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Yes, and Obama is a Kenyan Muslim communist with a fake birth certificate, a trans wife, and also he's probably the antichrist. Weak men are superweapons.
This is a class of objection that is very popular among Trump's supporters, as it is both impossible to fix (demanding that all those who oppose Trump have one unified coherent message, and also that none of them act histrionic or retarded is obviously impossible), and it also neatly elides any discussion of what Trump has actually said and done. "see, Trump isn't genocidal! He's just flirting with the nakedly imperialist conquest of our longtime friend and ally" is not the repudiation that you perhaps think it is. I personally have nothing to apologise for on that front, as I never engaged in such hysteria.
Trump is unlike Hitler in many ways. One of those ways is that, unlike Trump, Hitler had a theory. He 'knew' what had caused the ills of Germany, and acted accordingly. Trump, on the other hand, is just a thoughtless man with no moral center. His greatest achievement in this term so far has been to remove the safety rails that kept him from fucking anything up too badly in his first term. From here we are in uncharted territory. It is impossible to know what Trump is going to do next, he spouts so much bullshit that not even his strongest advocates can predict him. But what was fully predictable, and obvious to anyone who cared to notice it, is that Trump is unworthy of the post of President.
With all that said, I don't entirely disagree with the thrust of your post. The reason that a man like Donald Trump appealed to so many is that progressives overplayed their hand. I feel no need to let those who pushed woke to this point off the hook. But if they have to own that, then you have to own making an amoral narcissist the most powerful man in the world.
Transparent false equivalence. Ostensibly respectable left-leaning newspapers of record spent years milking the "Trump = Hitler" comparisons for all they were worth. Russiagate was a nonsensical conspiracy theory elevated to the status of a federal inquiry. I'll grant that a lot of people who should have known better gave the birth certificate theory more credence than it deserved, but the only people I've seen claiming that Michelle Obama has a penis are extremely online far-right weirdos. If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.
Of course it's not realistic to expect everyone who dislikes Trump never to act histrionic or retarded. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to request mainstream, ostensibly neutral institutions to dial down the hysteria a smidge.
Why not? Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.
Agreed.
I don't have to own anything. I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way, I've personally attended at least one protest against a policy he enacted, and even if I had been eligible to vote for him in 2016, 2020 or 2024 (neither being a US citizen nor residing in the US), I wouldn't have.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
Fair enough, anyone who claimed that Trump was literally a Hitler 2.0 hell bent on a new holocaust went too far. Anyone who stopped short of that, including those who merely accused him of being a 'danger to democracy' has, I think, been vindicated. There were plenty of contemporaneous articles which evaluated Trump as a menace without descending into hysteria.
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole. 'Ha! you thought he was a wannabe mass murderer, but in fact he is just a wannabe imperialist and warmonger'. Wow, great point. This is definitely where the nexus of the conversation should be.
Fair enough. Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
No argument here, but specificity matters. Rapists and murderers are both dangerous people, but if you're accusing someone of being a rapist, you need to present evidence that they actually raped someone; presenting evidence that they murdered someone is irrelevant. If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way, rather than just saying "he is an extremely dangerous man". As I said previously, Trump only benefitted by baseless accusations of genocide-mongering. A little message discipline would have served his opponents well.
I find it kind of staggering, that you apparently don't see any kind of causal link between a politician repeatedly asserting that the mainstream media is "fake news", said mainstream media producing avalanches of hysterical and overwrought predictions about the horrors that are soon to befall the world if he is elected, said predictions conspicuously failing to come to pass, and the politician getting reelected.
I hate this Manichaean arguments-as-soldiers worldview, in which if I point out that some factual claim about Donald Trump is false, the only possible explanation is that I'm doing so because I admire him and think that he's awesome. It couldn't possibly be that I just value factual accuracy for its own sake and resent being gaslit by people claiming never to have made specific claims that they did in fact make, repeatedly, for years, in public. Not everything is an opportunity for partisan mudslinging and nothing more.
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