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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Thanks for taking the time to come back and clarify your position in detail like that, I think I see where you're coming from here and I have to disagree with you. I think the trolley problem is still the best analogy and I'd go so far as to say some of the assumptions underpinning your view here are very dangerous.
Firstly, I would say voting is absolutely an irrevocable one time only choice from the simple fact that the past is immutable. Trump will always have been the president from 2016 - 2020 and now he's going to be the president for another term. No amount of voting in the future can ever change that. Roe v Wade is still overturned for example and the supreme court is still stacked as far as I understand.
Just ask Josseli Barnica's loved ones how easily the damage of some of Trump's decisions can be undone.
If someone thinks that the price is worth it for sending a message to the Democrats then that's up to them. Let's not be under any illusions though that we can simply change anything in the present day to undo history. That's why the trolley problem is the more apt analogy in my view because you must choose between two different bad outcomes irrevocably.
I'm also not from the US.
I would say that the full picture is somewhere in the middle - generally most actions of a President are not irrevocable but many do have consequences which are irrevocable (for example, Bush's decision to invade Iraq after 9/11 has as a consequence destroyed many lives and created ISIS and that will never be undone, especially the deaths, even if the president after him had immediatelly pulled the troops out from Iraq).
As you say, Trump might very well turn what was mainly (IMHO) not a Trolley Problem, into much more of one by (in "more likelly" to "less likely" order):
The time for Punishing the Democrats to try and influence the approportioning of the "cake" they put forward in the next round of the "game" was before in elections before this one, but that was not done hence the "quality" of the candidate offered by the Democrats. The wisdom of Punishing it in this election was, with hindsight, not so great, but it's still understandable that some people chose to Punish the Democrats by refraining from voting, even if one thinks their estimation of the associated risks of doing so was very wrong.
I suppose I agree with your original idea that in this cycle the US elections have turned into a Trolley Problem (though I see it as a high probability rather than absolute certainty), though I disegree with the wider portrayal (maybe not by you, but many others) of people who chose to not vote Democrat as responsible for what Trump is doing - I strongly suspect they merelly erred by underestimating the risk they were taking, which is understandable since in the Propaganda Heavy US environment the extreme warnings about Trump coming from Democrats were self-serving and very much a repeat of their propaganda techniques in previous elections, so many simply did not believe they were true or at least that they were not purposeful exagerations (i.e. a "boy who cried wolf" situation).