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s it possible to support Trump and still be a good person? I used to think so. We Americans are supposed to be tolerant, broad-minded, undogmatic. Our politics are not our souls, but just our opinions, kept in much the same large mental box as unacted fantasies and blameless speculations. Though fierce in debate, we have the knack of gracefully tabling differences, leaving the quarrel with a shrug and a quick smile, returning to it later perhaps. This can make us seem shallow to foreigners, but in fact it is our superpower, allied to our optimism, our pragmatism, our creativity, and — this above all — our ability to coexist without cutting each other’s throats.
So if you told me in 2016 that you voted for Trump, I would call you seventeen kinds of fool, but not necessarily a bad person, and not an enemy for that alone. No matter how bad Trump’s motives manifestly were, I would go on assuming that your motives were decent, and that they might, with patience, be concatenated to some other result than support for this hateful buffoon. Never mind that the old easy tolerance was clearly waning on both left and right, that both sides now seemed to believe that there was such a thing as thought-crime. You still got a pass from me.
Then came the Muslim bans. Then came the treason in Helsinki and the ponderous, perilous farce in Singapore. Then came “enemy of the people” and “fine people on both sides” and “shithole countries” and “go back where they came from” and “I don’t feel responsible for anything.” Then came the plague of cowardice that turned Republicans into liars and lackeys. Then came kids in cages. Then came lies in scads, in flocks, in torrents, somehow accepted now as the basic medium of presidential communication. Then came the daily vengeance of Himself’s Twitter feed, tripping out the base on vicarious cruelty. Then came corruption too vast to be measured or believed, graft flowing in rivers, America a noonday whorehouse and influence bazaar.
Then came — then continued, rather — the great American slaughter of the innocents, several tens of thousands per year laid down on the mighty altar of gun worship amid the droning liturgy of the NRA, the manufacturers, and gobbledegook interpretations of the Second Amendment, with nothing at all done about it except for one strange week when Himself, just bored it seemed, gave a two- or three-day head feint toward reform. Then came caprice in place of policy. Then came the poaching of military funds to build a stretch of Wall that even the most cockeyed Trump supporters had ceased to care about. Then came the stocking of SCOTUS and the federal judiciary with hordes of plutocratic flunkies, many incompetent and all spineless. Then came welfare for the rich and austerity for the poor. Then came betrayals of Syria, of the Kurds, of Ukraine, of Jamal Khashoggi. Then came sabotage of the Paris accords and the Iran nuclear deal. Then came mass rollbacks of already inadequate environmental protections, while the West caught fire and glaciers sweated their meltwater rivers.
Then came a Potemkin economy, floating on debt and fracked gas, contrived by precisely the same method that once supplied a coating of short-lived glitz to the Trump Taj Mahal: run the tab into the stratosphere, then leave it for someone else to pay.
Then came the Nuh-Uh-No-Impeach-For-Nothin’ Senate, a weary requiem for checks and balances.
Then came the top-to-bottom, first-to-last criminal mismanagement of a plague that has wrecked the economy, infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, and terrorized the whole population while dividing it still further.
Then came more lies, by the bundle, by the bale, by the boxcar, another kind of mass death, fact and history and science all herded into the showers and the gas turned on, with no one afterwards able to say what honesty and truth once were.
Then at last came this brazen, unmistakable attempt to overturn a free election, every bit a coup in intention, for all its comic-opera fecklessness and the absence (for now) of tanks and firing squads.
Then came the astonishing open-air sedition of a third of Congress, all those men and a few women formerly thought to have intelligence, decency, patriotism, and courage signing on to what was effectively the revocation of the Constitution, doing it without hesitation, not just guzzling the Kool-Aid but tipping the wait staff and toasting the guards, and for what? To placate the sweaty huckster from Queens.
