Confusing cause and effect: The Trump presidency

Always Orange Man's fault?
// public domain

Listening to the Reason Podcast on my way to work the other day, managing editor Stephanie Slade talked about her ballot and how it was sitting on her desk, waiting to be filled out. The two options she was mulling over was to either vote for Biden or vote for nobody. In the Reason staff poll, she mentioned that a vote for Biden has a lot of value, that it's a case for rejecting Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She doesn't mention that voting for Jo Jorgensen would accomplish exactly the same thing, all the while voting for someone that would actually represent her. At any rate, she mentioned that her hesitation with voting for Biden was his refusal to provide an answer of whether or not he would pack the Supreme Court and that she disagrees with him on virtually every policy position.

Huh?

If she disagrees with every policy position of his, why is she considering voting for him?

Thankfully, Nick Gillespie chimed in, asking the exact question I had, to save me from yelling at my radio.

The reason she gave was that the country was extremely fractured and she thought it would be very important to remove the dividing factor, Trump. For color, she talked about the literal riots we've been having in the streets.

It's not like I haven't heard this before. But I hadn't heard it from a libertarian before, particularly one that focuses on covering conservatives on a libertarian media outlet. And as Nick correctly points out, no one can seriously blame the riots on Trump. Hell, Biden had more to do with the fundamental reasons for the riots, given his hardline stance on increasing police militarization and aggressive police tactics in the 1990s, leading to loose policies that eventually killed Breonna Taylor.

Of course, the question is: Is Trump the cause, or the effect, of the political divide?

People who say he is only the cause must not have gained consciousness yet before 2016. The country was fracturing already during the Obama presidency. Even during the 2008 election, the left was en masse, calling anyone who doesn't vote for Obama a racist. The term racist was used so widely and pejoratively that it had pretty much lost all meaning, causing the right to respond by calling Obama the "affirmative action president". Obama's "clingers" antagonization of the right didn't help things. Neither did the biased media portrayal of the left-right divide. The anti-corporate media sentiment was already heightened during those years.

Of course, there was already a pretty wide divide during the George W. Bush years following the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and the Authorization for Use of Military Force. These were really bipartisan efforts in Washington DC, but not to progressives and conservatives outside of the political machinery.

The sentiment surrounding the presidency was already at boiling points at the 2016 election. It is reasonable to assert, as Dave Smith has continuously in his podcasts, that one of the primary reasons Republicans chose Trump over people like Jeb Bush was that they have been getting attacked and smeared for years to that point, and Trump represented someone that will fight back. If anything, Trump does not shy away from a verbal boxing match. 

No one would argue that Trump hasn't escalated things, but to say that Trump started all of this or even to say he alone is to blame for escalating this is to admit residency in a blue bubble habitat in the preceding years. Slade finding effort to vote for someone she never agrees with, utilizing bizarre reasoning, while not being able to find the effort to vote for Jorgensen, someone she would agree with and have a larger impact tacking on a vote for, is very disappointing. She's better than that. Her blank mark next to all the presidential candidates' names is a far more effectual vote for her cause than voting for Biden.