An old essay on the eve of the US election

NOTE: This is an essay I wrote back in 2016 with only slight revisions to reflect the passage of time. It is hard to believe that this is still relevant today, but it is.

Why do people have a visceral loathing of Donald Trump?   This is what many of my Trump voting friends want to know.  While there are those in the right-wing media who say it is all about his policy agenda, I would suggest that is not true.

If we can even remember the world prior to his 2016 election campaign, I would suggest that for the average Republican, Donald Trump was not really a household name, unless it was as a TV star.  But, for many of us, he has been a prominent figure since the 1980's. There is a reason he'd had four book-length bios before he became active in Republican politics. He had built not just his business empire, but his personal brand long before he moved from supporting Democrats to embracing the Republican Party.

For people like me, his brand and the values he has long endorsed are antithetical to my values system. He was (is) the poster boy for the "Greed is Good" ethic of the 1980's.  His values of "me first" and everyone else are just tools I use to get what I want are well documented by his own words, which again predates his first run for president.  There is a reason that his biographers are nearly unanimous that the more they got to know him personally, the less they liked him.  

New York elites, who hobnobbed with him all his life, never liked how he rubbed his opulent lifestyle and contempt for everyone not like them, in the face of average people.  His behavior was that of a self-absorbed vain man who from the start used his father's wealth and power to crush the lives of anyone who he saw as a threat. Later the wealth and power was his own, but he used it the same way. He was famous for sending armies of lawyers to bankrupt small people who had the nerve to say he should pay his bills, or failed to do what he told them to do.  And again all this predates his Republican conversion.

The leftist claims that he is a racist or misogynist show a profound lack of understanding of Trump.  He does not look down on black people, or Muslims or women because they are black or Muslim or female. He looks down upon and mistreats people equally.  If someone is not rich, powerful and above all useful to him they simply don't matter.  That is sociopathic, but it is not necessarily driven by racism or misogyny.  Rich and powerful Muslims (such as the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia) with whom he does business are fully respected.  The reason he looks racist and misogynistic is that women, immigrants or racial minorities rarely have the credentials to deserve respect in his world view. He has attacked Rosie O'Donald for years, but not because she was a woman, but because she was a vocal critic with a large audience. Megan Kelly was attacked because she was a threat and worse a traitor, not because she was a woman. Working for Fox News, she was expected to have his back, and when she did her job and asked tough questions, he responded with his famed vindictiveness. If using misogynistic language was useful to harm Rosie or Megan, then to Trump that was fair game. Even his history of "trading-in" wives for new younger models (literally models) reinforces the view that everyone in his life is just a prop for his own ego.  To feminists in the media, they see this as him only valuing women for their sex appeal.  But, again I disagree. While he does value sex appeal, he also values utility in other ways, so he hires smart pretty blonds into his organization.  Fat ugly women need not apply. The feminists find that very offensive, to Trump it is just practical.  

 The same is true for his history with African-Americans.  There is no evidence to show he thinks people with African heritage are intrinsically of lesser value; but he does not see anything wrong with using other's racism to his advantage. He has a history of this in business and so when he later got into politics it was natural to him. I know to the left, that makes him a racist, but I would disagree. It does however, show he has no morality other than expediency.   The right are fond of talking about Saul Alinsky as if he were uniquely evil. I would bet most who talk about Alinsky never read his writing. If they did , they would find (from a Christian perspective) he is evil, but he is far from unique. Alinsky openly advocates the same philosophy for politics that Trump does for business in his book,  Art of the Deal. Namely they both believe that "If an action benefits your cause you are a fool not to take it."   This ends justifies the means mentality is pure Trump as well as Alinsky.

All of this predates Trump's change of political party or his run for president. So when Trump began his campaign, to people like me and to the New York media, they filtered his words through decades of experience.  For people like my elderly mother-in-law, she took his words at face value.  So while so many people heard someone who was  truly interested in their concerns, I only saw a glorified used car salesman who would say anything he thought his audience wanted to hear.  It was only when his audience responded to his attacks on Mexican immigrants, he made that the centerpiece of his early campaign.  He did so even while his own businesses openly recruited and imported foreign labor to keep down costs.

