The question I was asked about cringe-worthiness was specific to Trump’s verbiage, so that’s what I responded to. (This was the question: “Does quoting Trump ever feel cringeworthy to you? Putting his policy positions aside (whatever they are), he just seems so inept at speaking that he can’t even focus on a complete thought without it running headlong into another one. Is this frustrating or embarrassing for you? Honestly curious.”) So I didn’t dodge anything.
You raise other concerns about him, most of which I share. I do disagree about two points. First, as far as foreign policy, thus far Trump has stayed true to his promise not to commit us to nation-building and costly, needless foreign wars. Even with regard to Syria, he used one strategic strike to send a message to Assad, but he didn’t escalate beyond that, thereby avoiding both Obama’s mistake of the toothless “red line” and Bush’s mistake of starting a dumb and disastrous war that cost us trillions and made the world a less safe place. I don’t care about his blustering rhetoric with respect to things like ISIS or North Korea. I’d rather he say things to scare and deter other hostile leaders than that he act like militaristic idiots of the McCain/Graham/Hillary Clinton sort, who never saw a war they didn’t want to fight. If she had been President, we would’ve had ground troops in Syria right now and been on the verge of World War III with Russia.
The other point I disagree with you about is immigration. You say that the move to the current merit-based proposal wasn’t his idea. So what? I don’t care whose idea it was. The point is that before Trump, no president was proposing this, even though it seems like total common sense to me. I don’t need him to come up with his own, original ideas. That’s not his job. If he suggests sensible ideas to implement, I’ll give him credit, even if those ideas were devised by someone else.
On healthcare, I completely agree with you.
On the subject of his often dumb, inflammatory rhetoric, I also agree.
Also, I thought the Muslim ban thing was done in a ridiculously amateurish way that just inflamed passions without accomplishing anything useful.
Obviously, he completely mishandled the whole Comey thing (though, so far, I don’t see any evidence that the Russia investigation is a good use of our time and money).
In other words, I have many reservations about the guy. But I’m not one of those dug-in partisan bozos who will either condemn or praise anything and everything he does because I’m on the red team or the blue team. I’ll disagree with him when he does something silly but give credit where credit is due, which was my approach to his predecessor as well. Sorry if that’s too nuanced an approach for you, but I feel like we as a nation are sorely in need of more nuance and less black-and-white thinking.
