| HN Mirror

Trump is not afraid of saying controversial things or making statements which do not mirror the currently understood facts. That much is known. There is probably a legal definition for what would make the president unfit to serve and it likely does not apply to Trump.

Nobody expects the president to be a genius military strategist, a certified priest, a renowned scientist, a master economist or whatever else. What people do expect is that he seeks out those he trusts most to offer opinions, data and interpretations of data to allow him to make informed decisions he deems best for the country.

To some extent, I think many of his whimsical views are irrelevant and are simply highlighted by media for profitability while others are perhaps overinflated relative to their original form. His actions are all that really matter and the media is covering him so studiously that if he does something truly horrid then it's unlikely to squeak by.

Having said that, there is a very serious danger that the media may have cried wolf too many times and the public may not pay as much attention if they have to cry wolf for real. They've overinflated and misrepresented many issues in every attempt to depopularize or delegitimize Trump, that they may have destroyed some of their potential as an alarm bell service.

A couple years ago if you were to put out a truly fair unbiased survey across the country which asked about the border wall or immigration from that list of countries without trying to force racial or religious interpretations, the results might be surprising in retrospect. After these things became super-topics thrust into the light of the campaign, the media machine went into full swing to convince people that everything about them was horrible.

Many people didn't even know they should have strong opinions about these and if Obama had done them (perhaps more smoothly), it might have just been another day. The trend out there is not to properly inform people on topics, but to instill anger. To some degree, Trump won on that emotional vote by using the same tactics.

What people have felt is that the government was not representing them and a candidate appeared that showed every indication of fighting an uphill battle where both parties and the media were against him. Saying a few unpopular things was not considered enough to be damning, especially when the media had thrown a lot of its credibility out by passing a certain threshold for bias which may have hurt their influence on shaping public opinion.

Now, part of what is keeping all of the controversy alive is that many people feel that Trump is being judged as guilty until proven innocent while at the same time there is parallel information (both fake news and legitimate) that offers reasonable doubt.

There was a time when news and scientific papers were trusted by default, but trust has been sacrificed for agendas and personal or corporate gain. It was never a good thing that they were trusted by default, but it was good that they were less opinion oriented. Now the burden has been placed back on the individual to do their own research, but many do not have the time or are not equipped to do research and the internet offers many counter-productive shortcuts.

I'm not a particularly politically invested person and I completely opt-out of the process. No voting, no donating, no activism, etc. It is however good to see that more people have gained interest in that process, despite how juvenile it may seem on both sides.

I don't know if any of that satisfies your curiosity, but I apologize for it being lengthy. It's easy to give in to the doomsaying that's popular right now, but I don't think Trump even measures on the chart of things to worry about over the next 100-200 years. Technically I guess that's also considered doomsaying. :) Doomed if we do, doomed if we don't.