Has the far-right hijacked and ruined yet another useful phrase?
There's the assumption infused to a lot of these conversations that Trump is uniquely bad or uniquely extreme and so that "centrism" would still mean opposing him.
I also don't get what's particularly "grass roots" about support for the Democrats. During the Kamala campaign we had a string of celebrity endorsements including a cringey Avengers reunion zoom call. These are rich, privileged people from a specific social milieu - not grass roots by any means.
The last "grass roots" candidate was probably Bernie Sanders (someone Joe Rogan also supported, incidentally), but he was too dangerous to corporate profit margins for the DNC to let him win.
Indeed, being friendly to Harris would make you "not a centrist", hence why I think it's weird how we're able to stick that label to obviously pro-Trump people.
The GOP received the lion share of financial aids during their last campaign, and it has been so for quite a while. Let's not even speak of dark money. That is not to say the democrats relied on 100% grassroots initiatives, far from it.
Can we stop this whataboutism and bothsideism from polluting the discourse? It is hardly relevant.
This is how politics looks like when the radical fringes from social networks take over national parties and squeeze out the so-much-mocked "enlightened centrists" from their seats. Missing them yet?
The same problem in Europe is somewhat tamed by proportional voting systems, but various edgelords have invaded our politics as well. Slovakia, right next to Czechia, is a horrible political circus. AfD in Germany mostly built its electorate online etc.