` O.K... WAY back at the end of May, I tried making a post about our recent lack of real Presidents, in this country. I've been quite STUPID levels of BUSY, but finally went back and looked at the replies I got. I probably should have just let it lay there, and bleed out, but I'm so full of opinions about our last two Presidents, and I TRIED to make it light-hearted and brief, and walk away, but I'm lousy at doing that with stuff I care about... The fact is, I've been biting my lip constantly for the last seven years or so, trying to get along with people, but I think that approach is killing me. Here's my reply. It became bloody gigantic, to even skim over the high points, but I can crib an excuse for that:

“I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.”
― Blaise Pascal

I guess the first thing I need to define before the screaming starts, (mine, mostly) is that I DON'T think that Trump and Biden are identical, in most respects. I just think they share a few things in common, even though the reasons they share these fine qualities are completely different. They are, in order of importance:

1) They are both far too incompetent to be President of this country.
2) They lie about things that matter; not constantly, but often enough, and they never 'fess up about it when they are found out.
3) They would both rather be a Dictator, than the leader of a free country. Trump has said so out loud, and Biden has simply proven it over the course of his legislative career.
4) They may come from different backgrounds, but they have both proven, over and over, that they only care about the welfare of the wealthy, and wealthy corporations. You and I, and everyone you know, are invisible to them.

They do have points of difference; for example, Trump was never forced to grow up, and Biden, who at one point was (at least technically) a grown-up, has been slipping into second childhood for quite some time now. Same end result, however. -Two guys that I do NOT want to be in control of the nuclear arsenal.

And I think here would be a good place to answer a question I've had from both sides for the last seven years, roughly stated: "Why do you HATE our idol, and not that OTHER, FALSE idol? I will say up front that I DO HATE idol-worship, but I have never met or interacted with either of those guys; so, could I truly be said to hate THEM? I just know that I hate the things they've DONE, even though I've been told repeatedly that those things were somehow GOOD, because REASONS. I don't believe it is necessary to HATE someone, or even to choose between them, to make a rational judgment-call that they are either CRIMINAL, or INCOMPETENT enough, or BOTH, that THEY SHOULD NOT BE IN OUR GOVERNMENT. I believe this very thing about BOTH of my picks.

@Doh1304:

