Preemptive whataboutism is even more powerful than garden variety whataboutism. Instead of measuring a president against a standard, or against the qualifications of another candidate, a partisan compares their candidate to the worst caricature of an imagined candidate of the opposition. “The President may be nuts in his behavior,” wrote the conservative pundit Erick Erickson, “but I’ll take his crazy over the insanity the Democrats would unleash on the United States.”
