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Very belated followup to a maybe-too-dismissive response and promise for followup here. I feel bad about leaving that branch rudely untaken and not following through.
Bluntly, criticism as from SlowBoy and KMC was correct, 'corruption' in the sense of using power to drive personal gain was the wrong word, and I should have spent more time finding a better way to express the tangle of traits in Trump that I dislike and that drive me away from favoring him for 2024 President.
I would endorse maybe half of the class/aesthetic criticisms laid against him by the total commentariat (crude, boorish, unrefined), the cultural-conservative portion of moral criticisms (venal, dishonest, weather-vane, pandering), all of the epistemic ones, few to none about intelligence and raw perception (stupid, senile, psychotic). I like Ezra Klein's podcast ep "What's Wrong With Donald Trump" as laying out the raw impressions that drive me away, and support his induction of the base disorders being basically narcissism and total disinhibition. These two factors couple to a lack of intellectual humility ("my gut tells me more sometimes than most experts ever have" or something similar in the podcast was a line that struck me) that verges on disconnection from consensus inference and prediction, but not perception, that I think also drives a disgust reaction for me. Practically, his anxiety to be liked drives people-pleasing in historical US competition and opposition that is excessive to the goals of diplomacy, and his refusal or inability to engage with the existing machinery of state and its tribal knowledgebase is a crippling defect, even accounting for parachuting in friendly top leadership like Project 2025 wants to.
I look forward to reading Bob Woodward's trilogy on the topic and believing a third to half of it, and whatever Milley has produced about his experiences and believing two-thirds of it.
Thank you for putting this sentiment to words. I've been struggling with it for the last week as I try to assemble a last-minute appeal to voters.
Every time I see a "they must just hate freedom" or "they're taking off the mask" or especially "anything is justified if they think they're stopping Hitler!" I want to scream. God damn it, you're missing the point! Most people aren't making a utilitarian calculation. They aren't even reasoning from a coherent philosophy. No, they see good things and bad things, you imbecile, you fucking moron, and they vote for the ones that feel right. Two centuries of civics have sculpted their feelings about all these pretty words like "democracy," "freedom," "rights." But millennia of history etched something deeper.
"He can't keep getting away with it."
The modal Trump hater thinks that he is coarse, unstable, and especially untrustworthy. Seeing him avoid consequences is disappointing. Seeing him get rewarded is frustrating. And seeing his supporters construct an elaborate alternate universe where he actually deserves even more rewards is fucking infuriating. That's all there is to it.
It seems to me that we Trump supporters also feel this way, simply with a different referent. Hence, Trump.
Well…yeah.
I was pretty tired when I wrote that, but what I really wanted to convey was the simplicity of motive. Especially on forums like this, people love to concoct their elaborate theories, detailed strategic planning over how the outgroup could possibly come to their conclusion—and no, they just think he’s a tool.
It’s like watching a carjacking and writing an essay about the perp’s home life.
Someone once said Republicans like Trump because he hurts the right people. There’s a lot of Democrats who just want the right guy to get hurt. It sucks.
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