Critics of Trump often describe him as making absolutely unprecedented moves to expand executive power, extract personal wealth, and impinge on citizens’ rights. Supporters counter that Trump's actions are either completely precedented, or are the natural extension of existing trends that the media wouldn’t make a big deal over if they didn’t hate Trump so much.

In some recent posts, some people have been like "Wait why is there suddenly this abrupt series of partisan LW posts that are taking for granted there is a problem here that is worth violating the LW avoid-most-mainstream-politics norm?".

My subjective experience has been "well, me and most of my rationalist colleagues have spent the past 15 years mostly being pretty a-political, were somewhat wary but uncertain about Trump during his first term, and the new set of incidents just seems... pretty unprecedently and scarily bad?"

But, I do definitely live in a bubble that serves me tons of news about bad-seeming things that Trump is doing. It's possible to serve up dozens or hundreds of examples of a scary thing per day, without that thing actually being objectively scary or abnormal. (See: Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers)

Elizabeth and I wanted to [...]

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 25th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XJDCii4QAG25e26dq/what-s-a-good-methodology-for-is-trump-unusual-about

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion?”” by Raemon, Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma)