So My Washington Nationals Won The World Series...

I disagree with some of that, but certainly not all, and I respect your opinions. 'If you're doing things that are advantageous to you, the people in your circles, or for people that have done favors for you, then you're not fit to run this country' is sadly, in my opinion, pretty much standard for most politicians. In the last election there was a choice between Hillary Clinton, who is completely amoral and totally corrupt... and Trump. In my lifetime I've rarely had a candidate for president that I really hugely supported, it's almost always as much a vote against someone else. I expect this next presidential election will be a choice between a Socialist and Trump, and for me that's not much of a choice. There's no way I can vote for Sanders or Warren, and Biden I honestly think is starting to suffer from dementia. The few people I could have supported on the Democrat side have been polling around 1%. I don't think a Democrat I could support could even make it through the primaries right now.

I think the biggest mistake the left and the media have made is abandoning any standards of their own to combat Trump. If the Democrats and the mainstream media had acted like adults they would have made Trump look terrible by comparison. Insisted, Congress is now a carnival sideshow. Two years of that Russia crap that turned out to be a pile of nothing and now... Ukraine, all while the USMCA trade agreement that would be of big help to American workers gathers dust because despite claims by Nancy Pelosi that Congress will eventually pass it, she's currently not even bringing it to the floor because she doesn't want to give Trump a win. Petty.

Instead of fighting Trump with the truth the media misleads, exaggerates, hides the truth and outright lies to combat him... and while they have hurt Trump somewhat in an almost universally negative depiction of him they have also destroyed their own reputation in doing so. Walter Cronkite was a major liberal, but he would have never stood for the shoddy 'journalism' that exist today. The New York Times and The Washington Post are now little better than supermarket tabloids who routinely have their headline stories against Trump debunked, often almost as soon as they are published.

ABC News's recent 'Slaughter of the Kurds' video is a prime example. What they claimed was a nighttime video of Turkish forces slaughtering the Kurds turned out to to be footage from a few years back of a live-fire exercise from an army base in Kentucky. When caught, ABC eventually posted a retraction on their website and said they didn't understand how such a 'mistake' could have happened. Does anyone in their right mind believe something like that happened as a 'mistake'? And when people see Trump being the 'victim' of stuff like that, it just makes them support him that much harder, and believe the media even less than they already do.

I think my biggest complaints with Trump are probably the 'dumbing down' and 'he's a counter-puncher' stuff. There are times when he's spoken off-the-cuff very eloquently and you realize he's capable of it, he just chooses not to, and as someone who values intelligence I've never been a fan of downplaying intelligence. I don't like it when some girls do it because they think guys will find a smart girl intimidating and I don't like it when politicians do it to try to be what they think is the 'common man', or to appear non-threatening or just to get people to underestimate them. You watch interviews with Trump from years ago and you can tell a lot of it now is a persona. Benny Hill meets Fred Sanford. It's very entertaining at times, but not exactly 'presidential'.

After watching too many Republicans not willing to stand up and fight for things, I like that Trump is a fighter, but the 'he's a counter-puncher' stuff also gets me when used to justify the way he feels he has to lob hay-makers at anyone who offers even mild criticism, when he would often be better off just ignoring a lot of it. He gets into ridiculous fights with people that agree with him on almost everything because they don't totally agree 100%. It's petty, and I wish he was above that. I wish he was above a lot of things. He's done a lot that I like for the economy, military and veterans, the courts, a long list actually... but I would have preferred all that and someone more... presidential. Unfortunately, my ideal candidate either doesn't exist or they don't run for president.