Deep-seated fears of a Trump autocracy have led me to this path. It started when I first saw him in a debate in 2015 and I thought "nobody could be this stupid and still have so many people cheering him on" but then I saw the people cheering him on. His background in professional wrestling and his association with Playboy magazine were things I felt would be handicaps but the rubes loved him. That scared me a lot. It indicated that the base of the Republican Party was damaged. I looked across the aisle at the democrats and they also seemed chaotic but there was always an appeal to reason in their sometimes-emotional responses to issues. I started seeing the crazy manipulative messages in online fora. I saw them in the firearms community which I participated. You couldn't go very far without some discussion about the government taking your weapons. Then 2016 came and I didn't love Hillary. She is and always seemed like Richard Nixon in female form. I voted third party in the 2016 election assuming she would win. Watching my wife lose the first chance at a female president was shattering for her. I grieved for her pain. And to lose to such a hustling liar.
We spent 4 of the most painful years with him as president. I worked in a field where I engaged with presidential threats that crossed over from Obama to Trump. The threats changed from unhinged racists ones against POTUS to unhinged racist threats against the people who didn't support "our president." And of course you were around, so you saw how terrible he was on the World stage. He hated our allies. He tried to create rifts where none needed to exist. He actively denigrated alliances. He curried favor with his benefactor in the 2016 elections Vladimir Putin, he leaked classified intelligence programs from the Israelis. He empowered the rise of a warlike PRC and his response with some whack-a-mole tariffs allowed corrupt people to game them so that instead of goods being traded at value they were sold below value to a country like Argentina which then in turn pivoted and sold them (still under market value) to the PRC. His response to COVID 19 was a nightmare of bungling and he created the conditions where statistically many hundreds of thousands more people died because they resisted the correct responses to a pandemic.
Then the George Floyd response. He didn't offer respect to the people angry at the murder. Nah dog...i'm going to turn it into a cosplay autocracy where we have the Gadsden Flag-plated late model pickups bestrewn with NRA and firearms manufacturer stickers unloading their deputized Bureau of Prisons employee owners so they can don body army and face shields so they stand in phalanx on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Because that's what Lincoln would have wanted: a protest turned into a bloody riot.
(Irony)
So, that misery finally ends with the restoration of decency with a Biden win. Oh, but Trump can't abide that. He insists that Mike Pence carry out an end run on Democracy and install him for another term. So, he gets his rabble to storm the Capitol and tells that group of intellectual heroes that Mike Pence is responsible. And being a rabble they show up with a gallows and proceed to storm the building defecating in the offices of Nancy Pelosi. She of course is also the victim of an assassination attempt later when one of his devotees arrives at her home and tries to nail her husband's head to the floor. This is of course cheered on by Trump's cocaine-fueled son and his other followers because decency is for the other guys.
Trump is eventually required to leave office. He begrudgingly does but not before he takes cartons and cartons of highly sensitive classified documents to his Florida golf club/rental property. These documents include details of operations and sources and methods. Revealing the details will in fact lead to the death of programs and people who put their lives and well-being on the line to carry them out. He is caught in this act and fights tooth and nail any effort to return the documents.
Then Trump's friend decides that its time to rebuild the Soviet Union and invades Ukraine. Because Trump is not president the people of Ukraine are able to mount a spirited resistance and they are able through the spirit of the nationhood and the support of the NATO alliance resist Putin. Trump hates this because most of his fortune after his multiple bankruptcies was from Russia. Trump is never seen as happy in public as when he is with Putin.
Tweedledumb and Tweedleevil
Biden and his team have a competency about foreign affairs. He rallies NATO and allows NATO and the EU to help the Ukrainians. Their war grinds the once-vaunted (and believe me I at one time studied the Russian mil closely) armed forces down to where they are conscripting 60-year old men and prisoners.
Putin being Putin he arrests American reporters and others so he can use them as trade chips. Trump deciding that he can ignore the Logan Act and says he can get these people out of Putin's jails because he has a special relationship and that he would end the war in Ukraine very quickly...because he would remove the United States from NATO. Which his attempts to do so in his first term are very well documented.
So, now we are at the stage where Biden is old. He appears to have lost a step. And the perception of that is as damaging as the reality. So, his trusted understudy appears and she is everything that Trump hates: female, African-American, prosecutor, Californian, a believer in systems of Democracy and the Rule of Law. And for me the "two Corinthians" of an effective system of Democracy is the Rule of Law. If you don't have it you are NOTHING.
I hope that bumper sticker of a post tidied it up for you.
