For all of my ire with Trump and MAGA specifically and the republican party broadly, it takes a palpable level of brainwashing to believe it's all about being evil.
Really? You believe Trump would make himself a Mussolini-style dictator and value judgments like evil have never popped up in your mind? Excuse me if I don't buy it.
There are always going to be people out there saying nasty things.
It's not about some vague "people out there saying nasty things". It's about a systemic bias in one direction against the other by the most influential voices in society. The average person, since he's not all-knowing, looks to voices of authority to tell him what to think. Not about everything, sure, but "being informed" entails consulting public resources and the individuals and entities behind such. This is unavoidable; I myself have little choice but to daily consult the same news sources that I distrust. And those individuals/entities are broadcasting 24/7 negative propaganda about Trump, much of it blatantly hateful.
If Trump were to say "Biden is senile", or "Kamala Harris slept her way up the early part of her career", who would believe him? His hardcore supporters, sure, but not moderate voters. He's one man known to have a big mouth and exaggerate constantly.
Of course, the same is true for Biden. Whatever his preexisting reputation, people know politicians say bad stuff about their opponents. That's par for the course. If it was simply Biden and his campaign slinging mud back at Trump, plus MSNBC and far-left outlets of similar reputation to counter the far-right Fox, we'd reach a situation of parity. I wouldn't be inclined to complain about that.
On the other hand, if the headline "Trump threatens a 'bloodbath' if he loses reelection" were to appear on CNN (even though, of course, Trump was talking about the US auto industry and anyone who bothered to watch the original clip should've known this), people believe that kind of stuff. It's much more effective propaganda than anything Trump or Biden is capable of. They have an outsized power to shape public opinion and they're using it solely against Trump and his campaign.
When I talk about civility in politics I'm not talking about people on Twitter, I'm talking about prominent figures within the political left
And I say that when journalists decide elections, they are as powerful as politicians and ought to be held to the same standard of civility as prominent Democratic Party figures.
Taking the high road doesn't mean pretending that your political opponent isn't the threat that he is.
If you're gonna go with this, then anything and everything is justified, because everyone believes the other party to be a "threat".
I'm talking about the guy who suggested we drop a nuclear bomb in a hurricane, thought the solution to California wild fires is a rake
That's a lack of knowledge, not stupidity. You yourself are knowledgeable about whatever your career entails, but ignorant about a million random subjects. That's part and parcel of being human. Trump's mistake was to act like he knew what he didn't. But this is a separate vice from stupidity.
And let's face it: when Trump said "let's drop the nuclear bomb on the hurricane", you knew it was a dumb idea but you probably didn't know the science behind why it was a dumb idea. Maybe you looked it up and read an explanation after the fact, but that's beside the point. You just intuitively knew it was a dumb idea, same way that Trump intuitively "knew" it was a good idea.
And there is, I think, value to creative thinking in itself, even if lack of knowledge hampers its practical usefulness. The fact that Trump, a man in his 70s, was still capable of this kind of thinking is a good sign.
Take the rake thing; it's well known that California's wildfires were made worse by the state's reluctance to do controlled burns, allowing for flammable material to build up in forests. Assuming he came up with the idea of raking the forest himself, it does make for a sort of creative solution. You would remove that material without having to set anything on fire. Of course, it doesn't consider the logistics of combing such a vast area for leaves, or that more leaves would fall after the job is done, but so far as spur-of-the-moment shower thoughts go it's not so bad.
Should anyone have followed Trump's advice and raked the forest floor? No, but what it demonstrates is that Trump can think flexibly, a skillset that suits any President of the United States well as they go about doing what the job entails.
I accuse him of that because he is, as evidenced by the fact that he constantly fawns over dictators because of how tough and in control they are of their countries
For what it's worth, it's not an unpopular opinion that some countries are unsuited for democracy.
Many Democrats scoffed when Bush said he was going to bring democracy to Iraq, and worried that removing a strongman who kept the peace would make the local situation worse. I've heard a political science textbook raise the question "What good are lofty ideals like democracy to third world people whose main concern is putting food on the table?". I paraphrase because I don't remember what the exact wording was, but yeah.
In other words, it's not uncommon to use a different yardstick for what's good for other countries vs. what's good for America, where the system of government we have has served us well (our huge national debt notwithstanding).
Calling a lie hyperbole doesn't mean it's no longer a lie.
"Gee, I'm so swamped today. I've got a million things to do." Was this a lie or hyperbole?
You mean like loudly declaring that if a NATO ally doesn't "pay up" he would tell Russia to "do whatever the hell they want"?
You mean things he was saying back in 2015/2016, before he proceeded to become President and not touch NATO? This is the man who withdrew from NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Do you really think he wouldn't have exited one more treaty if he wanted to?
You left the dictators of Russia and North Korea off that lost. I wonder why.
Because for Russia, he was the same as other Presidents. Like Bush, who "looked into the soul" of Putin and saw a good man. Or Obama, who was quick to pursue a "restart" with Russia and then laughed at Mitt Romney at one of the 2012 debates when the Republican dared to suggest Russia might still be a threat 4 years after invading Georgia. Trump's Russia policy doesn't exactly stand out by post-Cold War standards.
With North Korea, he was harder on them at one point and then softer afterward. Both matter. You may or may not remember, but the mid-2010s was a period when North Korea's nuclear program was maturing and they were posturing more aggressively than they had done before. Fears of war escalated during this period, not just in Trump's first 2 years but before he took office.
Ever since then, the whole situation on that front has died down. Hardly anyone talks about North Korea anymore. Why? Because Trump first warned them "If you pick a fight with us, we won't blink", and then offered Kim Jong Un an off-ramp. We couldn't stop the North from getting nukes in any event, but we've also minimized the consequences of this fact.
