Trump in 2016 was a potential. He'd never held office before. He was a protest vote against the political structure of the United States, a savvy billionaire known to the masses through his decisive behavior on reality TV. Trump in 2024 is a known quantity. He'll be Trump 2020 but still more defiant against norms and rules. He is a protest vote against democracy, a bombastic demagogue known to the masses through his autocratic behavior through four years of holding office. In 2016 you could tell yourself "maybe this will be better." In 2024 the only people telling themselves that are fascists. And say what you will about the United States, we do poorly with fascism.
A trump vote was never about things being better. It’s a fuck your vote plain and simple. It’s about kicking down middle class liberals to be poor and live similarly shitty lives to middle America. It’s not about bringing anyone up it’s about bringing everyone down to shitty parity.
It's funny because we hadn't proven our inability to understand fascism enough, we needed to unquestioningly back Israel. At least we had Russia right, all of us, for a while, but that's more than officially over for MAGA. Oh which reminds me, Biden's probably going to lose a lot of the Muslim vote, for obvious reasons, but maybe also partially for what may be a not-obvious reason to many folks. Fascism's a global problem. I think we are exporting. It's also funny that the "anti-globalists" are buddy buddy with fascists all around the globe. Ha ha edit: btw, when I was in your neck of the woods we had three (of three) first generation immigrant Lyft drivers, all of whom were Trump-friendly. One guy even commented when we were on 1st street "Look at all the businesses boarded up from BLM. Terrible." Maybe they thought because we said we were Texan we'd be into that, though.