Nor were they impressed by Trump critics who had their own penchant for hypocrisy and outright slander. I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.įor every in-your-face MAGA warrior there were plenty of ambivalent Trump supporters, doubtful of his ability and dismayed by his manner, who were willing to take their chances on him because he had the nerve to defy deeply flawed conventional pieties. I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me - people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions. This was the climate in which Trump’s campaign flourished. It’s another for them to be abruptly imposed by one side on another, with little democratic input but a great deal of moral bullying. It’s one thing for social mores to evolve over time, aided by respect for differences of opinion. Oh, and then came the great American cultural revolution of the 2010s, in which traditional practices and beliefs - regarding same-sex marriage, sex-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. Third, in the post-crisis recovery, in which years of ultralow interest rates were a bonanza for those with investable assets and brutal for those without. Second, after the financial crisis of 2008, when so many were being laid off, even as the financial class was being bailed out. First, after 9/11, when they had borne much of the brunt of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see Washington fumble and then abandon the efforts. Trump voters had a powerful case to make that they had been thrice betrayed by the nation’s elites. But that didn’t mean the anger was unfounded or illegitimate, or that it was aimed at the wrong target. It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists -clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”Īnger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways. Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. I was well paid, fully insured, insulated against life’s harsh edges. Our kids went to an excellent public school. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “ the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo. When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. That ought to have been the first question to ask myself. Telling voters they are moral ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds. It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. This opening salvo, from August 2015, was the first in what would become dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself.
The worst line I ever wrote as a pundit - 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 by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
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