COVID response seems like the biggest mistake, but that was a never before seen global pandemic, and it isn't clear to me that anyone else in office could have handled it differently.
- Forcibly separating children from parents, with no plan to reunite them. There are still children missing, who were spirited off $deity-knows-where. If criminals do it, we call it kidnapping and people-trafficking, but this was official government policy
- Let's focus on those kids, who were locked up in prisons, had any medication they were on confiscated, and we're not just talking teenagers here, some of those kids were under 5.
- The conditions they were held in would make a grown man weep, held in iron cages, kids defecating and vomiting in the heat. Staff wouldn't help small children, it was left to other children to try and keep the infants well.
- Routine use of pyschotropic drugs to act as "chemical straitjackets" on older children, so they would be usefully docile while being caged like animals
- Sexual assault on these unresisting, drugged children. That's rape. Of children - usually girls but not always. Under government supervision.
Personally I don't support the rape of children, but more than half the voting public seem to be "just fine" with it.
They're not just saying they're "just fine" with it. They are enthusiastically voting for it.
We have to come to terms with the fact that very clear, consistent campaign themes of cruelty and selfishness won over a majority of voters. Deep, country-wide introspection is needed.
It's the only way it all makes sense. I don't think that all those voters who vote for Trump and Putin and Erdogan and all the other autocrats think they'll have a better life. But they know that all those other people are going to suffer, and it makes them feel a bit better.
The most dangerous man (or woman) is someone who thinks they have nothing to lose.
People feel dispair, and therefore they vote for people who will make others suffer.
Their issue isn't legal vs illegal immigration. It's white vs nonwhite. They make "the legal way" harder for anyone that isn't white, which doesn't stem immigration. It just makes it easier to turn away non-whites at the border.
Attempted disassembly of EPA and FDA in attempts to raise employment in exchange for consumer safety.
Sale of federal lands that were preserves for future generations.
Picking a Supreme Court based on politics rather than law.
Preferring Totalitarian regimes when it came to diplomacy and snubbing our allies.
Trying to use the FBI as his personal attack dogs.
At least off the top of my head. Last term his goal was to undo a hundred years of progress as a constitutional progress.
This term? I have no clue what his goals are. I just hope he lives because the VP Vance appears to support that project 2025.
[1] https://time.com/6972022/donald-trump-transcript-2024-electi...
There's literally dozens of people who worked for Trump during his previous administration that have come out against him since then.
Personally, when I read about the alternate elector scheme and the attempt to prevent Pence from certifying the 2020 election, that was sufficient to convince me that Trump poses a real risk.
Trump fired national security officials in charge of handling pandemics. Trump repeatedly claimed that covid was not a problem, and that it wouldn't come to the US, and then that it would disappear by April, and then easter, and so forth. He fought the CDC, NIAID. As we know now, he also sent test machines to Putin for his personal use while they were in short supply in the United States.
This pandemic was rightfully and widely compared to the 1920 pandemic, as well as the SARS scare in the 00s. We are very, very lucky that the SARS scare got a lot of the legwork done in advance on the RNA vaccines.
It's hard to imagine any United States candidate handling it worse.
it's a very fucking slippery slope and everyone is too concerned with "but muh gas prices!" to think critically about the macro situation.