Trump didn't magically pop into existence upon his first day as president. There was a campaign before he became president. And in that he behaved as the typical rogue demagogue. Putting groups against each other, completely demonizing opponents and made numerous implications, ''jokes'' or statements that he wasn't in any way going to honor democracy and that he'd go out to hurt those he didn't like. The media didn't force him to campaign that way, and they certainly didn't force him to govern that way. Trump is a willfully divisive politician and that cannot be argued with. Its his business model. Demagogues are not goofy politicians who are just bad at expressing themselves. They use fear and division as marketing tools.
People were downright on their knees praying in fright when Trump lost for far less reason and far less justification for any fear. Biden is after all infamously milktoast. One can at least sympathize with those that fear a man who's an objective threat to democracy coming to power even if you consider the action themselves overly dramatic. The people who feared Trump so much? They were completely correct. Everything they feared came to pass up to and including an attempt to take down American democracy.
Given Biden didn't underestimate covid and didn't try to convince people it was just the flue we can safely dismiss any statement that somehow it was Biden who screwed up with Covid. Doing your best to protect citizen during a pandemic doesn't stoke divisions and much as grifters who pretend it does, or president who go out of their way underestimating it because they just don't feel like dealing with it.
Hilary didn't honor democracy either and said Trump was an illegitimate president after the election. And what about all the promises that democrats make during the election and never do? Again, Trump did not do anything (as he couldn't) and people were crying on election day. And what happened during Trumps presidency? Not much. Is the US now fascist or a dictatorship or are we back to before civil rights as far as racism goes? Nope. So what were people crying about then? They were riled up by the media in how horrible it would be if Trump became president. Both sides of the media do this, they act like every election everything will far apart if the other guy gets in, and the fact that US elections/campaigns last fucking forever, and just makes that division/hate even stronger.
Really, you actually think Jan 6th was a legit attempt to take down American democracy?
Trump did the project warp speed on the vaccine, and the vaccine is the only thing that significantly helps mitigate covid. But, Trump did nothing.
Trump wasn't the only one downplaying covid, the liberal media was as well. Here about the 3:00 mark, Rachel Maddow completely downplays covid while literally saying it has about a 2% fatality rate, does she not understand how devastating a 2% fatality rate would be? Same thing with Dr. Peter Hotez (not some media talking head but actual serious doctor that invents vaccines), famous for being super strick on people following the dumbest covid restrictions (yelling at people just this year for seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer), and was on The Daily Show around the same time as Maddow here saying you can see friends and family and stuff.
If you wanna criticize Trump for not following covid science, you also gotta criticize Biden who also has a horrible track record on following covid science. Why did he force vaccine mandates with no science supporting it? Why did he force boosters through with no science supporting them (for all people)? Why wasn't Biden for opening schools? Keeping kids home for 18 months straight was a massive tragedy that no other country did because the science was clear it was a massively stupid idea. I can tell you why, because Trump said to open schools and Trump can't possibly be right and the opposite must be done no matter what. Neither party is my team so I keep receipts on both of them. Lastly, closing schools massively hurt minority students disproportionately because private schools were open and all the kids of well-off families were still going to school the whole time. Hence, it was democratic covid policy that was very much against minorities, not republican policy, but the narrative is that republicans are the racist ones trying to keep minorities down.
I mean, if someone is at an event where people are openly chanting "gas the [slur], race war now" and isn't thinking to themselves "okay, I should leave and maybe rethink how I ended up here" I would say they are either not a good person, or an extremely, extremely stupid person, and it functionally doesn't matter which they are at that point.
Unite the Right was a massive failure for the far right. It was a huge mask off moment, and people really weren't ready for it. Ironically, it both divided the far right internally with various groups blaming each other for not being covert enough and pushed a lot of people who had assumed the neo-Nazi shit was just an edgy joke away from the far right.
Sure, they probably would have preferred it if Trump had stood up and said "hell yeah, white supremacy is tight" because they honestly seem to have thought that was going to happen, but what he did was still the next best thing for them, which is to play along with their cover story that this was just an innocent little grass roots local-led protest about statues and some mean old LARP Nazis showed up even though noone invited them. It wasn't. It was an explicitly neo-Nazi event organized by neo-Nazis to capitalize on a real political disagreement noone else wanted them involved in.
Basically, he did the absolute bare minimum he needed to do while leaving enough room for copium-huffing white supremacists to rationalize that he was actually on their side and protecting them. Many people justifiably felt that, given the context, it wasn't good enough.
Why is the far right so much worse than the far left? And this far right that's made of Nazis is actually a big enough percentage of the right to make actual Nazi shit happen? It's like being worried about the far left communists are gonna make America communist, it's not gonna happen. Why are you so worried about stuff that has no chance of happening?
