One of the great puzzles of the Trump presidency is why his supporters and his adopted political party continue to accept his ludicrous lies and assent to whatever he argues, however fantastic. Logic and reason do not explain why so many Americans are willing to countenance Trump’s continued attacks on journalists, for example, as lying conspiracy promoters and “enemies of the people.” These baseless claims, assaults on the very foundations of a free people, demand much cognitively of those adopting them to rationalize them, since they are so completely discordant with reality. In truth, Trump’s contentions require that those supporting them set aside reason altogether. This is also the case for those who have chosen to believe Trump’s frequent assertions (most recently targeted at basketball superstar LeBron James) that individuals, especially African- Americans, who criticize him on any grounds have a low IQ or are “unintelligent.”1
Unfortunately, such attacks do not exhaust the long list of lies and hate mongering that many citizens have accepted at Trump’s behest. Those embracing Trump must also rationalize or choose to ignore his arguments that America’s allies constitute a great threat and its enemies, especially Russia, should instead be admired and respected. Indeed, Trump went so far at a recent campaign rally to suggest that the leaders of his own administration’s defense, intelligence and security establishment are wrong in contending Russia interfered with the 2016 election and continues to seek to shape American elections, as this is written. He instead called these concerns a “hoax,” an absolutely false, not to say, bizarre, allegation.2
At bottom, the paradox of Trump’s continued lies and simultaneous policy attacks on the interests of his supporters even as they continue to embrace him, raises at least three basic questions:
On what bases are they doing so?
What are the principal implications for self-governance of their continued support of a compulsive liar and demagogue?
How far are such Americans willing to cede their rights and those of their fellow citizens in their allegiance to Trump?
While many Republican elected leaders appear to be accepting Trump’s outlandish claims because they are fearful that his most fervent supporters will turn on them and perhaps jeopardize their reelection if they do not, others, including many members of the so-called Trump “base” that those GOP officials dread, offer different reasons for accepting Trump’s lies. Evangelicals offer one partial lens into these justifications as their members are among the staunchest group of Trump acolytes. A Washington Post reporter recently visited one such Southern Baptist congregation in the small rural town of Luverne, Alabama and the “reasons” its attendees offered for their allegiance to Trump were both disturbing and revelatory.3 It is useful to reflect on those contentions in light of the three concerns noted above. Recent polls suggest that roughly 80 percent of Southern Baptists nationally support Trump. And several of those in that church’s Luverne congregation, “agreed with Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham, that the only explanation for Trump being in the White House was that ‘God put him there.’”4 They assume this position in part because they believe that he is strongly supporting their anti-abortion view, is willing to seek the appointment of very conservative Supreme Court justices and understands that their faith is “under siege.” Moreover, they believe that God has ordained those positions. Apart from their predilection to support Trump’s stance in these areas, their assumption that God engineered Trump’s narrow Electoral College win is dangerous. By such a measure, any election winner may be judged a favorite of God and that leaves one with a long list of tyrants who have “won” elections, including Adolf Hitler, who, it would be difficult to contend, were engaged in God’s work. Bluntly, this argument is nonsense.
Some Luverne congregants recognized that this contention was problematic and were also troubled by Trump’s ugly personae, including his public speeches in which he routinely has called other individuals “losers” and “stupid,” and the many allegations concerning his past and present immoral and unethical personal behavior. As one leader in the Alabama church observed,
I hate it. My wife and I talk about it all the time. We rationalize the immoral things away. We don’t like it, but we look at the alternative, and think it could be worse than this. The only way to understand how a Christian like him could support a man who boasted about grabbing women’s crotches, Terry said, was to understand how he felt about the person Trump was still constantly bringing up in his speeches and who loomed large in Terry’s thoughts: Hillary Clinton, whom Terry saw as ‘sinister’ and ‘evil’ and ‘I’d say, of Satan.’ ‘She hates me,’ Terry said, sitting in Crum’s [the pastor’s] office one day. ‘She has contempt for people like me and Clay (sic.), and people who love God and believe in the Second Amendment. I think if she had her way it would be a dangerous country for the likes of me.’5
This argument is fascinating, for it suggests that these individuals were willing to believe that Hillary Clinton hated them and that their right to bear arms truly was at risk had she won the election instead of Trump. There is no evidence for either claim. Clinton’s unfortunate 2016 campaign comment that this population was deplorable was offered in frustration and it was never incorporated into her proposed policies or actions, which instead were designed to assist many who were and are Trump supporters. There is no confirmation, either, that Trump’s electoral shift to his current position concerning faith and the easy availability of powerful firearms was anything but opportunistic. In any case, apart from GOP and ideological posturing and propagandizing, there is also no substantiation, as the deacon remarked, that Clinton should be regarded as evil while Trump, who has a long history of ethically and morally dubious activities, including systematically misleading his supporters concerning the implications of his policies, should be regarded as “God’s chosen one.” These contentions suggest how far these individuals will twist their nominally espoused beliefs to rationalize their support for Trump.