You actually answered your own question, about why I thought Trump was so bad, but then you glided right over it. He was incompetent. Not, "-he was incompetent, but...-" Sorry, no. He was incompetent. Period. Paragraph. The End. Putting him in charge of the country was like handing a small child a locked-and-loaded automatic weapon with the safety off. I've been paying attention to Trump since the eighties, when I bought and read his first book, (ghost-written) about how to become a successful entrepeneur. Read it cover to cover, skimmed it a second time, thinking that somehow I must have missed it, but NOT ONE WORD about how to obtain financing. Then I went to the library, and looked up more info on the guy, and discovered the missing puzzle piece, like: "Ohhhh. THAT'S how you become a successful entrepeneur! You have a RICH DADDY, that will tell the banks to lend you metric tons of money!" A daddy that made HIS money by successfully gaming a program of The New Deal, meant to help small businesses get their own brick-and-mortar shop, back when that was how it was done. Fred Trump created a bunch of legal entities, and had each of them get help from the government to buy buildings, and used it to create a real-estate empire. -And then did his best to dodge taxes, so he wouldn't be helping the government that had made him rich. I suppose one could think of Fred Trump as a very high-end welfare cheat. So there's a fine role model...
Useful trivia: How did Donald Trump make the Forbes list at a fairly young age? Easy. LIE about owning all of his father's properties in addition to his own, at a point where daddy was still very much alive and breathing. Forbes didn't fact-check, and BINGO! -DJT on the Forbes List...
I spent the first two-and-a-half years of Trump's term balancing between, on the one hand, being terrified that he had been handed nuclear weapons, after all his talk on the campaign trail about "nuking" anybody that would get his 'base' all riled up, all the while praying to gods that I don't think exist, that whoever was actually carrying the 'nuclear football' had some common sense, and would fight him to the death if he decided to start nuking someone. -And then on the other hand, arguing with (usually Dem) normies that had already absorbed all the 'Trump iz da ebil!' propaganda, and were trying to tell me he was 'worse than Hitler'. I spent MUCH more time than is probably healthy, learning about Nazism, at that time, and came to the conclusion that Trump was an anemic, lazy, clueless ghost of a pretend-Hitler. -No actual military experience as a high-value target, no wounds to show for it, and certainly no cred with actual combat veterans, like Adolf had. -No drive, no focus, no religious fanaticism, and certainly not anywhere NEAR the sheer volume of compound PTSDs and hateful programming/"education", as Hitler. As mean, racist, and emotionally abusive as Fred Trump was said to be, he was Mr. Rodgers compared to Alois Hitler, Adolf's step-dad.
I used what I had learned in arguments about Trump. Almost three years of defending him from the more hysterical arguments I would hear, three years of trying to tell people that the MSM (Military State Media, I think that is) had intentionally misquoted him and flat-out LIED about things he had said, and then... CoVid comes along, and his incredibly lame, incompetent, doctrinaire-capitalist response to it, gets more of my fellow citizens killed than were killed by Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito TOGETHER. So, look how wrong I was. When it came to getting Americans killed, Trump's simple incompetence exceeded the effects of cold, directed, planned, mechanized warfare in WW2. Only regarding America, of course, but still - yep. Trump. Actually, statistically worse for America than Hitler.
And then Biden gets in, and adds that body count, PLUS an extra 50%, onto the pile, BEFORE THEY JUST STOPPED COUNTING. Speaking of INCOMPETENCE, that is. So, yeah, that's heading for possibly TWICE AS BAD for America than Hitler? And I still pray to dieties I don't think exist, that the guy with the nuclear football is a secret pacifist, and more bad-ass than the entire Secret Service detail. Because putting Biden in charge of the country was like handing a doddering, senile, has-been fascist a locked-and-loaded automatic weapon with the safety off. Honestly, the main reason I put Trump and Biden together at the top of the heap, was that I've spent BOTH of their terms with a nearly constant fear that their two entirely different brands of brain-dead incompetence would turn the planet into another lifeless rock, spinning through a limitless void. -Which would have the curious quality of rendering all other political considerations as moot. Even under W, even under Clinton, even under REAGAN, F.F.S., and even under Obama, I didn't spend MOST of their term worrying about imminent nuclear war. I only worried about that for a single-digit percentage of THEIR terms.
BTW, I know from experience that there will be plenty of fan-boys and fan-girls on both sides of the aisle, telling me that I can't hold the President responsible for our crap CoVid response. Bullshit. The ONLY good thing I think we got from Truman was that little sign he had on his desk: "The Buck Stops Here" -Because it does. The bleeding PRESIDENT of the most economically and militarily powerful nation on Earth has no excuse. The buck stops on that desk in the Oval Office, and anybody that can't take responsibility like a grownup, and do what's right and proper and necessary, has no business being there in the first place.
In government, as in industry and business: Incompetent people SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE.
-And while I'm at defending my choice of those two Presidents for worst-of-MY-lifetime; serial compulsive LIARS that never 'fess up about their lies, SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE. Two-faced, pretend, 'not-racists' SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE. Guys who never learn any history so that they can repeat the mistakes of the past, SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE. Politicians that promise help to the poor, the working class, or the middle class, and NEVER DELIVER, SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE. Politicians that neglect civilian infrastructure, but can always find a way to build actual, no-foolin', racist infrastructure, SHOULD NOT BE IN CHARGE.
Trump BUILT his bloody wall. Biden BUILT a string of camps, where BOTH of them threw kids in cages. Racist infrastructure. Why did I ever need to type that evil phrase, just to reflect REALITY? Oh, and BTW, they can become death-camps in about a week. All you need is one trained mechanic, and a couple of ignorant young men to assist, and that's how long it takes to build a BIG oven that you can walk around inside of. I know because I was once one of those ignorant young men, helping build an oven that you could walk around inside of. (-for a BAKERY, not a death-camp, but the principle is the same) The hard part is building CAMPS in the first gods-damned place. The other hard part is spending DECADES brainwashing a populace to accept building CAMPS...

