Before you can be a leader people have to follow you, and in democracies people have to vote for you. And the unfortunate reality is that reality doesn't matter for elections, only the perception of reality matters.
So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Yes, the question is what end are they devoting their sociopathic skills toward? And isn’t it the most “patronizing” thing of all to believe that people are too stupid to see that when they vote?
So far Trump 2.0 has done exactly what he promised he would, and his supporters are quite happy. If his actions don't lead to the outcomes he promised that may change, as long as someone else who understands the needs can offer an alternative.
I think we did that experiment in November, and it doesn’t support your assertion that people suddenly turn into rational performance evaluators after the election (or in this case an entire first term).
In any case, this time around the likelihood is Trump will be long dead (of natural causes, I mean) before the impact of this election is realized. The change happening right now is generational in scale. The voters’ children will be reading this chapter in their history book and asking what on earth they were thinking.
