The other week I was in Boston and went out to dinner with an old college friend who in turn brought along a colleague. All was going fine until dessert when conversation turned to my friend’s brother-in-law in North Carolina. She mentioned that he suffered from mental illness problems, chiefly as a result of what he had seen while serving for the military in Afghanistan, and was having a challenging time functioning normally.
My friend’s colleague interjected: “Trump voter, was he?” No actually, my friend clarified. Her brother-in-law had voted for Hillary Clinton because he was dependent on the continuation of the Affordable Care Act.
Soon afterwards, I asked for the check and got in a cab to head to my hotel. The train of thought (“Mental health issues? He must be a Trump supporter!”) crystallized something I had been thinking for days, namely how patronizing people who didn’t vote for Trump — the majority as they so tiresomely remind us, deliberately overlooking the enduring primacy of the electoral college — treat people who did vote for the President.
Everywhere you look it’s impossible to get away from the war on the Trump voter. Whether on TV news networks (particularly CNN), in leading magazines or, you suspect, at home and in workplaces on both coasts, Trump supporters are still being stigmatized.
It’s not enough for Trump to be equated with Hitler as unproven stories on Russian conspiracies and business conflicts of interest grow in circulation. His followers are increasingly being covered like they are devotees of the Third Reich.
You see the smears from disaffected conservatives (David Frum wrote recently: “Trump is accelerating the alienation and cultural isolation of his supporters from the national cultural mainstream.”) But they are predominantly being carried out by disaffected Democrats, 91% of whom, according to a recent New York Post poll, disagreed with the statement that Trump “cares about average Americans”.
The contempt for Trump followers exists among Hollywood celebrities (epitomized by Judd Apatow’s post-Milo/Berkeley tweet “When will all the fools who are still supporting Trump realize what is at stake” which was deleted faster than his flop cancer comedy Funny People left cinemas.)
Staying with the movies, a Republican friend tells me he was recently listening to Santa Monica radio station KCRW. The discussion centered around the surprise success of M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Split. A correlation was drawn between director living in Pennsylvania and the film killing it at the box office. Shyamalan, it was argued, had come back with a hit after a slew of flops by making a movie that appealed to the heavy concentration of Trump supporters who live in his rust belt state.
If these “hyper-ventilators”, as Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker revealingly dubbed his tribe of Trump haters, sincerely thought the future of the nation was at stake right now, they wouldn’t talk to their opponents like we’re crazy. Since when has that been an effective negotiation tactic?
At this point it should be acknowledged that Trump is giving enough ammunition for his critics to blast him with the Winchester 1887 shotgun as used by one of his Twitter foes Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
But it’s hard not to think that when confronted with a president who is refusing to pander to liberal interest groups and encouraging economic deregulation, the liberal elite views smearing those who support him –as mindless sheep believing everything and reading nothing — as being integral to its mission.
In response some Republicans are fighting back and giving as good as they get. However a growing number of us are withdrawing from the fray and even going out of our way not to mention Trump with liberals around us so as to avoid confrontation. We don’t want to do battle.
But the other side is out to get us, not just Trump. They are doing so with relish. Take Scottish actor David Tennant going on Samantha Bee’s TBS show Full Frontal last summer to read out overblown insults about Trump.
Such mockery of the other side hardly encapsulates Michelle Obama’s recent rallying cry of “When they go low, we go high”, does it?
Tennant is soon going to be starring in what is reportedly the hottest play of the London theater season — Patrick Marber’s Don Juan in Soho. How would the former Doctor Who like it if Fox News were to run a segment consisting of mean notices from audience members slating his acting technique in the show?
The good news for us Republicans is that, so far, resistance is largely futile. You know the left is in trouble when not only are Shia LaBeouf and Keith Olbermann among the highest-profile Trump opponents but they seem to be making more sense than many of their fellow liberals!
Contentious elections that culminate in victorious Republican Presidents are hardly anything new. But by the equivalent point in Richard Nixon’s and George W. Bush’s administrations, the anger had dissipated from how it had been before their inaugurations. Not so in 2017.
Who knows when the other side will start treating Trump voters with a modicum of respect? Angry liberals like to refer dismissively to supporters of the new President as being on the Trump Train while they travel on a magic carpet above the volcanic ash of Mount Olympus.
A nautical metaphor is more fitting. The other side is convinced the captain of the boat is deranged, being supported by a ship of fools, and therefore the only sane solution is mutiny.
Hopefully President Trump will prevail against such dogged opposition but so far the biggest loser amidst the left’s campaign against his voters? That would be USS America.
