Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided, and we wouldn’t have to hear stories about “we sent $X billions, but Zelenskyy says he received only $0.5X billions” which could have been spent here, not to mention millions of lives spared (the latter doesn’t affect ordinary Americans directly, but there you go).
Edit: it’s abundantly clear that Trump is also highly corrupt. A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption (not to mention the felt need to pick a side)
Who was president in 2020? Who did the first round of stimulus?
The idea that Biden was taking food out of our mouths to send to Ukraine was pushed by the very people that approved that budget because it was easy to do. And Americans know this, they really do, they just forget it because they've had this narrative yelled at them so many times.
And even given that, we were very shrewd. We sent old weapons that were going to be decommissioned, so I would hardly say we sent a bunch of money to Ukraine. More like we goosed our weapon production.
I think that's fair, Covid was completely insane. Personally the part of the US response I disliked the most was the closing of schools. Like, in Ireland the pubs were closed for basically 2 years, but we kept the schools open for most of it, which I think was the right call. Difficult situation though, and the vaccine mandates were crazy (particularly given how ineffective they were in preventing transmission).
> Many people look at the Bidens’ relationship with Ukraine and wonder whether the war could have been avoided,
I really don't see that. Like, Russia basically invaded as soon as (like that week) Nordstream 2 was finished (which unlike Nordstream 1 didn't pass through Ukraine). I think it's arguable that the US didn't need to be as involved (although if they hadn't been, then the EU-US break would have happened much, much sooner).
> which could have been spent here,
Like, for the avoidance of doubt, sending old weapons to Ukraine doesn't actually cost the US as much as they claimed. Ye'd have had to decommission them anyway. (This is a surprisingly large pattern in US aid to other countries).
> A big part of the problem is that many are only to see the other side’s corruption
Yeah, that's fair.
Long hold times and phone-tree mazes for help with the dozen bills that showed up due to one night in the hospital (despite insurance and all that!), housing costs shooting up year over year, inflation (people genuinely don't understand that "inflation is down" doesn't mean "prices dropped", which, after the giant covid price spike, is what they actually wanted to happen). More visible homelessness. Scam call attempts 2-3 times a day, and your Grandma and thousands of other grandmas and grandpas and fathers and mothers lost a ton of money to them, and nobody in power seems to give half a fuck. The neoliberal trade changes in the '90s were supposed to come with mountains of support to the demographics likely to be harmed by them, and that never meaningfully materialized, and people remember that and families still feel the pain from it. It may seem silly, but: tip prompts for take-out. It's some bigger things, and a whole lot of little things like that.
Add the cultivated, perceived, not-backed-by-data problems Republicans propagandize, to those very real ones above. Sky-high and worsening crime, "invasions" at the border bringing in fentanyl and such (it's mostly Americans doing it, in fact, for the obvious reason that they have a much easier time crossing the border Mex-to-US while carrying drugs when the crossing itself isn't illegal, so it's far less risky) and trans athletes, all that junk.
This left a good chunk of the electorate eager for someone promising to upend the system, when the two options presented to-date had been "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll get worse)" and "we'll fix everything (but actually it'll still get worse—just more-slowly)".
Fertile ground for a fascist conman.
There are other aspects to it, of course. Conspiratorial thinking (QAnon and friends) twisted, as it usually is when it hits politics, into "these openly-grifting elites are on my side and will stop the secretly-grifting elites I've been assured are the problem!" is a pretty big one, thanks to the feed-algo right-wing-radicalization pipeline giving that nonsense a ton of oxygen. A non-trivial set of folks really are just racist as hell. But the above is the most-plausible explanation I've seen for the "things are bad and getting worse" voters.
It’s not solely Trump’s identity that makes that distinction; it’s the haphazard, uninformed, and ruinous adventures in poor decision-making in economics and otherwise that characterize the difference. Biden was ineffective and a poor choice, but utterly benign in comparison to his mendacious, unskilled successor.
It's a complex web of alienations.