And through it all the base grew ever baser, their scruples ever less, their contempt for the rest of us ever more open. They seemed to sense that the adventure was not going to end well — but God, what a ride! Who needed good government, when they got that daily fix of anger aroused and gratified? The greatness referred to in the MAGA slogan might turn out to mean only the terrifying grandeur of the Republic itself imploding, but they were basically OK with that. Deep in their resentful Trumper bones they understood, in a way elite wonks did not, that life was temporary, difficult, and too often humiliating, and as long as a guy owned a few liberals along the way, that equalled at least a C+ on the final. They kept on with their neo-Confederate rallies, doing their schtick that looked like a jolly impression of the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz, and thrilled to the core discovery of rage bombers everywhere: that nihilism can be a fearsome, unanswerable weapon. When it is yourself you are taking hostage, no SWAT team ever really gets the best of you.
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t some point, different for different people on our side, it wasn’t “just politics” anymore. It was disgrace, downfall, invasion. It was combat. Your politics were your soul after all, and there was no room for compromise, self-doubt, tentativeness, good manners, or a sporting approach. Everything was personal. People were trying to take away your country, and they stood a far better chance of success than ever the Nazis or the Imperial Japanese. If that didn’t make them traitors, villains, foes, what gentler name could you find for them? If you weren’t ready to fight them yet, when would you be? You were so pissed at Trump foot soldiers and acolytes — the truckers with their double banners, the gun-toting anti-maskers in stinky camo — that you started thinking just like them. You didn’t want to debate, you wanted to curse. You wanted to buy a gun and learn the best recipe for Molotov cocktails. You wanted to attend mass trials and help unspool the barbed wire for the camps, if ever our side got the upper hand.
You wanted to shoot someone, maybe one of those morons who kept obstructing common-sense gun reform.
In calmer moods, you wanted to write or read an Op-Ed piece on the necessity of dropping friends who wouldn’t quit with their Trumpist folderol. You realized that there really is such a thing as thought crime, but only on the right. You considered boycotting various firms and people and realized how damned inconvenient it was going to be.
Of course the trouble with militancy, the thing that has always been the trouble, the truly heartbreaking thing, is that there are so damned many of the peckers: 74 million by the count of this last election, no promised blue wave but a presidential squeaker in doleful tandem with a down-ballot calamity; and this, no more than this, after the historic deus ex machina of the pandemic and nine months of obdurately rosy polls. Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Lincoln got smaller percentages of the popular vote in elections they won. So did Hitler. Democracy is right at the brink of voting itself out of existence, it seems.
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nd there is another problem, if you live where I do, here in Trump country, in the swath of Appalachia that tumbles down from the mountains and rolls across Ohio and Indiana and central Illinois to the Mississippi. Seen in the wild, up close, the specimens disappoint. Few of them unmistakably show the features that were promised in the brochure for the safari — the mulish stupidity, the Bible-thumping fervor, the straight-up racism, the crazy credulousness, the whooping insensitivity and robust dickishness. Instead they are just people, more or less, like people anywhere.
In my neighborhood, two or three rural lanes at the edge of what is barely a city, most people will wave if you pass on the road, walking or in a car. If your truck breaks down, nearly anyone will stop to help and ask nosy questions. In good weather neighbors occasionally show up at your door with vegetables from their gardens, eggs from their hens, Rice Krispy treats from their ovens. If they know you or any of your friends, they will cheerfully loan you tools, up to and including small tractors. Then they offer to help you spread the mulch or take down the dead tree. They do business honestly, though often with discounts for kin and churchmembers. When someone is sick, poor, and uninsured, they leave collection jars at Mom ‘N’ Pop restaurants in town, and these quickly fill up with change and dollar bills.
People around here use horrible words and tell jokes that would get you canceled from the university crowd in town, but their racism, which can hardly be denied, has an abstract, theoretical quality. It applies mainly to strangers and large groups, to the general idea of race, but not so much to individuals, whom they treat decently one on one. Sometimes (as is often said), their simple friendliness achieves effective color-blindness better than the code-driven correctness of liberals in their gated campuses. But everything depends on the individual circumstance. I have one dear friend of many years who grew up desperately poor and accordingly tough. He will still sometimes utter the N-word, heedless of my wife’s protests and mine, and he is fierce on the subject of immigration. But over the decades he has employed numerous immigrants and treated them fairly, and the gods, with an unmistakable sense of humor, have blessed him with a grandson who is half black (and therefore, by the crazy particular rules of America, completely black). Will anyone be surprised to hear that he has always treated the non-matching descendant about as well and badly as any of the others? And while his daughter’s marriage lasted he was an affectionate, generous father-in-law.
