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Respectfully, this is just TDS. Your rebuttal is that you don’t like Donald Trump.
Yes, I really don't like Donald Trump.
It's worth a top level post though. Generally I think that "X derangement syndrome" can be a productive analytical lens. Here, for example, I use Elon Derangement Syndrome to explain what I see as unreasonable skepticism about Starship. I think Elon is a pretty bad person actually! But that has little bearing on the merits of his space program. He's an extraordinarily capable, visionary industrialist, SpaceX is a peerless global leader, Starship is insanely good. People derive "Starship won't work" from "Elon is a dishonest asshole" and I say that this only proves you don't need to not be one to win in space. Modus ponens, modus tollens.
But "TDS" is a cop-out, it is an assertion that all criticisms of Trump are driven by some instinctive hatred of the man, and not his object level failings or directly relevant priors about Trump's behavior. That's of course nonsense. The problem is that Trump really is an astonishingly low quality leader, in virtually every specific respect, a singularity of INTENSE BADNESS OF LEADERSHIP, as has been demonstrated through his entire career in more meritocratic contexts (shitty developer, shitty entrepreneur… unfortunately American politics is not meritocratic, you don't need any qualifications to rule at all); so every specific reason to disapprove of his actions kind of melds with every other reason, and you end up with the ur-reason "this kind of thing should not have any power at all", which is easy for followers to dismiss as "derangement". But it can also be just… objective assessment. Which it is.
I can praise Trump, though. Behold. He's not a coward, even seems to be personally brave (at least he has the instincts of a brave man). He's damn funny, and occasionally shows that he's a genius wordsmith. He's good at inspiring loyalty. He's kind to his friends. He can, apparently, instill party discipline. For most of his career he hasn't been a warmonger. He is capable of pointing out truths others try to ignore. He is not tribal (which is actually pretty impressive) – this is partially narcissism, but it lets him transcend insecurities and bigotries of his base, refuse to run cover for American deficiencies or problems, because he has his own brand which he holds in higher regard than "America", "White people" or "Republicans" or any other group. There might be more virtues. The best description of Trump in politics that I've seen can only be expressed in Chinese: «真小人 in a sea of 伪君子». 小人 is basically Trump's base; 君子 is what his tribal enemies want to present themselves as. But he's a genuine, exemplary specimen of his type, and they're frauds.
Alas, it does not make up for his deficiencies, and in many ways only exacerbates them. He's ignorant, stupid, impulsive, petty, vainglorious, dishonest, amoral, proud, opportunistic, greedy, corrupt, nepotistic, ungrateful and so on, a 小人 through and through. This influences his every action, and although every action can be deconstructed and traced back to specific failures in his decisionmaking, it's cheaper to just say it's Typical trump.
Part of the problem, as someone who also dislikes the man, is that there does genuinely seem to be a difference between those who dislike him on principles, and those who dislike him as a principle. Trump Derangement can be a cop-out, but there's far too many people who start with long lists of new superweapons they want to bring, a long list of supposedly unique grievances that justify their use, and then after the parallels or exact precursors to those grievances are shown to have been common or applauded, the need to launch the nukes remains. That's been true from Trump v. Anderson to the campaigns against the vulgarity of the office to grifting.
... which, uh, raises the obvious question. There's a pretty large number of other world leaders for whom each and every one of those criticisms applies, and a larger number of polities that have been either infected by or been the morass from which those leaders arose.
I can't object to that. Plenty of world leaders really seem to be terrible in very relevant and damning ways. Monke. Von der Leyen. Lula. Trudeau. Orban. It's harder to find a truly impressive one than an irredeemable wrecker. One could perhaps argue that Trump's badness is more about the unusually (for the developed world) shameless self-presentation than the content of his character or his political MO. What I'd say is that he's still unusually bad for an American leader, ie I cannot remember a single less competent President over the post-WWII period at least, and this makes him vastly more of a problem than all but maybe 2 other national leaders (yes, Biden or rather the hivemind that effectively was Biden is more competent); he's the first one in the US to build such a solid cult of personality, which is deeply corrosive and divisive because it's a cult of a shitty personality (one decent objection would be that Obama also has a cult of personality, and he's… mediocre); and that yeah, libs and Never Trumpers are correct, his erosion of norms is a great harm unto himself. "We had boats there also". "A whole civilization will die". Making the superpower's policy conditional on his petty personal grievances. Tearing down treaties. Flagrant Middle Eastern corruption and nepotism, cronyism, the first real Purge in the history of your state. Associating the White House with crypto and other tacky/scammy things. Based Intern poasting on official comms. He's not just low, he's bringing America down to his level, kicking down the whole edifice of "institutions", which had apparently rotted enough in the meantime to become precarious.
I guess what remains is that it's just sad for a straightforwardly bad, unworthy American leader to have such a large and energetic fan club. It's kind of an indictment of the whole American democracy thing, and startling vindication of the warnings of the Republic's Founders like Franklin and Adams. Trump maximizes objective functions of an elected American politician (chiefly, being electable and capable of running a coalition) and demonstrates that they can be neatly divorced from any virtue relevant to actual governance.
This seems a little prone to presentism. On top of the disclaimers you had to throw in, Lyndon B Johnson famously would wave his dick at reporters and got the FDA to pretends eggs were unhealthy just to paper over inflation. Nixon was Nixon. Ford started off the whole 'pardon the last guy' trend. Reagan had the exact same untrustworthy sack-of-shit empty-suit cargo cult leader stuff pointed at him, continuing well after he left office. Clinton interrupted national television to disclaim whether he, in fact, had sex with that woman, enough of a cult of personality that he got thrown into random cartoon intros, and a variety of hilarious corruption that at best gets the disclaimer 'not proven'. Dubya was Dubya. Obama's cult of personality has his defenders insist today that his worst scandal was a tan suit, after literal court settlements and his attorney general being held in contempt of congress (by a bipartisan vote). Biden Purged as or more aggressively.
I'll give you Carter, who was merely incompetent in his areas of expertise.
Trump's a culmination of the long-standing paean against democracy, but he's far from a novel or extreme one. The institutions hadn't rotted by coincidence.
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You could write a top-level if you want, but I don't know if we're going to get very far. I disagree in the strongest terms that Trump is a bad leader and I severely question many of your assessments: Shitty developer? Shitty entrepreneur? Moreover, Trump has shown intense leadership of both the Republican Party and America using qualities you have not named: his loyalty to people who are loyal to him; his loyalty to the base; his willingness to sacrifice his private comfort for a life of public politics; his flexibility on things that don't matter; his refusal to back down on things that do matter; and, yes, we agree at last, his bravery. Because Trump has lead the way on a dozen major issues that have gone from outside serious political consideration to mainstream. He has turned the world.
So when you call America a cretinous nation and justify that with your assessment of Trump, yeah, I call that TDS. It doesn't matter if you can articulate it at length in measured ways. I don't use "TDS" to compare you to the incomprehensible rage of a leftist full of hate. I simply think your assessment is so wrong that it can only come through a kind of reality-distortion field.
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