Charles Webster
Wondering about those folks who advocated for a “balanced” view of Donald Trump…
Are you still waiting to “see how it plays out”?
The gormless “let’s take a centrist view” crowd, wringing their hands and trying to sound reasonable while the house burns down, have egg on their faces and blood on their hands.
Let me be crystal clear: There is no neutral ground left when it comes to Donald Trump. None. He’s been in office four months, and we’ve already had a full-throttle collision with authoritarianism, corruption, cruelty, and outright incompetence. To those who were willing to really look, this was an eminently foreseeable outcome.
We Cannot Afford to ‘Wait & See’
This is not politics as usual. This is not “both sides have flaws.” This is not a moment for “balanced” opinions.
You don’t “wait and see” while fascists torch the foundation of a democracy. The once-leading democracy in the world. You don’t sit on the fence while civil rights are rolled back, the rule of law is treated like an inconvenience, and children are put in cages. You don’t “keep an open mind” while a man with the emotional maturity of a wombat and the ethics of a mob boss tries to dismantle every hard-won protection for the most vulnerable, while enriching himself and his cronies.
What exactly are you waiting for? A PowerPoint presentation titled “How I Intend to Burn It All Down”? A press conference where he actually says “I’m a fascist”? The red flags are flying like it’s the fucking Moscow May Day parade, and still people sit smugly in the middle, pretending moral superiority comes from pretending both sides are equal.
What America & The World is Expected to Ignore
Let’s list what this “balanced view” requires you to ignore:
– The open attacks on the free press.
– Open attack and threats of impeachment against judiciary resistant to Trump overreach, ignoring the separation of powers.
– The executive orders that kneecap public education, healthcare access, and environmental protections.
– 34 felony convictions.
– The dog-whistling and outright megaphoning of white nationalism.
– Refugee status he granted to white Afrikaners while rounding up and deporting brown and black migrants irrespective of their status.
– The nonstop lying. Provable, shameless, pathological lying — about crowd sizes, about COVID, about election results, about things we can literally see with our eyes.
– The mountain of sexual assault allegations, and the public bragging about it.
– The nepotism, the self-dealing, the grotesque grifting off the presidency.
– The violent rhetoric and incitement of an insurrection against his own country when it suited him, and the illegal deployment of the military against those who resist fascism (and labelling them as mobs and invoking anti-insurrection laws) when it suits him.
Neutrality is Not Virtue in The Face of Tyranny
What kind of self-delusion does it take to see all this and say, “Well, he’s just trying to put America first”? “He just tells it like it is”? “He’s just sharing difficult truths”? Really?
Trump is not some misunderstood reformer. He is not a blunt instrument for positive change. He is not a victim of media bias. He is a corrosive force in American and (because of the influence of the US) global democracy. He legitimises bigotry everywhere and anyone still playing the “reasonable centrist” game is, frankly, an idiot.
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The idea that neutrality is virtue in the face of tyranny is not wisdom — it’s cowardice, dressed up as intellectual sophistication.
So to those still hanging on to “wait and see”: What will it take? Where is your line? Because if this isn’t it, then just admit it — you don’t have one.
And don’t come back in a year, in fact don’t even respond today pretending you didn’t know. You were told. You were shown. And you chose to look away.
History won’t forget that.
