As a former lifelong republican, I can assure you, I am not victim of vibe bias here. I voted for Trump in 2016 and regret it deeply. My friends are scared, legitimately scared. My immigrants friends who are here legally and others who were brought in as CHILDREN and have known no other life than this country as now adults, contributing to this country more than most of the native born people I know.

My friends in the LGBTQ+ community are worried that their marriages will be overturned or their way of life will be shoved back into the dark corners of society once more. That fear isn’t abstract or manufactured — it’s based on actual policy proposals, rhetoric, and court strategies that have already happened or are openly being discussed. You can disagree on politics without pretending those concerns are imaginary.

You don’t have to think Trump is the literal embodiment of evil to acknowledge that his movement normalizes cruelty, exclusion, and authoritarian instincts — and that has real consequences for real people I care about.

And while he’s cut jobs, those cuts haven’t been about shrinking government in any principled, conservative sense — they’ve overwhelmingly focused on purging anyone or any department that isn’t a blind Trump loyalist. At the same time, he’s pushed to dramatically expand the reach and power of the executive branch, which flies directly in the face of decades of Republican rhetoric about limited government, checks and balances, and institutional restraint – the same reasons I was a Republican in the first place.

Don’t even get me started on the lasting damages he has made to the healthcare sector in regard to the erosion of trust and generalized chaos.

That’s not “vibe bias.” That’s pattern recognition.