I was asked who was to blame for the mass violence in the US this year, and what electing either candidate would say about the violence:
"That's a good question.
If voting Trump out stops the violence, that suggests that the violence has been organised in order to get Trump out. Do you think sucuumbing to blackmail is a good thing? Even if it works in the short term, it opens you up to more blackmail in the medium and long run.
Consider that even Biden has condemned the burning, looting and murdering. Do you think that the rioters, if they saw that their rioting worked, would not be emboldened to push even more strongly for their agenda? Some of them want to defund or even abolish the police. Others want to destroy the US, or burn everything down.
Of course, one counter claim could be that Trump is inciting the violence, which is why voting him out will stop it. But I do not see empirical support for this claim. For example, we are told that Trump ending in the feds caused the riots in Portland. Yet, we know that the riots pre-dated his actions and continued after he withdrew the agents. And liberals' justifications for the riots do not mention Trump, but invoke police brutality, slavery, reparations and that kind of rubbish. Consider too that we saw a precursor to the current riots under Obama - which naturally was before Trump - and his stoking of grievance politics laid the seeds for the current, worse conflagration.
It is telling that the media is pivoting from calling the riots "mostly peaceful riots" to "Trump's America". i.e. What used to be a non-issue yesterday is now suddenly an atrocity - blamed on Trump, naturally. Of course, liberals won't notice, but those of us who have a better memory (deliberately or otherwise) will.
Ultimately, I agree that he is responsible just because of his position - but he is not to blame. It is useful to distinguish between the concepts of blame and responsibility. I disagree that he can't do anything because he is incompetent. Recall that when he tried to do something, he was called a fascist - and there was active pushback from Democratic cities which wanted the chaos to continue (Portland tried to fine the federal government for the fence around the courthouse with the excuse that it was in a bicycle lane, for example). And he can't legally do much anyway.
And since you don't know, he did indeed condemn the violence. He even said the George Floyd incident was a tragedy."
