I’ve had occasion several times over the last three years to wonder why the Left, American and not just American, hates Donald Trump with a level of passion so intense that they’re perfectly willing to bring the United States to its knees to get rid of him.
Initially, I assumed it was because there was something about Donald Trump the man. After all, I don’t particularly like him, and didn’t vote for him myself, finding that both he and his major opponent were too flawed to willingly put into office. But it didn’t take very long before I began to realize that something far more intense and worrying was going on. The Left didn’t just hate Trump, as they had hated Bush – they were willing, it seemed, to do anything to make sure Trump wasn’t seated as president, and barring that, make sure he was tried and convicted and thrown out of office as soon as possible. This, one must admit, was unusual for a country where we have free presidential elections every four years, with strong institutions designed to prevent tyranny from being possible, even if the person in the Oval Office was so inclined. It’s unnecessary to enumerate all the opposition #Resist -style activities that have been launched, and mostly, gone down in flames.
So, I have asked myself, what is so special about Trump, that he engenders this kind of effect in his opposition? And I wonder, also, whether Trump is in fact special enough for this kind of treatment – or would any other Republican president be seeing the same level of unrest and below-the-belt-no-holds-barred hatred in Anno Domino 2019? It’s a darned good question, and here I’ll attempt to answer it.
Early on, we were told by the left-leaning media that Donald Trump was a right-wing authoritarian, a la Hitler. There seems to have been very little behind this charge, even more so in retrospect. But it should be expected; Ronald Reagan was called a Nazi, as was George W. Bush, by those very same media outlets. This time, they said, we mean it. Ooook. So we can put that charge aside, I think, into the category of “what every Republican President should expect”.
“Well, okay,” the Solons of the Media said, “if you won’t buy ‘Nazi’, how about ‘racist’?” Of course, to the modern Left, everything is about racism and intersectionality, so this seems to be a charge that is wholly of the modern era. But in order to make even that charge stick, they needed to go back to 1972 for an anti-discrimination case that Trump was involved in – a time when the Democratic Party was still largely the party of institutionalized old-school racism itself – or take Trump’s remarks out of context and twist them and/or interpret them for us. Would any other Republican be vulnerable to the same claim? You bet, especially since multiple prominent Democratic personalities have opined publicly that the Republican party is the party of racism, conveniently ignoring both history and their own contributions to bigotry.
The next charge you’ll inevitably hear is that Trump is corrupt; he’s in office solely to enrich himself and his family. There have been unprecedented attacks on the Trump family over the last three years claiming all sorts of things, but for me the question would be, “what’s the point?” The family is undeniably wealthy, and it contributes generously to many charitable causes. The Trump hatred has been so strong that many of those causes are being forced to sever ties with Trump family members under threat of retribution. Would we expect to see this with any other Republican president? Well, we certainly didn’t hear of any problems in the previous administration, when VP Joe Biden’s family sold themselves as purchasable protection against United States anti-corruption activity. You’d have to go back to the George W. Bush administration to find any similar deep exposes against extended members of the Bush clan. Still, I cannot rule out that this is now a standard practice that would be deployed against any Republican who seeks the highest elected office.
So, specifically, what is driving this level of hatred and division? I believe it began in late 2000, with the election of George W. Bush. At that time, the Angry Left was born, and it had a grievance to keep it angry – the fact that they didn’t win the Florida recount. Many organizations, including the New York Times, have reviewed the results and concluded that whatever way you counted those ballots, Bush was indeed the winner. But it was close, and a narrative was launched of stolen elections. So the Left was thrilled when Barack Obama took office, because they thought they’d finally won, and indeed won forever. Much of the narrative at the time stated that the Obama Coalition was insurmountable; it was the demographics, stupid, and there would never be any chance of a Republican president, or even Senate, again in the foreseeable future, if ever. Obama himself apparently thought he was the country’s “first post-colonial president,” meaning that with his election, the period of “colonialism” was finally ended. The implicit belief was that, like post colonial regimes elsewhere in the world, there would be one man, one vote, once, and Obama believed his was the one. Even if he wouldn’t stay in office, his hand-picked successors would.
