Ultimately, trusting in democracy means you have to trust people to choose what’s best for themselves (with protections against those choices hurting others).
well then i think the disconnect here is pretty simple: i absolutely don't, and i think the past few years have borne this out repeatedly. i think it's trivial to mislead people into voting against their best interests and that the public voting in a way that harms them has been a repeatedly-occurring, inarguable problem in most existing democratic states throughout their history. so i have no issue with this.