You're making Trump out as being way too harmless.
Trump led our society straight into Covid denialism, and subsequently vaccine denialism. The root has been there, but the main power of a politician is to lead people, and he led the mainstream right into solipsistic "skepticism" of what would otherwise be pretty straightforward topics.
Trump is also directly symbiotic with reactionary groups that aren't criticizing our society to improve it, but rather to drag us back to the stage when their simple minded prescriptions were useful. As a libertarian, it's easy to explain away many of the other criticisms through different priorities, tradeoffs, relativism, media sensationalism, etc. But those two stick in the absolute sense.
Like every high level politician they're both terrible people, but Biden at least serves the corporate status quo that is the backbone of the country - the "deep state" if you will. I fully support Wikileaks et al, and I wish CIA/NSA/etc were disbanded and prosecuted. But as a self-interested American I'd rather the "deep state" continue causing global mayhem for economic gain, than to have a civil war at home (sorry). If you value global stability you probably should too, despite how disgusting it is.
The way I see it, 2022 is going to be a barometer and 2024 will be the jury verdict on our society. If people have come to see the destructiveness of Trumpism, the conservatives (democrats) will gain ground, and the incumbent power structure can continue sauntering on as it's slowly usurped by technology (ideally p2p rather than big tech middlemen, but that's orthogonal). Whereas if disenfranchised people continue to put performative dissent above rational self interest, the radicals (republicans) gain ground. They'll continue to create more elective crises that drive even more disenfranchisement (hello last 50 years of trickle down inflationism), and we're solidly in a death spiral.
Trump led our society straight into Covid denialism, and subsequently vaccine denialism. The root has been there, but the main power of a politician is to lead people, and he led the mainstream right into solipsistic "skepticism" of what would otherwise be pretty straightforward topics.
Trump is also directly symbiotic with reactionary groups that aren't criticizing our society to improve it, but rather to drag us back to the stage when their simple minded prescriptions were useful. As a libertarian, it's easy to explain away many of the other criticisms through different priorities, tradeoffs, relativism, media sensationalism, etc. But those two stick in the absolute sense.
Like every high level politician they're both terrible people, but Biden at least serves the corporate status quo that is the backbone of the country - the "deep state" if you will. I fully support Wikileaks et al, and I wish CIA/NSA/etc were disbanded and prosecuted. But as a self-interested American I'd rather the "deep state" continue causing global mayhem for economic gain, than to have a civil war at home (sorry). If you value global stability you probably should too, despite how disgusting it is.
The way I see it, 2022 is going to be a barometer and 2024 will be the jury verdict on our society. If people have come to see the destructiveness of Trumpism, the conservatives (democrats) will gain ground, and the incumbent power structure can continue sauntering on as it's slowly usurped by technology (ideally p2p rather than big tech middlemen, but that's orthogonal). Whereas if disenfranchised people continue to put performative dissent above rational self interest, the radicals (republicans) gain ground. They'll continue to create more elective crises that drive even more disenfranchisement (hello last 50 years of trickle down inflationism), and we're solidly in a death spiral.