-And this next little blurb is just personal opinion, sort of off-subject, and I can't back it up the way I can with most of what I'm screaming about, but I personally suspect that both Trump and Biden, have never seen a blue uniform, or a prison full of black and brown people, that didn't give them a stiffy. I overheard a few minutes of their 'debate' in 2020, and it sounded like a couple of adolescent boys arguing about who had the BIGGEST 'Law and Order'. That did, however, confirm me in my atheism, because if there really were a just and compassionate God who really loved us, there would have been a bright flash on the debate stage, leaving only two pairs of smoking shoes.

-But you wanted to know, what I thought was so bad about Trump, specifically. I didn't start out thinking that way about him. -But I spent nearly ALL of my time during CoVid, scouring the Net for news. Honestly, it seemed pretty obvious, early on, that Wuhan was the genesis-site of the pandemic, and I kept waiting for the proof of animal-vector transmission of a naturally-occuring mutation. -Which never arrived. I waited for Mr. Trump to get serious, and provide some actual help to the poor and middle class. -Which never arrived. I waited for President Trump to get over his Obama-downing, and admit that there were definitely times when universal health care was needed, and at least provide some for the duration of the pandemic. -Which didn't happen. I waited for President Trump to invoke the War Powers Act, and direct appropriate industries to start cranking out N-95 masks, which apparently we are no longer capable of producing, or some such crap. It might have cut into someone's overseas profits, after all. We just had to wait for masks from China, while the RN I live next door to, had to make due with ONE mask PER WEEK.

Trump told us the pandemic would be "very mild", and what does that look like? Most of a football-stadium-full of bodies, tightly-packed, that's all. "Very mild". Although, to be fair, Biden gave us a further HEAPING football-stadium-full of bodies...

Trump demonstrated his only real job skill, and FIRED experienced, knowledgeable people at the CDC for disagreeing with whatever half-assed, uninformed, pseudo-medical opinion, that Mr. Real Estate President was putting forth, TODAY. Firing people that had already developed a pandemic response framework under Obama, that Trump dismissed and discarded out-of-hand, 'cause OBAMA, right? The country languished, while the wealthy ramped up their CoVid business plan. The Canadians, I believe, got $1200 Canadian, per month, per citizen, for the duration; and we got 30 new Billionaires, instead. That's what class loyalty looks like for the wealthy. Billionaire President had money for the already-well-off, but EFFECTIVELY NOTHING for the masses of wage-slaves.

I continued to spend a lot of time online during the 'Great Covid Time-Out', mostly to avoid thinking about the half-assed response to the pandemic, and how ashamed I was of how technologically, industrially, logistically, and politically LOW America had sunk. Instead, I surfed the Net, looking for answers. I learned that there was a virology lab in Wuhan, that was suspect, at least as much so as the much-heralded wild animal market. I dug a bit, and found out that under Obama, Dr. Fauci and his British-educated, Ukranian Zoologist buddy had tried to get U.S. Federal funding to do "Gain of Function" research on corona viruses in that lab in Wuhan. Obama had the State Department find a couple of experts on bio-containment, and sent them over to Wuhan to evaluate the facility. They came back with a report that there was no way in hell that it was a Class-4 facility. And yes, there was a copy of the report online, and I read the summary of it. Too much missing, from training, to emergency equipment, and everything in-between. The list was comprehensive. President Obama, having done his homework, like a grownup, told Dr. Fauci and his PhD-in-Zoology buddy Daszak, that they absolutely could NOT have taxpayer dollars to do their questionable research at a substandard lab overseas, and Mr. Obama FORBADE it, going forward.

