the orwellian phrases "fake news" and "alternative facts" also served to compound the sense that things were very wrong.
but in the 3 years that followed, i have to admit that his rhetoric sucked but his actual actions in office were pretty benign. his judicial appointments were fucking dystopian, but not unexpected for any other republican like cruz or rubio. his executive appointments (like department of education) were likewise awful-but-expected.
i still won't vote for him. but i didn't vote for biden, and i won't be doing that this year either unless there are some significant moves from biden that i don't believe are reasonable to expect.
to be fair, those chucklefucks also do this to ryan gosling, but I like ryan gosling. point, i suppose, is that believing the opposite of fascists is probably a good heuristic, but it isn't really a great like, reliable fact. see: the milk gallon psyop, or the OK symbol psyop.