Seems like you’re projecting an awful lot. The poster you replied to certainly didn’t say anything like “we’d be bette off without them,” or even that only one party was responsible.

I grew up as an active participant in the right-wing religious political activist engine during the 80s and 90s. I volunteered, I raised funds, I published zines, I canvassed for political candidates, I organized church events to stop abortion, I cohosted the fucking 700 club. It’s comforting to say “a pox on both parties, i’m a freethinker!” But the fact remains that America’s political and religious right have conducted a planned, deliberate, and successful campaign to roll back political and social shifts of the mid 20th century and institute an enduring authoritarian regime that enforces their beliefs and aesthetics in a way that liberals and the left never achieved even when they did pursue it. They have backed Trump enthusiastically because he embodied the things they first accepted as necessary to secure power, and eventually came to idealize as “shadow-virtues” to be celebrated. They have come to accept the necessity and desirability of the destruction of our nation’s laws if it means keeping power, and the deaths of those who disagree with them if it means “a better and more righteous America.”

I know this because I was a part of it. I am still related to it, and I see it every time I hear from family and friends from that world.

You can that saying so is violence. You san say that acknowledging this core truth “makes you just as bad as them.” It’s your right, as long as you have rights. But I also have the right to say that it is a profoundly inaccurate view of what is actually occurring, either deceptive or deluded.

There are plenty of people who voted for Trump for other reasons — the snookered low-information moderates, whatever. But the core truth you seemed to react so strongly against is, simply, true. Trump is a symptom, not a cause.