This is why I don't understand why people say that Trump winning again is the end of democracy.
Trump's behavior is not "weird"; it's standard American politics.
The only way to beat it is to offer real democracy, real economic change, and to take people unhappy with the current system seriously instead of dismissing them as "weird" or "deplorables".
Reagan did not try to overthrow democracy. He didn't conspire with Russia against America. He didn't try to blackmail a foreign power into dishonestly interfering with a US election. He didn't retain 60 boxes of classified secrets after leaving office. He didn't sexually assault 26 women. He didn't tell 30000+ lies in 4 years. He didn't say that immigrants were eating our cats and dogs.
Even knowing everything that has come before intimately doesn't make Trumps stuff make any sense. There is a reason all the professional historians, including the ones politically on his side, are up in arms about him and his plans. This is not "business as usual", he is as bad as literally everyone that has any idea about any of this stuff says he is.
He is way too easy to corrupt and sway. He has no idea what he is doing and trusts all the wrong people because they play him so easily. He's a "useful idiot", but useful to people who want to bring America down or just make more money for themselves. He still thinks all of his plans are his own ideas, or at least that he is doing them for his own reasons, but they are just tapping into his overblown self-confidence and ego.
The reason calling him "weird" actually worked is because he knows that word... schoolyard taunts bother him so much more than accurate assessments of the consequences of his actions. If he could follow along with that logic, he wouldn't be a problem in the first place. Deplorables doesn't get to him because he has no idea what that means and refuses to learn. He has an aversion to reading. Yes, that thing that is basically 90% of the presidents job.
This is absolutely business as usual, but Trump as a business man is just more erratic and harder for those with a vested interest in maintaining existing power structures to control.
He's not as bad as Reagan, but he's a loose cannon and I agree that that makes him dangerous.
calling him "weird" actually worked
I'm sorry, what? Did we see the same election results? Publicly dismissing someone for being weird is alienating to large swathes of the country. Many of us take pride in our weirdness.
Has Trump put the lives of innocent American hostages at risk for his political gain?
Note that I'm not saying that he wouldn't, just that he hasn't yet to my knowledge.
I would say that Reagan's treasonous acts were in fact even worse than Trump's, considering that Trump's impeachment treason was to put a foreign country at risk.
Note that that isn't to say that Ukrainian lives matter less than American hostages or that what Trump did wasn't bad, just that putting Americans at risk is "worse" on a scale of treasonous actions.
Another way that things are in fact getting better is that unlike Reagan, Trump actually got impeached (even if the conviction failed at the end).
how do you feel about the whole iranian general missile thing. that felt like it could have gone very, very wrong. Keep in mind to that he was largely still using the established beuracracy when he came in and this go round he has a lot more intended people and many military people said they had to keep him in check.
My understanding is that Soleimani was responsible for the deployment of a type of anti-vehicle mine in Iraq that killed hundreds to perhaps in the low thousands of US soldiers. A lot of the military brass wanted him dead for personal reasons and Trump was too weak to resist their urging he be taken out. Trump may have avoided immediate consequences because Soleimani was more useful as a martyr to the Iranian leadership at this point. In the long run it fueled another generation's anti-US animus.
If you're talking about Trump's assassination of Qasem Soleimani, then I have to admit that I'm less familiar with thr details there since it happened while I was out of commission.
From the wiki article, it looks like the root problem was Trump being an idiot and loose cannon by reneging the Iran nuclear deal, leading to a crisis in the Gulf, which he then tried to solve by killing that guy.
yeah it was a moment when it was like. did he just start ww3. I mean I think everyone was bowled over at how small the response was from iran. it was just a dangerous as fuck thing to do.
Do you remember how Trump chose not to address COVID for political gains when it looked like it was hitting primarily democratic cities? I've seen some calculations that half a million more Americans died from COVID because of his reaction to it. That's treason on a level nobody has reached