Yes, looking at the title I'm a couple of years late to the show, but bear with me. I've been sitting on the sidelines watching half a country and 80% of global media devolve into a delusional mob when it comes to the U.S. president ever since he announced he was running for office in earnest in 2016. And, truth be told, I just don't get the why?
I mean, parts of it I do get. If your preference for politicians is the slick party professional who has gone through all the DC hoops and loops, or any other career politician in the broadly western world, Trump certainly isn't that. He's brash, too eager to go off script for many, egocentric, boorish even. He looks like an oversized oompa-loompa. He has funny or weird mannerisms. But these are superficial things (which don't bother me personally, but I understand that they might bother someone else). Me personally I prefer a straught talker even if he or she ends up sticking their foot in their mouth once in a while.
Is it that he doesn't play the press' and blue Twitter checkmarks' game and that he has by and large turned the tables on them? Is it that he, more or less, could also reach his followers by completely bypassing traditional channels?
Is it his stance on the border? But how is that stance substantially different from the presidents preceeding him. Sure, he's more vocal on it, and he's putting more pressure on Mexico (actually, it's probably that he's putting any pressure on Mexico at all that is making the border less porous...), but in essence his actions are not that different from what others have done before him? He's just a bit more... loud and pressing on it?
As far as social policies go, I really don't know enough about the US developments these past three and a half years, but by and large Trump seems like and old school social liberal to me. It's certainly not as if he's leading an arch-conservative, bible-thumping regime, leaving all diggs at Mike Pence?! Dude's pro gay, has been married more than once, has a Jewish son-in-law.
Under his government economic activity and prosperity has soared for the overwhelming majority of US citizens. Nobody can deny this. Sure, it can be claimed that this might be more due to some long-term effects of policies enacted by Obama rather than just by his early term tax cuts (which might be possible, if one looks at the reforms of German chancellor Gerhard Schröder that enabled much of the prosperity that Merkel's governments have enjoyed). But the outcome is the same: people prosper (or prospered until CoViD-19, but then that's hit everybody squarely in the balls). Massively, going by the pre-CoViD-19 unemployment figures. Businesses returned to the US, and businesses in the US have received greater protection from outside dumping price competitors, meaning jobs either stayed or were created in the US.
Is it Russiagate? That Nothingburger-from-the-start? I'm sorry, everybody looking from the outside in who didn't have their heads stuck up their own asses could see that this was bogus. I'm really baffled by the position that it ought to have needed Putin's magic finger for a business- and showman with decades of nationwide media exposure to beat a grumpy DC harpy suffering from party infighting. It's also a pretty risky stance to take, given the numbers of elections the US itself has actively meddled in! Ukraine comes to mind, which was an Obama op, if I'm not mistaken.^^
With regards to US military interventionism, this is maybe the one where it logically baffles my mind the most. Primarily because I like a certain amount of consistency in political stances. How can it be that one political side went from a broad anti-war, anti-interventionist stance that had large public support in the first half of the first decade to praising to heaven and back someone who was busy drone bombing half the planet to smithereens while at the same time lobbying for that someone to receive the Nobel Peace Prize? Only to complete the 180° by throwing their weight behind a candidate who, while possessing all the virility of a mummified corpse, proclaimed a foreign policy stance that would have gotten the US into a shooting war with the only other near peer power on the globe on an issue where the other guy would never have backed down!?
And yet at the same time the news outlets and seemingly half the electorate where busy screeching about something Trump said - at that point - something like ten years ago. The "grab them by the pussy" bit. Boorish, again, yes. Inappropriate, sure - in any official circumstance. But out of the ordinary in a seemingly private conversation between two machos trying to out-alpha each other? Because no man has ever talked hilariously inappropriate shit in private, ever, right? What does Trump's shit-talking ten years past in private have to do with his qualifications and stances for president in 2016? How does this in any way, shape or form disqualify his government's achievements or policies or, at that point, plans? That shit went on for weeks!
And now you've got a US government that's been trying to scale back US interventionist involvement against all internal and external pressures, something leftists have been clamoring for for decades - and that's wrong again? Suffenly you need more troops on foreign soil, more interventionist strikes? Huh?!?
Really, I don't get the scizophrenia. I freely admit that most likely I don't even have half the info I need as an outsider, but just from the way the overall sizuation has presented itself to me during the past years I can't wrap my mind around this. Disagree with his policies, fine. But then present viable alternatives. All it seems to me is that leftists seem to get stuck on fighting the man's style, but they've got no idea how to fight his policies' substance?!? Why this irrational hate? I get not liking the man's style. I get not being behind his policies. What I don't get is this nigh religious fervour with which he is hated?