Imagine the surprise, then, when a Republican won the election.
The guy who won, even worse, was Donald Trump – who is arguably more suited to be a reality TV host than a President in many ways. His true gifts revolve around trolling the very people who cannot believe he is president – Hillary Clinton, to this day, claims he is illegitimate – and doing so in a way that infuriates them all the more. His superpower is to make otherwise rational people abandon all rationality and pretense of moderation. The Left’s angry goal now is exposed: make sure it is impossible for a Republican to ever win a national election again. It’s not about Trump per se; he’s just the convenient cannon fodder of the time (and yes, he doesn’t help himself many times). But make no mistake: many of the same flash points would be flashing today if any other Republican had wound up in office on January 21, 2017.
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I believe part of the reason is that he fights back effectively, and doesn’t hold back.
Well, that’s why he’s *survived*, anyway.
Articles like this trigger the more basic question of why we need to believe in the first place. More recently Peter had me read “Why We Believe in God(s): A concise guide to the science of faith” by Thomson. While many of the details were new to me, there was little I didn’t know or had deduced about the bigger picture of why we believe. However, Thomson’s comprehensiveness got me thinking that we are approaching the question the wrong way. That feeling was reinforced reading this article.
The simple answer is that it is not what we carry in our brain, it is not the precise chemicals and the amounts of them that trigger our belief in God, but the opposite, i.e. what we don’t already have that we need to help us cope with the hostile world that we live in. It is not the capabilities we already posses but the gaps in them that we need to fill with beliefs, most particularly those that allow us to survive in new situations, in situations about which we know little and consciously or unconsciously feel vulnerable.
We only have so much processing capacity and information in our brains, and in reality these are very limited. With those we form simple predictive models to help us cope with routine day-to-day challenges. Those models tend to be rule based in that by following certain rules we learned or deduced we are able to cope better. When we face something new as a result of change, any change, we need to make use of an existing predictive model or develop a new one. But our capacity to do so is very limited so we take advantage of outside models we trust.
Therein religion or other available alternative models that we trust. Think of how many other models we are able to reach out for, including particularly group and party affiliations to deal with political questions. For instance, it’s not just the Republican vote that matters for some but also the evangelical or some other smaller group vote. And for those with much more distinct group affiliations, e.g. atheists or just non-believers, Hispanics, African-Americans, and you name it you need to rely on old models of party affiliation or go around tailor-making new ones.
In that context think about what the left has been doing quite successfully: They have been undermining trust in Trump by providing an alternative narrative or model of who he is, and they have been unusually successful because they have captured the media, and not just the mainstream media but all media very effectively. I say all media because the left has been setting the agenda and putting the right leaning media on the defensive.
I don’t really know how this is all going to play out because of how extreme and desperate the left’s attempt to sell an alternate predictive model has become, but it does explain why the left hates Trump so viscerally.
In thinking how to deal with this go back to my basic thesis that to cope with change we all need alternative models to those of the very limited repertoire we already have or have the capacity to develop. And the only thing I can think of is to keep hammering on Trump’s accomplishments thus far. I hate to say it but exposure by AG Barr and US Attorney Durham of the plot against Trump will help but will not provide an alternative model.
Anyway, if I am right then what is needed is a different way or model to help people on the fence think differently about Trump, most especially to make him predictable in ways they THINK, rightly or wrongly, affect their lives more directly. I think he is already helping himself a lot both with results and with his daily press opportunities at which he presents himself as a very reasonable and thoughtful person. I’ve noticed that the opposition 24/7s carry them more often and they even make it to the nightly news. The key is to keep hammering day in and day out, which Trump is doing.
In the end it will all come down to who has the better marketing campaign and is able to reach people better. However, there is a downside in how it is dividing the country in ways that may be unrepairable and that could result in very undesirable outcomes.