Yes. My core political view is that the death of 1000 people really is 1000 times as tragic as the death of one person.
Many national issues will cause (or prevent) needless deaths on that scale, or on even bigger scales.
Things that aren't on the order of "irrevocably change 1000s of lives" seem like they're symbolic issues.
Trump is almost maximally offensive. Any worse, and he'd get marginalized in the press.
People like their symbols, so there's endless reporting about how he's as bad as anyone could get.
Trump is pretty mild in terms of actual accomplishment. Especially for a leader from the other tribe. The backlash means he's often achieving good things.
Take health care. But for John McCain's switching sides, we'd be in a world where thousands of people would die of trivially preventable diseases.
Take environmental regulation. Obama couldn't get the Paris Accords accepted as anything other than a promise. Trump got tens of states to support it.
Neither of those things would have happened if, instead of Trump, we had a generic Republican leader in a respectable suit.
So, the Trump tradeoff is that I read a bunch of Toxoplasma articles that are as symbolically offensive as possible. But, in return, I expect that literally thousands fewer children will die pointless, agonizing deaths due to inadequate medical care or lack of clean water.
I'll take that tradeoff all day. Especially if was focused on helping minorities.
When calculating Wolfishness, it's useful to think about how your system rates different people.
Let's take responses to an attack.
Trump gave a weak condemnation a day or two late.
George W Bush prosecuted a war against a similar looking nation that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Roosevelt interned the Japanese.
I agree there are ways to do the rating where Trump comes out as Maximally Racist. But I can't help but feel they're focused entirely on interpretations of signals.
For me, there's quite a ways to go before we're anywhere in the region of the US's historic fuckups.