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All of those rationales for "forgiving" a 2016 vote for Trump no longer applied after his first term.
After his first term - yes. But the election was held before his first term was over.
I agree that as of the end of October 2020, there were a bunch of things known about Trump, most of them not good. But to repeat, most of those were known only by people that follow politics to some degree. I believe there are a lot of people who don't follow politics that closely. If you had mostly ignored politics throughout Trump's first term, you would be hearing things that sound like the typical jabs of a political campaign:
Trump had a lot of turnover.
Trump made some questionable appointments.
Trump didn't release his tax returns.
There was a scandal in the Trump administration.
And more as you correctly point out.
Then you'd hear Trump saying similar bad things about Biden.
To those who aren't thinking about politics daily (like we do here), this is all just ordinary campaigning. Say bad things about your opponent. Say good things about yourself. Sure, with Trump there'd be some things that are a bit weird:
Why does he keep going on about crowd sizes? But who cares? Whatever, that just his quirk. They all have quirks. They all stretch the truth to make themselves look good and their opponent look bad.
I'm kind of deliberately avoiding covid in this discussion. I'm not really sure how much of a role that played. It could have been the tipping point. It could have been just another bit of political whining and moaning in these voters' minds.
Anyway, when we get down to election day, there's a camp of folks one one side. There's a camp of folks on the other side. They're not terribly moved by anything that has happened to this point. And just as it will be this time around, the votes of 90% of the people won't matter.** (Please see note below.) It's the 10% in the middle of a handful of states that swing the election one way or the other. And those folks tend to vacillate back and forth. If the last administration has been unusually good, they can say. If they haven't been really good, they'll vote for change.
By election day 2020, Trump was just an ordinary President clearly in the not-great category. So those few folks in the middle, who aren't paying close attention every day or every week, decided to switch horses. They went from a "meh" horse of the last 3+ years to a different horse.
And that's when the "meh" horse blew up and became an outright threat to our democratic processes.
So yeah, I'm going to cut some folks a bit of slack in the 2020 election. SOME folks. It wasn't until after the election that Trump showed us how bad he really was. Before the election, he was just an "ordinary" level of bad. You could still vote for him because he was the Republican and you always vote Republican. You knew he wasn't great (unless you were in the cult, which I believe to be smaller than most people think), but he was still the Republican. And even a "meh" Republican is better than any Democrat.
Of course, today things are much different. We know a whole lot more. But that's today, and not November 2020.
--Peter
** Note:
Those votes won't matter for President. They matter much more - MUCH more - for Congress and various state and local positions. So please vote even if you are in the bluest of blue states, or reddest of red states.
And yes, 90% here is a rhetorical tool. Could be 70%, could be 80%, could be something else. The point is that it's a small subset of voters whose votes matter the most for electing a President. That's why both campaigns will travel mainly to a handful of states for rallies. If they are somewhere other than those half-dozen or so states, it's probably a fundraiser.
