To be clear, I am only talking about people like the average working class Trump voter. The ones who just got caught by misinformation, and just haven’t been able to find a way out. Trump and all his mates are terrible people, and should be held accountable.
The average voter is another thing. My attitude is that I got lucky, and found out that Trump and his mates are terrible, instead of getting sucked down a rabbit hole of supporting them. Knowing how fascism works, I don’t know if I’d be able to reliably land on the right side if fascism happened in my home country. And if I don’t believe I could reliably spot fascism, I’m not comfortable acting like those who support Trump could have.
This isn’t a discussion of “just be a good person”. I know plenty of amazing, caring people who believe they’re doing the right thing.
This whole idea of “I can’t say is reliably avoid fascism” is based on this, the school that became fascist for a week. As bad of an experiment that was from that teacher, it was an effective way of teaching how people fall for what should be obviously a bad thing.
This is more concerning the replies here, but in this discussion, saying “Trump did X thing, so that’s why it’s the voters fault” is precisely why Trump voters exist. You just flip it and say “Biden has been supporting genocide, that’s all you need to know” and that’s a sufficient argument for Trump voters.
The issue is the amount of fuckups each side had, and while Trump is pretty clearly in the lead (I mean, he’s straight up a felon) to us chronically online people, I don’t know about normies who only watch the news that didn’t get the message through clear enough (not American, so I don’t know), or just use Twitter (which is Musk’s propaganda now, btw) or even other media that just recommend you what you want to see. They probably see constant allegations against the Democrats too.
For what it’s worth, I refuse to watch news networks, and have done for many years now, due to the utter drivel they push, and the breathless, manufactured urgency and false equivalence they habitually resort to. I do my best to source and corroborate things I consume across a broad ideological and geopolitical range. I’m fully aware of the rampant idiocy that Biden stuck to for large swaths of his term (and more broadly, his whole fucking career). As a result of that, I’m not ever going to agree that Trump in any way shape or form improved the situation in Gaza.
If anything, my read on it is that he likely prolonged the slaughter by getting his envoy to push Bibi to time it like this - honestly, it’s… suspiciously convenient for Trump that Bibi agreed to the same fucking thing that was presented the better part of a year ago, and that it just happens to almost exactly align with his inauguration.
This is all just part of Trump trying to project the image that he’ll “fix things on day one”. But he’s incapable of that, and only knows how to sandbag and sabotage shit so the timing makes him look better to his domestic American audience (who often consume stories like this in an uncritical and non-skeptical fashion, which is a tendency Trump is fully aware of and relies on quite consistently).