I Hate Trump Supporters. Is that OK?

Dear Reader,

I heard the news this morning that President Trump and the first lady have been diagnosed with COVID-19, or SARS-CoV-2. I felt bad about the confluence of events but that is history in the making, so here’s the column which I began yesterday before the news and am finishing today after the news.–CT

Hi Cary,

So, the comedian and talk show host Bill Maher says that we’re allowed to hate Trump, but we shouldn’t hate his supporters.
I can’t help myself. I now officially hate them.
We live in a country where 45 percent of our citizenry are willfully ignorant, xenophobic bullies who spout “Christian values” while allowing brown children to languish in cages, separated from their parents, probably forever, yet are holier than thou when it comes to unborn children. Let’s not even discuss their hypocrisy about appointing a Supreme Court justice before the election, their contempt for Black Lives Matter and their altogether smug superiority and belief that ‘Merica is exceptional.
Yes, Cary, I hate them. And I don’t know the way forward. What do you think?
Hating the Trumpers
(p.s., Have you seen “Coastal Elites” on HBO? I relate to the Bette Midler character …)

Dear Hating the Trumpers,

Just now, here in Italy, my wife woke me up and said, guess what, Trump’s got the virus.

Now, that doesn’t change what kind of president he is, or what kind of man he is, or what ought to be done, or how one ought to feel about his many supporters.

But it does change how I feel about the national situation.

In my draft of this column I said a lot of things about Trump that weren’t very nice and it just doesn’t feel like the right time for that.

I feel more for the nation than I feel for Trump.

I still say some things people would consider unkind, but I took out all the really nasty stuff!

What follows, then, are selected pieces of that gargantuan tome I drafted yesterday, which I found so unwieldy that another day was required to finish. These snippets will stand alone; it won’t be an essay but just a collection of observations. Thus the bullet points.

(OMG, It’s still super super long!)