My neighbors are generally better than city folk at building a deck, fixing a car, wiring an attic, dressing a deer, patching a boat, adding a room. None of these is a task for fools, or for fact-defying cultists particularly. They have lived through the collapse of farming as a way of life — or rather, its suicidally excessive triumph, as family farms consolidated and everything went high tech, and the jobs disappeared even as the bumper crops rolled in. Could you operate the half-million-dollar portable factory known as a combine, guiding it through the scientifically planned and planted fields to bring in another harvest with the speed and efficiency of a drone strike? Don’t tell me these people are against science, or ignorant of it; they know their corners of it, at least, like their mother’s middle names. At the median they are far too smart to enroll in Trump’s phony university or contribute to his bogus charities, to buy the water or the vodka or one of his gristly steaks.
Yet they have bought Trump himself, the biggest con of all, and that is a mystery for the ages. I will never really understand it. But I think I get the gist. More than most demographics, Trumpers have embraced the pitiless American cult of the individual, the Henry Ford-Horatio Alger-John Wayne creed according to which you are always and only responsible for your own lot in life. The frontier is always there, even if it takes the form of Manhattan or Queens, and your job is to seize and exploit its glorious possibilities. But woe unto you if you fail, loser.
Yet as everyone seems to understand, Trumpers in general have failed, at least according to their own reductive inner calculus. In 2016 Trumpers collectively had about half the income of Clinton voters, standing there in our stunned ranks, wondering how our dough had bought so little power; and in 2020 the very best predictor of a Trump vote was the lack of a college degree. The latter point is one we liberals should especially ponder I think. Do we even see the hereditary caste system implicit in the creeping credentialism that controls more and more of the economy? Do we ever admit that a college among other things is a privilege factory, cranking out entitlements and subtly dispossessing those who cannot get them? To many Trumpers, that college degree feels like the very incarnation of society’s meritocratic disdain, as well as their own festering self-accusation.
The pandemic of “failure” is not in the least the Trumpers’ own fault, for it has been caused by huge historical forces that no one can control — globalization, automation, population growth and flow, the decline of unions, the overall miracle and curse of always-exploding capital. On one level Trumpers understand those huge forces perfectly well, and they can tell you just how the game has been rigged against them. (Don’t argue China policy with that guy in the corner in a John Deere cap. You will lose.) But they go on blaming themselves anyway, on another level they never quite admit to.
I sometimes think, in my patronizing liberal way, that what Trumpers really want is just what they most condemn: socialism, which would give them both badly needed economic aid and a less punishing light in which to view themselves. But they thrust that thought away in horror, as they might a sudden urge to wear petticoats. Trumpers can’t bring themselves to abandon the dream of self-sufficiency. Its frontier promises still seem too sweet, it is too deeply entrenched in the American psyche, and above all it still works as rationalization and ego protection: watch it get trotted out whenever white men and their “housewives” need to defend their remaining class and color privileges.
Onto this scene of paralyzed ambivalence and gathering rage then enters Trump, with his painted wagon full of scapegoats whom it is deliciously easier to blame than either the success cult or oneself: Mexicans, blacks, Jews, the press, China, Iran, Muslims, terrorists, trade deals, Democrats of course, radical feminists, radical socialists, RINOS, caravans, conspiracies of every kind, and on and on. America herself makes the list in some versions, with the proviso that her shining white essence is still there, encrusted by layers of corruption but capable being “great again” if grabbed strategically. All those canny farmers and union stewards had not suddenly gone stupid. But they took up Trump at first in a spirit of satire, enjoying the comedy of his incongruous ascent, loving it when he took down some stuffed shirt with his WWF tactics. His manifest failings were crucial to his appeal. You could look at him and think, If that’s a presidential candidate, I should be one too. You could think white male privilege was okay after all, for what could be more privileged than this horny loudmouth who had failed up all his life, this too-white-to-tan millionaire’s son flaunting borrowed billions as he pissed them away? From this angle he was in himself a wonderfully succinct and sarcastic comment on the rottenness of the system that had failed and condemned you. Above all you could think, Nothing is my fault.
