The worst line I ever wrote as an expert—yes, I know, it’s a crowded field—was the first line I ever wrote about the man who would become the 45th president: “If you don’t hate Donald Trump right now you are terrible.”
This August 2015 opening salvo was the first in what would become dozens of columns condemning Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I hardly regret what I said about the man and his closest followers. But the wide sweep at his constituents made a caricature of them and blinked me.
It has also probably done more to aid than hinder Trump’s candidacy. Telling voters that they are moral ignorant is a bad way to make them change their mind.
What did they see that I didn’t?
That should have been the first question I had to ask myself. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump supporters saw was a candidate whose whole being was a proudly raised middle finger at a smug elite that had spawned a failing status quo.
I was blind to this. Although I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Our children went to an excellent public school. I was well paid, fully insured, isolated from the hard sides of life.
Trump’s allure, according to Noonan, was largely centered on people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods were not so safe and pleasant. Their schools were not that excellent. Their livelihood was not so safe. Their experience with America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal way.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated like losers and racists — clinging, in Obama’s infamous 2008 phrase, to “weapons or religion or antipathy toward people who are not like them.”
No wonder they were angry.
Anger can take stupid or dangerous turns, and with Trump, they often took both. But that didn’t mean the anger was groundless, illegal, or aimed at the wrong target.
Trump voters had a strong argument that they had been betrayed three times by the country’s elites. First after 9/11, when they had endured most of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then cease efforts. Second, after the 2008 financial crisis, when so many were laid off while the financial class was rescued. Third, during the post-crisis recovery, when years of ultra-low interest rates were a boon for those with investable assets and brutal for those without.
Oh, and then came the great American Cultural Revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs – related to same-sex marriage, segregated bathrooms, personal pronouns, meritocratic ideals, race-blind rules, reverence for patriotic symbols, the rules of romance, the presumption of innocence and the distinction between equality of opportunity and outcome – became more and more not just passé, but taboo.
It’s one thing that social mores evolve over time, aided by respect for disagreements. It’s another for them to be abruptly foisted on by one side on the other, with little democratic input but a lot of moral bullying.
This was the environment in which Trump’s campaign thrived. I should have thought a little better about the fact that, in my dripping condescension to his supporters, I also affirmed their suspicions about people like me – people who had a good game about the virtues of empathy, but only practice it selectively; people who are unharmed by the country’s problems and yet not embarrassed to propose solutions.
I could have also given Trump voters more credit for nuance.
For every in-your-face MAGA fighter, there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubting his prowess and baffled by his demeanor, willing to take their risk for his audacity to use deeply flawed conventional to defy piety.
Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. To this day, few anti-Trumpers have been honest with themselves about the elaborate hoax – there’s just no other word for it – that was the Steele file and all the false accusations, gullible aftermath in the mainstream media, that resulted. .
One last question for myself: Would I be wrong to criticize Trump’s? current supporters, those who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic January 6 outcry?
Morally, no. It’s one thing to place a bet on a candidate promising a break from the ordinary. It’s another thing to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the Republic itself.
But I would also approach these voters in a very different spirit than last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a liter of bile,” noted Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of his political career. “If you want to win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, especially for those of us concerned with persuasion.
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