“Trump is only after brown people lol so not as bad as Hitler by far” - average white centrist Liberal
I want to help people interpret this tweet because many are struggling. When I say “worse than I thought” I’m proposing a counterfactual situation: what I expected Trump 2 to be. I was expecting Hitler. Trump 2 is very bad, but not Hitler bad. I therefore am massively relieved that it’s not Hitler bad. So, although it is bad, though millions have died (as expected), the situation is much less bad than my expectation of how bad it was going to be. The fact that my expectations of how bad it was going to be are worse than what it is, does not imply that what it is, is not bad. Merely that it is less bad than the counterfactual situation—that is, less bad than my expectations.