• Emotions are neither good nor bad, allowed or not allowed. Emotions are information. They tell us what disgusts us, what pleases us, what we desire, what we fear. Starting with this emotion of hatred toward Trump supporters, in the ideal world, one would begin a dialog with the self: Is there more to this hatred? Is there a conceptual framework to it? Is it purely about the present moment or does it fit some pattern in my life having to do with power, choice, domination, mistreatment? What do I fear? Does the hatred stem from fear? Does it stem from previous abuse or mistreatment, or a current situation in which I am being mistreated or controlled?
• Political emotions are neither good nor bad in themselves, but point us toward greater self-knowledge and greater, better informed action.
• What is important is that you treat other people with dignity and respect. What is important is that you try to abide by the laws and moral codes that we have agreed upon. What is important is that you act like a good person. That doesn’t mean have the feelings of a good person. It means try to act like a good person.
• We’ll never cleanse ourselves of the demons in our dreams, because we all contain the collective history of our species, all the grisly martyrdom and massacres and all the bloody, mud-spattered brawling and medieval tortures and inhuman wars, the garroting and drawing-and-quartering, the floggings and the rapings and the scalping and burning: All the awful things our species has done throughout history run together in the river of human consciousness. It’s all there in our collective being, or so I believe. I believe that we are all part of the collective soul of man, and that in this soul is all the poetry and all the cruelty that man can muster, and has mustered over millennia.
• There is also grace and peace and serenity within us, and that is what matters and keeps us sane.
• I think what Bill Maher means when he says don’t hate the Trumpers is that they are victims too. I imagine there is some truth to that. Not to be condescending to his supporters, but Mr. Trump is a con man. He is a consummate salesman and liar. The con man’s job is to promise, to spin belief, to weave a tapestry of gold, to entice, to persuade, to promise you’ll feel better, he’ll solve your problems, your life will get better if he is president.
• Who among us is immune to the brilliant con? Who among us has never been fooled–in love or work or sports or Scrabble if not in money?
• I don’t think you’re talking about pathological hatred, like racist or genocidal hatred or a homicidal hatred, or a depersonalizing hatred. I think what you are talking about is more like hating the other team, like I used to despise the Los Angeles Dodgers, especially that pitcher Éric Gagné.
• The game has a structure within which we work out our hatred of the other team. Politics has a structure too, within which we work out our hatred of the other team. It is OK to feel powerful negative emotions about other people within a structure in which we compete for treasured aims, and within which–in politics if not in baseball–we may believe that others are morally in the wrong.
• If hate is made taboo, it then returns with twisted vengeance, as the Jungian shadow, as the Freudian repressed.
• It is better to let the bitter flower bloom. Then meditate upon it, sit close to it, let it tell you a story of its genesis, how it came to be. How did this feeling come to be? Therein lies your story.
• To hate is a private matter. It signals your morality. You hate things that inspire revulsion. Revulsion is instinctive, bodily; your nose crinkles; your eyes squint; you hunch over as if to vomit; revulsion signals what is repulsive and obscene, as cruelty to children is repulsive and obscene, and we hate these things, and so we hate the people who do them.
• But that does not give us the right to … We do not do the things that arise in the mind. We do not string people up for their crimes, or become vigilantes. We do something about the policies. We do something about the laws, the politics of it. We stop them from doing repulsive things by using lawful methods. We stop them from putting kids in cages by enacting and enforcing policies. We stop them from making women bear children they cannot afford and do not want by enacting and enforcing policies. We stop them from making people live in poverty with not enough to eat by making and enforcing policies.
• We hate these awful things that are happening and perhaps in our hearts we hate the people who are responsible, but we act not with vengeance but with purpose, to use the tools of democracy to stop these awful things from happening. We stop the people who are doing these things by stripping them of power, rendering them harmless, rendering them impotent and powerless, irrelevant.
• Remember the power of nonviolence.
• So yes, of course, people must be stopped from doing these things, but …
• Words change in meaning as cultures change. Maybe “hate” has come to mean blind, murderous prejudice. Maybe that is what people mean when they say “hate” is bad. But hate is an emotion.
• It does no good to tell people not to feel emotions. They will feel them anyway. If emotions must be hidden, they will sink below the surface and emerge in other ways.
• Growing up means learning to feel what we feel, but decide how to act.
• Sometimes it helps to express what you feel in a way that’s not going to hurt anybody. Like the things we say in private to our friends. Like what we’d like to do to certain people if we had the chance. If we weren’t so decent and moral.
• What’s wrong with disgust, outrage, incredulity, and moral indignation that leads to impassioned speech? That leads to saying, this shit is wrong? That leads to going out into the streets to march and chant? That leads to lifelong commitments? What’s wrong with passionate moral outrage? Are we supposed to sit with our hands in our laps?
• I hate Mitch McConnell. OK, `I’ve said it. Like I used to hate Éric Gagné. I looked at him pitching for the Dodgers and … like when I look at Mitch McConnell, the emotion I feel is disdain, disgust, pity, nausea, ugh ugh ugh. I just go ugh when I see him. But he is not a soulless creature; he is one of God’s creatures just like the rest of us, and if we could scare him so he goes back into the forest that would be OK, to scare him into the forest, but we can’t beat him or burn his house down because he is one of God’s creatures
• Trump is a sick man, a narcissist which is a terrible thing to be, because he can never feel true human pleasure or love, which is sad …
• SO, OK, SAY … a genie pops out of a lamp and says, “I will make you president of the most powerful country in the world, but you will never be able to feel love or humor or warmth, and people will despise you, and you will do many cruel things and you will live in fear of being found out, but you will be powerful.” Would you take it? That’s the bargain the narcissist takes. He will never know how much he is suffering and how much he is missing. He will never be truly human.
• But let’s not pity him.
• Malignant narcissists must be removed from power. Jeffery Epstein. Harvey Weinstein. Donald Trump. They must be removed from positions of power because they do terrible damage acting out their inner conflicts and they cannot feel the damage to others, they cannot feel empathy, nor can they be taught, injected with a conscience. The paradox is  that the one thing a narcissist is good at is acquiring power, and that is the one thing we must not let a narcissist do. Because they do so much harm!
• And why do we let narcissists acquire power? Because the weak among us are so hungry for the crumbs of power a narcissist will promise, so hungry to be in the shadow of his fame.
• A narcissist surrounded by sycophantic idiots straining to be in the selfie with him. A selfie like the Last Supper, Trump in the center of the table with on either side of him the wife beaters and con men and shysters and double agents and treasonous weasels, as well as those tragically well-intentioned statesmen and generals who thought he was another hill to climb but he was much more, he was the apotheosis of blind hungry power, the apotheosis of empty self endlessly mirrored onto itself, endlessly shining into its own reflection, infinitely shallow.
• A fantasy: One day Trump’s debts come due. His towers and golf courses are rebranded as the Putin Towers, the Putin Aberdeen, the Putin Turnberry, the Putin Doral, the Putin Albemarle … Ah, we dream of that day …
• Don’t you love the King James bible? Deuteronomy 32, 35: “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”
• Be kind to those you hate. Pray for those you hate.
• We are not kittens. We are not worms. We are people of strong conscience. We are people who must defend ourselves against bullies, tyrants, assholes, bigots, con men, sadists, all those who fester in the American swamp, who have been swindled and are themselves swindlers, who swindle those who are just trudging along trying to make a buck, trying not to get shoved off the road, not to be blinded by the headlights of a Range Rover or a Bentley, trying to just get home before dark to feed their kids.
• Repressed, the feeling sours. Acknowledged, it tells a story.
• We are all part child. We all feel what it would be like to be torn from parents and put in cages, and we  all recoil from that feeling, except Trump the narcissist, who uses it. Who tortures us with it. Who taunts us with it.
• The crime of putting children in cages does double duty: In a PSYOPS sense, he’s not doing it to the kids. He’s doing it to us. It’s us he wants to put in cages. He wants us to imagine being in those cages, and to be harmed by our own imaginings. In a PSYOPS sense, he wants to turn our own imaginations of horror against us, allowing our own horror to mute us and incapacitate us.
• We feel his desire to put us in cages, to tear us from our mother. Symbolically, he pulled us out of the Paris climate accords as a way of pulling us away from our mother. We feel protective toward the Earth, we feel grateful to it for feeding us and supporting us and protecting us and we want to preserve it in order to feel safe. Trump attacks that, our need to be nurtured by the earth. He thinks the need for nurturing is a weakness, that we’re sissies, that we need to be taught a lesson, to be toughened up, to be bullied and kicked around until we see things his way.
• We took it for a while. But we won’t take it forever. We will have our revenge.
• Our revenge will not be a military-school fistfight. It won’t be like that.
• Our revenge will be ceremonious revenge.
• Our revenge will take place in a suitable and formal way, at the ballot box.