He is not, remotely, “like them all”, and I think if you are dealing with your remorse this way then, respectfully, you have a little more work to do, not least because it will give you the skills to help you negotiate the current moment where the tech industry has some people who are aberrant in similar ways.
The threat posed by Trump to the USA was evident from the day he announced his candidacy. That his whole presidency would one way or another be about his awful approach to immigration and to Ukraine was evident by the time of the Republican National Convention.
That he would try to overturn an election that he lost was evident before he ran for one.
If you cannot see that this man’s essential pathology is dangerous, I worry you cannot see dangerous parallels in several current tech CEOs (at least two, fairly arguably four or five).
There are many bad and crooked politicians; there are many their colleagues hate. Trump is not a crooked politician except as a side effect.
He’s not the same kind of “bad person” at all; most of us never meet anyone as dangerous.
I think you do need to recognise that you (and don’t get me wrong, millions of others!) voted for someone who is essentially evil (in the literary sense of evil). And really you should have been able to see it, because it wasn’t that hidden.
It shouldn’t stop you voting again because genuinely so few people are like him, though he has found fellow travellers in this administration. (Notably RFK Jr — a shockingly awful man)
But it would be healthy to look at what it was that let you look past his evil.
> And really you should have been able to see it, because it wasn’t that hidden.
A lot of his voters saw the cruelty and crassness and liked it. Trump was their vessel for vengeance, as one disappointed Florida voter complained during Trump I "he isn't hurting who he is supposed to be hurting"
> The threat posed by Trump to the USA was evident from the day he announced his candidacy.
Why?
Both Democrats and Republicans equally seemed to hate him.
Like there was numerous government shutdowns in his first term because nobody actually liked his agenda. Why was it obvious that eventually both parties would agree to enable him?
I agree with all you said with two caveats. If someone only watched Fox News, they likely didn’t see all this from Trump especially the first time. Second is that Trump is a product of the growing and unaddressed wealth/equality divide. It’s a similar reason we see the rise of the far right in the EU.
> He is not, remotely, “like them all”
We will know this only if The Next One reverses all his policies.