Sure they aren't.
The right answer is they are fear-mongering liars. The very thing they accuse Trump of being.
Every politician on planet Earth can be characterised in some way as a fear mongering liar if you were to dig down to it. That's sort of the job in the modern media environment. The stoic and calm accountants, or leaders who carefully considered both sides of the equation and came up with an acceptable middle ground don't exist any more. They've been replaced by TV show characters whose main qualification is that they can get their base to come out and vote in droves. And anti-other guy rhetoric has always been the biggest point scorer in Party stuff.
There's very few in the world now who aren't just party loyalists hoping to cement their position though that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Tony Blair released a book last year called Leadership which talks heavily about this issue, in reference to a recently promoted leader of an African nation that he was asked to advise. It's wonderful to get into power and start enacting all the change you want to see, especially as this specific example was about a person who wanted to liberalise the country after many years of turmoil, but unless you also manage your own Party and your voting base then you'll be gone in six months and all the change you wanted now doesn't happen. So secure your position then baby steps it towards where you think the nation should go.
People who expect (or try) to walk in with a big broom and change everything in one big hit always fail in the medium term. Their vision is always reversed in one, two or three elections down the line. Ultimately the greatest thing about democracy (and something I believe some political parties have forgotten), is that you have to take people with you and get them to buy into your vision otherwise your "win"/time in Government is basically masturbatory until the next guy comes and puts it all back for better or worse.
Trump isn't going to have a long term impact on the US and I've been saying this since about 2012. He swings to the right, then someone will come along and swing it back and harder and then it will run out of steam with swings and end up round about the middle. That's what markets and companies want, its what electorates want. People scream for change because its a nothing term that means everything to everyone but they actually want stability. Some might suggest the Supreme Court but the next person who learns from the "strongman" appeal of Trump and is on the left will start to address that through reform. This is punishment for Trump pushing through judges, next someone else will push stuff through to negate that. So what started with some horseshit about Merrick Garland not allowed to be appointed near an election is now going to end in 20 Supreme Court judges because they didn't understand precedence and escalation.
I believe in the importance but also the danger of precedence. If two people are in an argument on here for example and it's vaguely friendly then you expect the tone to continue like this. But if one person calls the other a bad cat nonce then they've introduced that as an acceptable form of interaction, so then can't complain when they get called a bad cat nonce by others. Same with politics. Republicans specifically are so utterly stupid when it comes to this. They introduce new ways of interpreting protocol for them to "win" without seemingly considering that that same protocol can now be applied in the future to them. The Democrats need to start hitting them harder on this.
