Please keep the "terrible person" trope off HN. The online call-out culture is good for shaming and indignation, but it wrecks curious conversation. Here we want curious conversation.
Two answers. First: sure it does. It's not about the person, it's about ourselves and what things like personal attacks do to the community [1].
The second answer is more pragmatic: in practice, it's much easier to simply ask "please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar" [2]. Everyone understands that. If we say "please don't do personal attacks" or "please don't do online shaming" about a major political figure, people mistake that for an expression of political support and object sharply. It's not worth the confusion, and I only have so much energy for explaining that it doesn't mean we're Trump supporters or communists or whatever.