Certain jobs require a certain type of person. The moral character of the politician is irrelevant to whether they are the right tool for a specific goal. This is the same logic applied to rave lineups: bookings are about sound cohesion, not character references.
I do not like a lot of things about Trump, and I did not vote for him. But for a trade war, he is the perfect paranoid, unhinged piece of work necessary to bring back manufacturing. That might sound like a hot take. It is pragmatic philosophically.
The tool framework
Obama was well spoken but ruthless. Trump is poorly spoken and ruthless. The competency matrix has two axes: communication and execution. The public evaluates politicians almost entirely on communication. The outcomes are determined almost entirely by execution. The disconnect between these two evaluations is where most political confusion lives.
The pragmatic position: evaluate the tool by the job it needs to do, not by how the tool looks on the shelf. A hammer is ugly and violent. It is also the correct tool for driving nails. The person who refuses to use a hammer because they find it aesthetically offensive is not morally superior. They just have undriven nails.
On immigration specifically: I personally blame the Biden administration for not processing everyone correctly. But this whole deportation thing has been done by both Democrats in the past with Obama and now with Trump — except Trump is just doing it with way less quality control. The policy direction is bipartisan. The execution quality varies. Evaluating only the current administration’s execution while ignoring the previous administration’s identical policy is not analysis. It is team sports.
Why this matters in nightlife
The rave scene tried to make political alignment a condition of participation. After the election, the scene split. The promoters who had built their identity around opposition to a political figure had to recalibrate. The promoters who had built their identity around sound and community did not have to change anything.
The position of political independence in the scene is both principled and strategic. Nobody is ever going to force a statement that does not align with the operation’s values. Events are not about particular social issues. They are about music and community. The brand that stays apolitical preserves the widest possible audience. The brand that takes sides loses half the room and gains nothing except approval from people who were already coming.
What this is not
This is not ideological alignment with the full right platform. Not anti-immigrant — the person writing this is first-generation. Not MAGA in the rally-going sense. It is pragmatic cost-benefit analysis combined with a genuine anti-performative stance and strategic use of political positioning as a scene filter.
The people who cannot separate tool evaluation from tribal loyalty will read this as endorsement. It is not. It is the same analytical framework applied to politics that gets applied to everything else: what works, what does not, and what is everyone pretending about.
Trump is a tool, not an idol. The person who cannot tell the difference between using a tool and worshipping it has a different problem than the one they think they have. The framework is simple: evaluate the outcome, not the personality. Apply that consistently across every administration, every party, every era. The analysis changes. The method does not.