Enter President Trump. I picture Fauci acting SO hurt that FORMER President Obama wouldn't let them do their research, and Trump going: "OBAMA said that? Well, I'm in charge now. Go do your important research." Then, a little over a year later, PING! COVID! -And the "Coincidence Theorists" in my life have already chimed in, so save your breath on that. No, there wasn't a Pandemic Fairy that waved her magic wand, and it just magically happened; I firmly believe it was created, by real-life MORONS with college degrees. Early in the pandemic, I read a brief paper from an actual virologist that had indeed worked with MERS coronavirus, (Yes, I checked, and he was, and he had) and he explained that when MERS mutated into existence, it was at a handful of sites, spread throughout the genome of the virus, as one would expect from a natural mutation. He then pointed out that this new CoVid-19 virus had ALL of it's mutations clustered directly around the spike protein. He stopped short of saying "Isn't that suspicious?", but certainly had no logical explanation to offer, stemming from a process of natural mutation. -And I remember thinking at the time, "Gosh! -Almost like somebody was trying to improve the ability of a naturally occuring virus to infect humans! What should we call that? Oh, yeah! GAIN OF FUNCTION!! -Or, if we wanted to be more accurate, we should call it GAIN OF INFECTION, but that just doesn't sound as warm and fuzzy, does it? Honestly, how does anybody hear that phrase "Gain of Function", related to a micro-organism, and not call bullshit, immediately? It's a VIRUS. The list of functions on a virus is bloody short. -Spread. -Invade host cells. -Do varying degrees of damage using the host to reproduce. -Possibly mutate, and then, -repeat, ad infinitum. But when you say "Gain of Function", it sounds like teaching the virus to play the piano, or improve it's math skills, or learn to speak French. My guess is that Obama had called bullshit in his own mind before they even stopped speaking, but that Trump never let it bother him, at all.

-And I'm not meaning to say that Trump is DIRECTLY responsible for giving us CoVid-19, no. I only think of him as an Accesory to the crime. I'm saying that we had no-foolin', real-live MAD SCIENTISTS that had ALREADY STATED THEIR INTENTION to BUILD A NEW VIRUS THAT COULD INFECT HUMANS BETTER, and Trump couldn't be bothered to read a two-page summary about the lab in question being a really bad idea, signed the order to let them out of Mr. Obama's temporary jail, ('cause OBAMA, right?) -and then handed them tax dollars, so that THEY could f___-up the world. Now that, THAT is some serious incompetence. That is incompetence for the record books, incompetence for the bloody ages.

-Assuming, of course, that "Other Uncle Joe" Biden doesn't have a "senior moment" and get us all nuked in the next ten minutes or so, and that there are even record books, ever again. Speaking of entirely non-Trump-related incompetence, that is. And while I'm on that subject, way to go, Joe, for declaring the pandemic 'over', back while we were still losing approximately 2000 citizens per week. I'm sure that you can LIE in public about having multiple advanced medical degrees that let you make that call...

Oh, and also BTW, I agree with many of you, that we've had some spectacularly bad Presidents in the past, which is why I specified Presidents 'in my lifetime', but if you want to go earlier, you forgot Truman, the fine racist f___-head that dropped nukes on Japan, after we had already leveled all their major cities with conventional bombs, leaving them on the verge of surrender. And after the War, he couldn't even be bothered to answer any of the three letters sent to him by Ho Chi Mihn, the then-recently DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED PRESIDENT of Vietnam. The one who had spent WW2 fighting an insurgency AGAINST the Imperial Japanese invaders, and more than once, getting downed Allied pilots back through Japanese lines, to safety. The one who practically idolized Thomas Jefferson, and cribbed from our Constitution in his acceptance speech. The one that wrote Truman about wanting the US and Vietnam to be friends. Yes, but for Truman, we might have had an actual ally in Vietnam, instead of trying to help France force them BACK into being a French colony, and when that failed, fomenting civil war there, with a not-so-great-for-America outcome, and a positively awful outcome for Vietnam, including our chemical warfare's toxic 'fallout' that still plagues them today. Truman charted the mostly-racist course, sprinkled with the excuse of Anti-Commie-nism, conveniently ignoring that NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC ELECTION in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson was just the lead club that the M.I.C. later used to TRY to get it done.
So yeah, Truman can go on the list, even without quoting any of his flaming racist comments verbatim. Even without discussing in great detail how he, with knowledge aforethought, helped give us the CIA for our very own Nazi police state, with genuine Nazis. If you don't believe me, look up "Operation Paperclip". When Truman was handed the bill that created the CIA, he said: "Well, I guess now we'll have our own Gestapo." -And he signed it anyway! An official, secret home for Nazi war criminals wanted for trial by our allies, with a secret budget, and a secret agenda. Real Nazi war criminals, whose institutional 'offspring' are still trying, four generations on and more, to get even with Russia for KICKING THEIR ASSES in WW2. What FINE trans-generational, psychopathic, racist, institutional tenacity!