In 2016, I was appalled that the Christian conservatives turned their back on decades of using a Christian virtue litmus test for candidates. For thirty years Trump had lived a life that is the antithesis of the values Jesus espoused: greed, pride, vanity, exploitation of the poor, boastfulness, vindictiveness, dishonesty, and a general "me first" lifestyle.  This was all well known before he became a Republican.  Yet, one-by-one Evangelical leaders dismissed his lifetime of anti-Christian behavior and lined up behind him. They even quoted the old Democratic Party line that we are not looking for a pastor-in-chief; something they utterly rejected for decades.  Then I saw Republicans turning their back on one after another key principle that defined the party for half a century, like free trade or the opposition to legalized gambling.   In all this, I saw my friends fall under the sway of someone I had long ago come to despise as the embodiment of everything wrong with America. 

And worst of all he was a New York billionaire. How could any decent Southerner not tell him to go home to Manhattan and stay there?

If a sharpie con-man takes advantage of my 90-year-old mother-in-law and sells her a phony herbal miracle cure for her arthritis for an outrageous sum; I don't get mad at my mother-in-law, she was in pain and the slick talking salesman took advantage of that. I do however get mad at the crook who took advantage of her.   I see Trump and his voters the same way.  Trump identified, correctly, that middle America (fly-over country) has been utterly forgotten by the powerful elites who reside in a band from Washington DC to Boston on the east coast, and a band that runs from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the west coast. To the media, not just news, but TV and movies as well people who live in the South and Mid-West are almost always ignored as being irrelevant. Even the Fox News & entertainment networks have a serious New York/LA bias as well. When wage earning people in the South and Mid-West are mentioned at all,  they are just assumed to be stupid red necks (unless they live in big cities).  

Since 1980 there has been a massive shift of wealth from wage-earning people in the mid-west to those in the east and west power corridors.  And since about 2000, the Democratic Party has shifted from its wage-earning base, to a base of fragmented base of small groups driven by the ideology of Critical Theory. The shift has been away from the working class toward a well-off well educated professional political class.  For this new professional political class, the ideology is not liberalism, but a quasi-religion that no longer sees social justice as “justice for all,” but as a zero-sum game of “justice for me.”  All too often the premise is that to help one group gain social justice and respect, you must take justice and self-respect from others.  White people living paycheck to paycheck with little hope of advancement really don't care to hear rich college kids at elite colleges lecture them on white privilege.

Trump saw all this as an opportunity, and spoke to those forgotten people. He promised to bring back their high wage jobs and more importantly their respect.  The difference between me and Trump voters is not that I disagree with the symptoms, but I think Trump is a snake oil salesman packing piss and castor oil as a miracle medicine for hurting people.  I am absolutely convinced that Trump doesn't care one wit for working class people. Nothing in his lifetime of actions supports any other conclusion. I see his vicious attacks on anyone who even slightly criticizes him as further proof of his deception.  His blanket categorization of all criticism as fake news is like the herbal supplement dealers who attack the use of independent scientific studies into the effectiveness of products.  It is easier to attack the messenger than to rebut the message.  That is Trump. That is who he has been for decades.  And so yes, the longer someone goes on fooling my mother-in-law into paying for and taking a remedy that actually hurts her, the more angry I would get.  It is not that I don't want her well, it is that I don't trust the salesman. It is not that people like me don't want America Great, it is that they don't trust Trump to deliver, and worse yet, they believe his cure will only make America worse off than it is now.

So yes, I detest Donald Trump, as does most anyone who sees him in the light of decades of his actions not a year of his promises to Make America Great.  The more I see my friends lured into believing his lies the more I loathe him. The longer my friends continue to swallow his snake oil the more damage it will do to them, and that makes me mad.

2024 addendum:

Just as I had predicted when I wrote this in 2016, as president, Donald Trump’s policies did not address the needs of the working class who were (and are) his base of voters. Instead, the policies he enacted were tailored to increase the wealth and power of the billionaire class and to sew further hate between the working-class white people who voted for him and the working-class people of color who opposed him.

It was an effective strategy, making tribalism more important to his voters than self-interest.  Now on the eve of the new election, what is his pitch? He is demonizing all immigrants (legal or not) after he told his allies to kill a bipartisan bill that would have provided a significant improvement in border security. And in the past few weeks, he and his allies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to attack an infinitesimally tiny group of transgender people.  He offers no vision of hope, only hatred for the “other.”

 Why? Because engendering hate and fear works for him, so he will keep doing it. I said it over and over again back in 2016, when I was still on Facebook, “You can not follow both Trump and Jesus. They present diametrically opposed value systems. Those who claim they can follow both have already rejected Jesus and have followed Trump.”    Time has only proven me right.

 A meme I made in 2016