Will you #votebluenomatterwho?

[TJ in Oregon]

Fascinated by TCG's current status and YellowHammer's liberal use of the word "communist".

I have moderated on a few issues, but overall I'm still a conservative. I've just simply been so dispirited by Trump's control over the GOP that I took a much more critical lens to many arguments used by conservatives on various issues and found a number of them lacking. The free-wheeling use of the terms communist and socialist when NO major presidential candidate is running on those platforms is particular annoying and intellectually lazy.

I'm in a strangely opposite position in that Donald Trump, while clearly evil, is to blatantly obviously the lesser of the two evils in most of the matchups that the question is whether or not I vote for him or a random throwaway candidate like last time. It's also interesting in that I see Sanders as far less evil than the other major Democratic candidates: he has some out-there views that seem genuine and at least less strongly committed to the deconstruction of society than most of his party rivals.

[TJ in Oregon]

this president is a clear and present danger to the long-term health of our entire system of government, yes, I will vote for whomever the Democrats nominate.

Can you even present any actual reason to believe this?

Sure, several. At a very base level, he has no problem debasing the legitimacy of our election process with wild and unverified claims of "millions of illegals voting" and claimed in 2016 that he'd keep America in suspense as to whether he'd accept the results of the election, if he lost. If he spoke in this way about an election that he won, imagine how he will respond if he loses in 2020. Given that the Senate is now basically a symbolic rubber stamp for the President and the judiciary can only pass legal judgments and not actually enforce their rulings, who's going to stop Trump from simply declaring the election null and void, essentially ending the American Republic, for the sake of his own ego? To top that off, he speaks of having the military, the cops, and the bikers - "the tough people" - on his side in case "things get bad". Do you really think that it's ok for a president to hint at who would take his side in the case of a civil war? That's extremely dangerous talk in such a polarized age. Whether he means it in jest or not, he has millions of people who would literally take up arms to keep him in the White House if he claimed that he was being forced out by some deep-state coup.

And of course, there's the fact that he openly invites foreign interference in our elections, blackmails allies into pulling up dirt on political opponents, and is able to commit crimes and violate the Constitution with impunity because of the aforementioned rubber-stamp Senate...so yes, Donald Trump is a threat to our system of government.

Good answer. You also forgot to mention that he has not just critiqued the media, but actually branded the free press - a necessary pillar of any functioning democratic system - the "enemy of the people." He routinely uses the term "fake news," an actual problem that should be appropriately addressed, to describe any news that is remotely negative for him politically. He's gaslit a huge portion of the population to the point where they will deny what is confirmed by many reliable media sources so long as Trump tweets out that it is a lie. The man being reported on has become his own reporter. The gutting of American media is an underrated threat to our system of government and while Trump is not the only cause, he is pushing the pedal to the floor.

I mean, the media obviously is the enemy of the people. Given the freedoms provided for in the US constitution it has every right to remain so - and people, the president included, have every right to criticize it. But there is no question that the media is an overt enemy to both conservative values* and to a functioning civil society, given both the vast disparity between its views than those of the people it is reporting to, and its incentive to make money by driving controversy. It relentlessly twists every sentence to provide the maximum polarization and outrage and has without a doubt done more to make us all hate each other than any other institution in America. And there is no reconciliation or remorse coming from it, red meat to drive division. The media created Donald Trump. And they strive to hate him, but it is for two reasons: one is that in the cultural circles in which they travel everyone hates him and they are mostly weak-willed and seeking affirmation from their cohort; the second is that, paradoxically, they benefit from him financially, since more controversy = more money. If they really wanted to defeat Trump, the answer would be simple: Trump is a troll. We've all been on an internet forum long enough to know you don't feed the troll.

*There is also something to be said here about the particular role conservative media has played in both ripping apart national cohesion and in undermining conservative values. The Fox News of the world spent decades proclaiming themselves as some kind of great defender of conservative values when it was basically a hypocritical scam filled with people who believed none of it and just used it to make money. See other conservative outlets too for people like George Will or Bill Kristol for added examples of pundits who pretended to be conservative but had no real intent to push those principles beyond a few niche issues (read blah blah blah cultural values but I don't care and will actually just want to invade places and cut taxes since it's all about that $$). Also just watch the advertisements of Fox News sometime to see it is like half scams. Thus a conservative should see most of the US's conservative media as also an enemy, even if an occasionally useful one.

[TJ in Oregon]

this president is a clear and present danger to the long-term health of our entire system of government, yes, I will vote for whomever the Democrats nominate.

Can you even present any actual reason to believe this?

Sure, several. At a very base level, he has no problem debasing the legitimacy of our election process with wild and unverified claims of "millions of illegals voting" and claimed in 2016 that he'd keep America in suspense as to whether he'd accept the results of the election, if he lost. If he spoke in this way about an election that he won, imagine how he will respond if he loses in 2020. Given that the Senate is now basically a symbolic rubber stamp for the President and the judiciary can only pass legal judgments and not actually enforce their rulings, who's going to stop Trump from simply declaring the election null and void, essentially ending the American Republic, for the sake of his own ego? To top that off, he speaks of having the military, the cops, and the bikers - "the tough people" - on his side in case "things get bad". Do you really think that it's ok for a president to hint at who would take his side in the case of a civil war? That's extremely dangerous talk in such a polarized age. Whether he means it in jest or not, he has millions of people who would literally take up arms to keep him in the White House if he claimed that he was being forced out by some deep-state coup.

And of course, there's the fact that he openly invites foreign interference in our elections, blackmails allies into pulling up dirt on political opponents, and is able to commit crimes and violate the Constitution with impunity because of the aforementioned rubber-stamp Senate...so yes, Donald Trump is a threat to our system of government.

These are major faults of course, but one thing I would like to point out here is that when he won, his opponents' voters were the ones who had an extremely hard time accepting that. In 2012 when Mitt Romney lost, I didn't spend days hearing from disaffected Republicans calling for an armed revolt, or even much moaning about how the election had been stolen. Sure, there are always people who think every election was stolen unless they win, but the Democratic Party establishment did spend years claiming Russia "hacked" the election (and intentionally misleading phrase that suggests they hacked into vote-counting machines rather than had a few internet trolls illegally campaigning). Strangely, not to be outdone, whereas Trump called for an investigation into Hillary Clinton (a threat of imprisoning his opponent), it was none other than our 'reasonable' establishment Republican Bill Weld who is running with the position that Trump (his opponent) be executed. There is a lot more incivility than just Trump.

All of this is crazy talk from where we were pre-2016 in the national narrative. The question then is whether it is a consequence of Trump, or whether Trump simply ripped down the facade of civility. My personal belief is the latter. The unfortunate question is when we can stop tearing down the corrupt elements of our system and actually build something positive. I am not optimistic I will live to see it. People yell at each other recreationally on the internet, yes, but there is little else actually happening. I doubt the decline will end until we're, as a society, uncomfortable enough to want to build something better.