Policy vs. Personality

In every election, whether for President of the United States or for mayor of a small town, there's a the age-old question about what's more important, policy or personality. "Policy" should be the more obvious answer, but the reality is that most people consider personality, at least partially, as an important metric upon which to base a decision. 

In most elections candidates make a lot of promises. Sometimes they follow through, other times they don't. Sometimes they simply can't. Many times shit happens. Did George W Bush plan on presiding over a global war on terror when he was running? Did Barack Obama think he was going to walk into a recession when he threw his hat in the ring? Did Donald Trump anticipate a worldwide pandemic? Whatever they thought they'd be doing, events conspired against them. Even in the best of times Presidents are not dictators, they have to contend with two other co-equal branches of government, which may or may not be sympathetic. At best, campaign promises should be taken with a grain of salt and viewed only as a rough guide to how he or she will govern. After all, the point of campaigning is to convince more people to vote for you than for the other candidate, and getting down in the weeds of detailed policy proposals is going to lose most voters, and bore many of them. 

Often opposition to Trump is caricatured as "orange man bad", or TDS - Trump Derangement Syndrome, or "mean tweets". And I'm sure that there are people who oppose him just because he's an asshole, but for most it's deeper than that. While anyone who thinks they are qualified to be president has to possess a healthy ego and self regard, Trump's personality goes well beyond that. He is a narcissist who has demonstrated that whatever he thinks, no matter the evidence against it, is the right way - the only way. During his time in office, and during the campaign this year, he has demonstrated an abysmal ignorance of how things work, how anything works. Sure, a president can't know everything, but they have to have a willingness to learn, to lean on subject matter experts to help them arrive at the best decisions. This ignorance manifested itself in his view of how tariffs work, how NATO is funded and whether injecting disinfectant is a good idea, among many other areas.  He said out loud that he would be a dictator, but just on his first day, as if that made it acceptable. 

Trump's personality is such that he takes everything personally. Those who disagree with him are sick, evil, deranged, un-American, treasonous. Enemies of the people. He has made it clear that he will exact revenge on those who he believes have wronged him. A president has to be the president of all the people. All the people may not agree about how a president does their job, but it has to be clear that the president puts the welfare of all the people first. Trump pits us against each other. There's us and them. And his "us" are who he views as the "real Americans" and the rest of us...

So, while the policies that I'm aware of are enough to disqualify him from receiving my vote, who he is should disqualify him from receiving anyone's vote.