As a former #nevertrumper, I decided when he got elected to take him one issue at a time. While trying to do that, the insane overreaction to him turned me into an anti anti Trumper and got me to have some sympathy for him.
Aghast at what Biden/Harris portended, now eventuating, I would have voted for him if I had a vote.
My view is that prior to his election loss and maybe prior to Covid, what’s bad in him personally was mitigated and outweighed by his policies and his policy successes. Starting with Covid and then growing sharply, the former began outweighing the latter, especially after his policies became nil. He lost them as a countervail to his bad behavior.
But on the latter post election, James Lindsay adds some nuance. While recognizing the bad things Trump did post election, he notes that in the end Trump did leave the White House when he was supposed to. And his whole pattern, maybe his raison d’etre, during his presidency was as a fighter. Don’t tell me that he had nothing to fight against—arguably only the most obsessive, concerted establishment reaction to a President in US history, not counting Lincoln, in which normally sane people and institutions lost their minds in their effort to bring him down.
What he did was to stand up to them. The recent article on how diverse establishment centres of power got together to ensure his election loss was a continuation of that establishment onslaught against him— TIME MAGAZINE . So was the second futile attempt at impeachment, conviction and barring him from running for anything again. His modus operandi during his presidency to fight back continued after he lost. It, before and after, was marked by the same thing, for good and for bad, basically not to do the expected or the conventional, to go against accepted expertise, especially in foreign affairs.
That allowed him space for his policy successes and it continued after the election. So, it was a tough dynamic for him to balance, fight for what he believed in and stood for as against being concessionary.
I had no argument against his vain attempts to litigate the vote.
So, again, this isn’t to excuse the post election bad in him and in his conduct, but it is to say, Lindsay’s analysis makes the context for his actions broader than simply, “Trump bad.”
