> He's also the only President in my lifetime who did not start a new war.
There is no coherent standard by which both Trump did not start a war and every other recent President has. This is just a “say something often enough and people begin to accept it as true” thing.
> The extreme hysteria around Trump actually prevents people like me from evaluating Trump on his actual merits.
You seem to have a very firm opinion of him on the merits, which is inconsistent with believing that you have been prevented from that.
> Every article only highlights the negative of anything Trump doe
Where'd you get the idea that he is the only President in your life not to start a war then? The truth is that there are plenty of outlets pushing neutral and positive Trump outlets, and even actively suppressing stories that might hurt Trump (less so now than immediately before the election, as a whole bunch stopped such suppression when it no longer served to influence the election), and “every article highlights only the negative” is a lie.
> But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise
He openly has proposed personal-loyalty-based purges of the military officer corps and thr civilian civil service, deploying the military domestically in a deportation operation he explicitly modeled on the notoriously racisr, due process denying, legal injigrant and citizen expelling Operation Wetback of the 1950s (which itself, unlike Trumps overt olan, stopped short of using the military), massively scaled up, and has proposed solving urban homelessness by forcibly relocating the homeless to concentration camps.
And lets not get started on Musk, D.O.G.E., and fascist corporatism.
(But I, too, think Trump is not exactly a fascist, he’s a kleptocrat hiding behind fascism. But the functional difference between that and an actual fascist is likely to be minor.)
There is no coherent standard by which both Trump did not start a war and every other recent President has. This is just a “say something often enough and people begin to accept it as true” thing.
> The extreme hysteria around Trump actually prevents people like me from evaluating Trump on his actual merits.
You seem to have a very firm opinion of him on the merits, which is inconsistent with believing that you have been prevented from that.
> Every article only highlights the negative of anything Trump doe Where'd you get the idea that he is the only President in your life not to start a war then? The truth is that there are plenty of outlets pushing neutral and positive Trump outlets, and even actively suppressing stories that might hurt Trump (less so now than immediately before the election, as a whole bunch stopped such suppression when it no longer served to influence the election), and “every article highlights only the negative” is a lie.
> But no, I don't think Trump is a fascist, textbook or otherwise
He openly has proposed personal-loyalty-based purges of the military officer corps and thr civilian civil service, deploying the military domestically in a deportation operation he explicitly modeled on the notoriously racisr, due process denying, legal injigrant and citizen expelling Operation Wetback of the 1950s (which itself, unlike Trumps overt olan, stopped short of using the military), massively scaled up, and has proposed solving urban homelessness by forcibly relocating the homeless to concentration camps.
And lets not get started on Musk, D.O.G.E., and fascist corporatism.
(But I, too, think Trump is not exactly a fascist, he’s a kleptocrat hiding behind fascism. But the functional difference between that and an actual fascist is likely to be minor.)