To reject Trumpism for good, Americans must learn to trust each other again. Joe Biden knows this better than most.

This might strike you as naive. I think it’s actually hard-nosed.

No less a President than Lincoln, when faced with what to do with ex-Confederates after the bloody calamity of the Civil War, offered them amnesty and restored their citizenship.

It might seem distasteful. But we must offer a path back into mainstream society for the tens of millions of our countrymen whose lives were so emptied of meaning that they were ready to place all their trust in a con-man.

How did American society fail to the extent of allowing *Donald Trump* to take a whole Party hostage and then become President? That is what we need to answer, and work on going forward.

Both sides need to embrace this. Both sides are guilty of polarization tactics, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and more. If my priority is freedom, and someone else values safety more highly than their freedom, then we will have different points of view on several topics. Neither person has to be stupid or evil for their to be a disagreement. When people are painted with a blue or red brush, it's usually by a tard. When somebody votes only for their party, they're usually a tard. The idea that political problems have simple solutions and the leaders that you like have the answers, means you may be a tard. By tard, I mean someone who has never been skeptical about what they believe. Someone who is afraid to discuss why they prefer one answer to another. I was talking to a really young coworker last week on a topic he was interested in and I had a lot of experience with (decades.) At one point he asked, "so what's the answer?" I explained that the more you know about something, the fewer answers you have and more questions. Things rapidly evolve into probably this, and sometimes something else. You learn that there are trade-offs, like the "joke" about, "Cheap, fast, or good... pick two." It's like the idea of safety. Safety as the absolute most important thing in your life doesn't make sense to me, but I know there are people who think that way. The safest thing is to not leave your house and never take a bath or shower. That's not a great life, so you decide to do things. As soon as you get in a car or decide to operate a tool at work, you are accepting risk in order to accomplish a task. That's a trade-off. If you want answers, you still haven't arrived at the tipping point of understanding where the questions start coming faster than answers. That's when you really start seeing into the fabric of the subject. Your question about the societal conditions that allowed a narcissistic con man to get elected is a great start. You can see that Trump was a symptom. Was it 8 years of Obama? I've read Michelle's masters thesis, and it changed my views on race. Was it the economy? Was it the media? Was there a shift in opinions about politicians in general? Was it just a technological advancement in campaigning? Who was that gal that worked for Obama then Brexit, then Trump? I guarantee fixing it is not simple, when power brokers have what they want.
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Thanks for that.

It’s hard to discuss politics without stepping on someone’s toes. But I really do try to be sensitive and aware of the conditions that produced our current political state. I’ve been around long enough to see the GOP evolve from the Bush years, through the failed Presidential campaigns of McCain and Romney, to Trump.

Some things the Trump version of the Party got right? Opposition to starting new foreign wars. Trump stated quite clearly he was not going to be a Neo-Con and invade countries for looking at us funny. And he lived up to that. We had no Iraq-style debacles.

Trump was essentially right that free-trade agreements have gutted the American economy. This is now orthodoxy on both the Right and Left.

The complaints about Trump being racist, sexist etc., I believe are grounded in real things he’s said and done — but being charitable to him, were perhaps a bit overblown. Is opposing illegal immigration necessarily racist? Not necessarily, even if most “illegals” have brown skin, it’s fair to point out they jumped the legal immigration line. Trump has been publicly accused many times of sexual misconduct. But it is fair to point out he hasn’t once been found guilty in a court of law. (I think the law is very stacked against women, personally — it took over 100 public accusations before Weinstein was found guilty, for instance.)

That said, Trump has crippling weaknesses. Narcissism. A lack of empathy. A failure to understand or maybe just indifference to science that proved immensely costly during Covid. He led our country into scary new uncharted territory in terms of erosion of faith in democracy. Jan. 6 and his ongoing refusal to concede serve as proof. He’s set the stage for the 2024 election to be a disaster, especially if he personally runs again.

Liberals have been painted as freedom-hating control-freaks. However, the truth is we do value freedom. We value freedom from police harassment. We value freedom from oppressive laws, such as the war on drugs. We value freedom for women. Freedom from moral dictates in our bedrooms. When the taxman comes around, we feel the same pinch as everyone else.

Freedom is a dominant force in American thought dating back to the Declaration of Independence. It’s a major theme of both parties. Let’s do more to try to recognize that, and that those who disagree with us on certain points aren’t evil.

I remember the newspaper picture when the Carter campaign team was celebrating that Reagan got the nomination. They thought they had it all sewn up. An 'outsider' can't beat Carter. An 'outsider' wasn't supposed to beat Clinton. C'mon man! Outsiders gain traction when people get fed up enough with what the insiders are doing. The two parties are cooperative behind the scenes. Both hands wash the other. It's a lot of theater, and the citizens need to stop voting for anyone who is a career politician and became rich in the process.