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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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To this day, I see people saying things like "Trump separated families at the border" and "Trump puts kids in cages".

I haven't really checked in on this issue in about 5 years, but I had remembered back when this happened, hearing conflicting reports about whether this was the Trump administration's policies, or if this was something that (like so many other things) had been going on for a long time before him, but for which he got saddled with the blame because of TDS.

I wanted to find out the truth about what happened, and if Trump is uniquely to blame. Quite frankly, I don't really trust anyone or any source (from the left or the right) other than this forum to be honest about the veracity of the accusations, because TDS is so powerful.

TDS can cut both ways.

Some can’t believe Trump could ever do anything right/good, some believe he couldn’t do anything wrong/bad.

Some will exaggerate or inappropriately assign blame, others will downplay and sanewash.

This isn’t a completely new phenomenon (I remember people seriously alleging Obama and Bush were on the verge of establishing a dictatorship), but Trump has an incredible talent at arousing emotion on both sides of the aisle and perhaps generates the strongest reality distortion field ever measured, in US politics anyway.

In Trump’s defense, he retracted the policy himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_family_separation_policy