who trump inspires the most visceral gut-level hatred in
he doesn't inspire that kind of hatred in me. not least because he isn't worth it.
I'm 36, but the mask has been off America for me since I was a teenager so I didn't need some grotesque clown to rip it off. I came up in the anti-authoritarian left at the height of anti-globalization. liberals and in particular neoliberalism were always the enemy. Obama the centrist technocrat amping up the drone war etc was no great surprise. liberal society has always been a bullshit veneer. a century plus (going on two if you include filibusters, the Mexican-American War, etc) of military interventionism, banana republics, etc, generally to line someone's pockets. Smedley Butler - the most decorated Marine in American history - wrote a book about it called
War Is a Racket - in 1935 (and he knew of what he spoke, having participated in virtually every colonial action and Banana War from the 1890s-1910s). since WWII direct military intervention has largely - not entirely obv - been replaced by outsourced coups and a rigged global finance system, but with basically the same results and for the same purposes. Tbc that's not anything unique to America, which is a mistake people sometimes make. That's what all empires do. China will be no better, and probably worse, if it supplants the U.S. as global hegemonic power.
otoh I don't find anything about Trump funny. gallows humor about the situation we're in more broadly, sure. Trump himself, no. he is, as
@craner said, just a malignant iteration of a long tradition of American flim-flam men and snake oil salesmen who has been elevated to a position where he can wreak the maximum havoc. and while I ofc understand humor as coping mechanism it clearly also serves as a deflector shield for him from that havoc i.e. "he actively mismanged the pandemic resulting in probably tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but also lol covfefe".
in general focusing on Trump the individual as opposed to the forces that brought him to power - either actively or by making it possible - is a huge mistake. it plays directly into the cult of personality he's been fostering since the 1980s. reverse the Baudelaire/
Usual Suspects line "the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was convincing the American public that he was important".