But from the other angle, the campaign-bio angle, the full-bullshit angle, he looked like an actual self-made billionaire, at least if you had pounded enough Stroh’s that afternoon. He offered intense vicarious fulfillment of your still-enchanting, still-festering American Dream. You might eventually get there after all, you felt in the face of all evidence.
The disease was progressive; he grew on you. You could say, We need good business sense in the White House, as if Trump had ever shown a lick of it. After a while his clownish hyperboles seemed to express your truth or part of it in a way the extant language of political reality — measured, evidence-based, tolerably exact, obsessed with equality but somehow more and more restrictive and suffocating — could not. Trump was a defender of the system and a tireless assailant of it, a high-flying meritocrat and a homey Everyman, a Falstaffian blowhard and a humble best-buddy whose Twitter musings were available to everyone. You could look up to him and down on him at the same time. His matchless comic delivery, perhaps his one true gift, let you have it both ways without really deciding how seriously you took any of it. Whenever he seemed about to crash the plane, the “I was kidding” excuse was there like the button to an ejection seat.
So you went to a Trump rally not even realizing how humiliated and anxious you felt, spent several hours dumping on lots of people you didn’t know, and came away feeling marvelously better about yourself. As for the future, as for agendas and platforms, you were not even sure you cared anymore. Like a trip to the Gulf in peak Covid season, this ride seemed worth it in any case. Nothing could equal the adroit, paradoxical way the Clown King gave you permission to be who you were. And if the poetry rapidly soured into propaganda and worse, into disinformation, slander, Nazism, and thuggery, into demolition of the norms and structures of American democracy, well, group loyalty always entails a surrender of personal judgment at some point. To ride the Trump-O-Coaster you had to believe whatever the group believed on a given day. So sure, those inauguration crowds were history’s biggest. Sure, there were millions of stolen ballots in 2016 and again in 2020. Sure, the pandemic is over and the health plan almost done. You signed off without paying attention. Sure, the moon landing was faked by Elves. Beneath it all the Trumpers mostly knew better, but they went on trolling the rest of us, because it felt so right.
. . . Which is about as far as I can get in parsing the malignant miracle that is Trumpism: not far enough to quench my permanent astonishment that America has done this to herself. As I write this, seven weeks after the election, Trumpist bitter-enders are still clamoring for the election results to be abrogated (by Mike Pence in an arcane maneuver on January 6, according to the latest fantasy). Himself is inviting fans from across the country (many armed, it goes without saying) to come watch Mike leap through the flaming hoop for his boss. A rich farmer down the road is still flying his Trump flag right under Old Glory. A long-time family friend grins and remarks, “We still don’t know who the real president is.” I imagine all these celebrating the death of American democracy with keggers and hog roasts, not beginning to guess what they have done and lost. What can they be thinking? What can they be feeling?
I still won’t say that Trumpers are terrible people. They are just ordinary people who are doing a terrible thing: wrecking America: destroying all her best norms and key institutions, and this while, almost incidentally, they enable a tsunami of needless deaths and a Russian attack. They are still drinking their witches’ brew of bullshit patriotism, slander, scorn, hero-worship, self-pity, cruelty, trickle-down malarkey, and self-help doctrine, and their frenzy shows few signs of abating. They will be back in 2022 and 2024 and must be stopped. But I’m not ready to shoot anyone. Instead I cross my fingers and think of a farm kid I knew once, who ruined himself and his family with meth and Oxy in his twenties, but finally went to rehab and came out a decent person again.
