Comment by mindslight

I lean "both sides". Or at least I did, before June of 2020.

I don't see room for any benefit of the doubt here. Even if this was from some staffer getting "carried away", this is exactly why you don't load your administration with human bags of rotting trash. This is why politicians reaffirm societal values with virtue signaling, and pearl clutching when bad things happen - not continually trashing our societal values with edgelord vice signalling, as if everything is just one big joke deserving of scorn. Then when mistakes [0] are made, those mistakes can be viewed as obvious outliers and sensibly repudiated, rather than clearly being a central part of the overall platform.

If the public relations backlash here ends up being large enough that it leads to some Republican reflection and administration backpedaling, as happened from the execution of Alex Pretti, performative damage control is all it should be viewed as - mere regret for having blown the dog whistle too loudly.

[0] mistake in the sense of having trusted the wrong person to do something. The person who created this obviously can't be said to themselves have made a mistake