And yes, Grant had the most corrupt administration until Reagan came along, but at least in Grant's case we can largely blame alchohol, instead of epic levels of stupidity. I suspect that an honest evaluation of BOTH Trump's, and Biden's Administrations, however, would make Grant's and Reagan's look like choirs of angels. -Sober, genius angels.

Sidebar @ Liberal Moonbat:
Yes, I think that W was bloody awful, and a consistently careless, racist mass-murderer, but I always try to be accurate, and inferring that he didn't take the Presidency seriously is based on observing his obvious play-acting as a clueless hick moron, which was widely accepted. One of the links you sent, in fact, referred to him as "In over his head", echoing that sentiment. You never hear him referred to as a third-generation Nazi sympathizer, who was faking ignorance to disarm criticism. I found out that there is only one point of IQ difference between him and me, and neither of us are geniuses, but we are above average. Learning THAT made it obvious to me. He has two degrees from Ivy-League colleges. You listen to him debating to become governor of Texas, and it is sharp, fast, deft use of language, not the fake-schucks-howdy-howdy we got during his term. And when he was no longer President, suddenly he remembered how to put sentences together again! It was a mask. It was a persona, meant to keep us from noticing that he and Dick were enacting a Nazi form of government on us. THAT is not taking the office he held seriously. It was all one big smirking Nazi joke for him, not an attempt to lead a free people, not an attempt to discharge the demands of his office faithfully, and certainly not even a passing nod to his oath of office. DHS was the biggest increase in government in the entire history of this country (-from the Party of Small Government!), and they just had to name it 'Homeland', a word that was strangely ABSENT from American English until that point. The original word was 'Heimatsland', and it was one of Hitler's favorite words, one which, ironically, he stole from proto-Zionists. Hitler used that word four times in one short paragraph in one of his speeches. So, seriously, calling it 'Homeland Security' was the grandson of a Nazi sympathizer, giving America the finger; sort of a 'F___ Y'all, America! Grand-daddy wins!" I couldn't imagine how he could have taken the job less seriously... -until I watched Trump and Biden doing it.
One major difference between W, and Trump or Biden, was that W had to ACT incompetent. I don't even have to think that Trump is the most evil; I don't. I can just observe that he was lazy and incompetent, and got more Americans killed than all the rest of those I mentioned, put together, UP TO THAT POINT. He continued the violent foreign policies of Obama, who had done the same to W's legacy evils, and then Biden continued what Trump had refused to alter or abate. We got a few days of thinking Biden was going to start ramping down our Conquer-The-World wars, after his totally incompetent pullout from Afghanistan, but then he set aside the yearly budget for THAT, to start a NEW war; one more likely to end in Mutually Assured Destruction. -And all while fattening up the CoVid death toll since he had more time than Trump to get Americans killed, in that way. That was Other Uncle Joe, multi-tasking.
And while I'm on the subject of comparative evil... I only think of Trump as being evil if he didn't have to work for it, or had it handed to him. There is more than enough golf out there to distract him from truly applying himself to getting the evil done. I think of W as being actively evil, but in a truly selfish way, and sporadically. Face it, he left the lion's share of the evil to be done by his various chicken-hawk, scaly minions, many of whom probably have their own reserved parking space in hell. Biden is a different story. His entire political life has been dedicated to enacting evil laws, starting with the "War On Drugs", which was, is, and always will be, a racist pogrom, and culminating in the "PATRIOT" Act, which he wrote the lion's share of. I suspect that the only part of THAT evil law that might have been excised in commitee, was the part where it would have provided funds to dynamite the Statue of Liberty at the ankles, and drop her into the harbor. I truly believe that Biden's entire legislative career has been following a long-term plan to wreck and loot this country. He has never met a civil liberty that didn't make him angry, and he has done his best to put everyone who wasn't HIS kind of white person, in prison. The long-term harm he has done behind the scenes during my entire adult life makes anything Trump has done (-and he has done PLENTY) look like juvenile pranks. But now, we face a conundrum concerning Other Uncle Joe; now that he's obviously senile, can he be said to be truly evil the way he was, or is he a pale shadow of that evil, hoping for a nuclear war to make him feel young and virile and capable of normal thought again? That is a question for the philosophers, and I can only suspect that the majority of them would come down on the side of "No, he's not truly evil anymore, but WOW, he can sure be incompetent. -DANGEROUS BLOODY LEVELS OF INCOMPETENT..."
So, yeah, I don't think Trump or Biden take the job as seriously as W did, and W didn't take it as seriously as any real adult, though he certainly could have. I just believe that, for entirely different reasons, Trump and Biden are INCAPABLE of taking it seriously.

