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I do not believe it was ever moral to own slaves, nor do I buy the excuse that we should look at it in the context of the time.
But I do believe that, in terms of direct comparison, with centuries worth of progress and a moral compass that has largely improved on multiple fronts, it becomes a contextual sticking point.
So owning slaves is definitively worse than not owning slaves, and is also worse than simply being a garden variety racist, so that distinction is more significant to the question of who is the worse person.
To the question of who is the worse president, I think the criteria changes a bit. And in this case, Trump is quite literally working to overthrow our democracy, and not because of the yoke of oppressive leadership, but because he lost a contest.
From the standpoint of which is the worst president, I'd say that's a gargantuan reason to vote Trump in this specific context.
Slavery kills any pretense that casts our founding fathers as heroes, and the damage from that reverberates to this day. It can be argued that everything we see now, up to and including the existence of Trump's presidency, stems from their choice to use slavery to build this country.
So I may be overvaluing the benefit of being to look at the horrible decvisions of the past, because it assumes he and the rest of that fucking party thought they were horrible to begin with.
I guess I'm all over place with this. I agree with you in general, but I think what Trump has done, from the primaries all the way up to his lies and treatment of COVID through this coup attempt and a million places in between make him the clear "winner" over George on this one, from the standpoint of what makes each a worse president.
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