The case is for defending the conditions under which it’s even possible to have a group of privileged people sitting around worrying about animal advocacy while the world is burning. To the extent that you think 1) Trump is a threat to democratic norms (as described e.g. by Julia Galef )/ risks nuclear war etc. and isn’t just a herald of more conservative policy, and 2) most liberals galvanized by the threat of Trump are worrying more about the latter than the former, there’s room for EAs to be galvanized by the threat of Trump in a more bipartisan way, as described e.g. by Paul Christiano.
(In general, my personal position on animal advocacy is that the long-term future of animals on Earth is determined almost entirely by how much humans have their shit together in the long run, and that I find it very difficult to justify working directly to save animals now relative to working to help humans get their shit more together.)
I don’t think this comparison holds water. Briefly, I think SI/MIRI would have mostly attracted criticism for being weird in various ways. As far as I can tell, Gleb is not acting weird; he is acting normal in the sense that he’s making normal moves in a game (called Promote-Your-Organization-At-All-Costs) that other people in the community don’t want him playing, especially not in a way that implicates other EA orgs by association.
Whatever you think of that object-level point, an independent meta-level point: it’s also possible that the EA movement excluding SI/MIRI at some point would have been a reasonable move in expectation. Any policy for deciding who to kick out necessarily runs the risk of both false positives and false negatives, and pointing out that a particular policy would have caused some false positive or false negative in the past is not a strong argument against it in isolation.