But back to my main rant: I've heard an awful lot since 2016, from fan-boys and fan-girls of BOTH of my top picks, and there is nearly always a WHOLE LOT of OVERLOOKING "their" boy's OBVIOUS and MANIFEST FLAWS, while focusing in minute detail on the OTHER's flaws, even the ENTIRELY IMAGINARY ONES.
The credulous, pre-planned, drooling stupidity of Rooshia-Gate comes immediately to mind, since I'm still waiting for ONE TINY SHRED of ACTUAL EVIDENCE to support it, that isn't an undocumented assertion by the same players that gave us stonking, proven B.S. like "WMDs in Iraq", or for that matter, the "Tonkin Gulf Incident". There are STILL certain willfully-retarded propo-bots that are trying to pretend that the long-awaited and loudly-heralded Mueller Report DIDN'T cartwheel down the runway, throwing off flaming chunks of the Russia-hating bullshit it was constructed from. Honestly, folks, I sometimes feel like the only person in the nation who actually tried to read any of the Wikileaks emails, pronounced real and authentic by multiple experts, where an exchange between top Donkey-Party staffers ends with: "Besides, if Trump wins, WE'LL JUST BLAME RUSSIA! That's an email from BEFORE the 2016 election, and gosh, what happened? Oh, right. Assange ended up imprisoned, facing regular torture, for showing us the kind of backstabbing swine who rule us. AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, a quick question in basic logic: If Rooshia can manipulate our elections by spending several orders of magnitude LESS money than EITHER side of the duopoly for clever 'mind-control' MEMES... -MEMES, DO YOU HEAR ME? EVIL, COMMIE MEMES, POLLUTING OUR OTHERWISE PURE, AMERICAN THOUGHTS!- Well, then if they could foist their Pinko "choice" of Donald Trump on us, wouldn't that mean that Joe Biden is just Tool-of-the-Kremlin 2.0? HMMM??? Only true patriots dare connect the dots...
Sorry, sorry! -Slipped into COLD WAR mode for a second, there... Let me just step back across "The Aisle" for a moment...
Now, on the other obviously deranged hand, Joe Biden is not going to TAKE YOUR GUNS! He's just doing his job to Unite the Right, since he is, after all, a right-wing extremist. They said the same thing about Joe's former boss, and we got eight years of Obama conspicuously NOT TAKING YOUR GUNS. Also, Joe Biden is NOT injecting "tracking chips" alongside Covid vaccines, since that would entail spending more money to produce each dose, which might hurt some rich person's profits, something that Biden would never, EVER do. It is also COMPLETELY UN-NECESSARY SINCE WE TAKE OUR BLOODY SMARTPHONES WITH US EVERYWHERE WE GO, and the largely Biden-authored "PATRIOT" Act, lets them look at everything you do on the bloody things. Although I should take a moment to acknowledge Baby Bush and Dick for pushing all that anti-Liberty horseshit through, and all the many "PATRIOTS" on both sides of the fence that cheered while they gutted the Constitution.

-And lastly... -speaking of overlooking things, on both sides of 'The Aisle', have y'all noticed how THAT OTHER GUY OVER THERE is always a criminal pervert who should be in prison, while OUR GUY is always simply the innocent victim of unfounded accusations of sexual assault from hysterical women with mental problems? Isn't it amazing how that works? Only a FOOL and a SOCIALIST would say they should BOTH be in prison for that class of crimes.

But wait, I am a Fool and a Socialist! Yes, they should...