[kafkaesq]

All generally valid viewpoints, of course. There may be questions of degree, and more fundamentally, of proportion to other issues not mentioned. But taken individually, I can get where they're coming from on nearly all of these bullet points. (In particular: while I personally don't think political correctness comes anywhere near in significance to the issues it (clumsily) tries to address -- it is a significant problem in itself, and I can see why it provokes so many negative feelings in people).

It's the fact they chose, as a frontman for this body of positions, a person who's not only blatantly incompetent -- but who may very well get large numbers of us killed (for example, by unnecessarily provoking a confrontation with North Korea) and/or potentially cause extreme, irreparable damage in a whole bunch of other ways -- that's the part I don't get. Or that they can't see this basic disconnect (between the sentiment of their positions; and the reality of the end result of the course of action they advocate in response to this sentiment). When it should be blindingly obvious.

EDIT: Failed to notice that this thread represents the very essence of a "pure politics" discussion, and hence is strongly against site guidelines. Nonetheless your analysis was very succinct and thoughtful.

[gfodor]

The thing that seems to have gotten lost is that ultimately the choice for all Americans was between Trump and Hillary. There are many millions of Americans who came into 2016 with the view, established over the last 2 decades, warranted or not, they would never, under any circumstance, vote for Hillary Clinton for president. Within that group, there were many who felt that they would do anything, including vote for a person like Trump, to prevent such an outcome.

Trump is hated now but it's easy to forget what a fundamental difference this was. There were large swaths of voters who would have voted D if literally any other person with a pulse was on the ticket. For the most part, In fact, those people did do just that when they voted for Obama TWICE in the last two elections:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...

I think the narrative that the electorate embraced Trump belies the fact that just as much, if not more, of the dynamic was that the electorate, unsurprisingly, rejected Hillary specifically (who by the way, as is known now, cheated the candidate who probably deserved to be on the ticket.)