Beyond these arguments, a share of the believers quoted by the Post, in keeping with their view that Trump is doing God’s work, went further to argue that,
‘I think they are trying to frame him,’ she said, referring to the unflattering stories about the president. By ‘they,’ she meant liberals and others she believed were not only trying to undermine Trump’s agenda, but God’s agenda for America, which she believed was engaged in a great spiritual contest between good and evil, God and Satan, the saved and the unsaved, for whom God had prepared two places.6
This sort of claim echoes Trump’s own wild conspiratorial claims that the media, “Fake News” and unspecified others (“they”) are making up stories to undermine him. Once again, there is no support for these arguments. Instead, as the Luverne church deacon Terry suggested, these individuals are “rationalizing” Trump’s often, in their view, abhorrent behavior, against apocalyptically framed fantasies concerning what would have occurred had he not won in 2016.
Some of Luverne’s congregants, to justify their support for Trump, embraced the claim that President Barack Obama is a Muslim (untrue, as was Trump’s long-time assertion that President Obama was not a citizen) who waged war on Christians, and the equally false claim that Hillary Clinton would have continued that mythical onslaught:
‘You can say righteously I do not support him [Trump] because of his moral character but you are washing your hands of what is happening in this country,’ she said, explaining that in her view America was slipping toward ‘a civil war on our shores.’... ‘Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,’ she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. ‘He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in.’ ‘Obama woke a sleeping nation, said Linda.7
These individuals have accepted lies and fantasies to justify their fears and support of Trump, but these falsehoods were not of their making alone. The claim that Obama is a Muslim and that he conducted a “secret” war on Christianity did not originate with these groups. It is similarly outrageous that Trump has been rationalized as the savior who will remedy a nonexistent crisis. While Luverne’s churchgoers offered several more “reasons” for their support for Trump, it is clear that those claims sought foremost, as deacon Terry noted, to excuse.
While the views of this microcosm of Trump supporters may only be regarded as suggestive, they present a sobering picture. First, it appears that in the name of their fears of possibilities that are not occurring, their belief in lies; not to say their choice to believe in lies to rationalize their positions, and their overriding and absolutist devotion to a very few policy concerns, these individuals are willing to countenance a wide variety of pernicious policies and behaviors that undermine their broader economic and social interests and our regime more generally. Indeed, paradoxically, the very behaviors they have been willing to excuse concerning Trump - his constant and outrageous lies and double-speak efforts to undercut the nation’s primary institutions in the name of what he perceives as his short-term political interests - are corroding the nation’s capacities for self-governance. Second, to the extent that adherents of any faith tradition in our pluralistic nation are willing to believe and act on imagined fears that others are attacking them, they risk occasioning the disease they purport is already afoot. To the degree that perception was created and sustained in the present case by ideologues and power seekers for the purpose of mobilizing this constituency, it is especially cynical and its implications all the more sad for that reason.
Finally, the views of these individuals remind interested observers that democratic deliberation is innately complex and difficult to engender and still more challenging to sustain in today’s polarized environment of canalized and often politically self-interested information sources. This fact highlights the unsettling reality that those employing these vehicles to sow fear and spread lies to mobilize voters and secure votes are now playing a very significant enervating role in the future of self-governance in the United States.
Notes
[1] Caron, Christina. “Trump Mocks LeBron James Intelligence and calls Don Lemon Dumbest Man’ on TV,” The New York Times, August 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/04/sports/donald-trump-lebron-james-twitter.html Accessed August 4, 2018.
[2] Yen, Hope and Calvin Woodward. “AP Fact Check: Trump’s imagined Steel Mills, Russian ‘Hoax,’” Associated Press News, August 6, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/e6ee02634ee94e32a88a91c9d4d66c7a
[3] McCrummen, Stephanie, “Judgment Days: God, Trump and the Meaning of Morality,” The Washington Post, July 21, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/07/21/feature/god-trump-and-the-meaning-of-morality/ Accessed July 21, 2018.
[4] McCrummen, August 4, 2018.
[5] McCrummen, August 4, 2018.
[6] McCrummen, August 4, 2018.
[7] McCrummen, August 4, 2018.
Sometimes we need to remind ourselves of the obvious and occasionally we read something or converse with someone who shines a spotlight on the proverbial elephant in the room. I had just such a moment when reading a column by the conservative columnist Ross Douthat in The New York Times. Douthat used his essay, “The White Strategy,” to assess the Trump campaign and GOP electoral strategy to increase racial polarization to mobilize voters in 2016 and currently. Douthat carefully parsed Trump’s electoral margins and racialized rhetoric targeted to key demographic groups in 2016 in several midwestern states (which resulted in his Electoral College victory). While suggesting that outcome hardly constituted a vindication of the former businessman’s strategy, and making clear he did not embrace such a course himself, Douthat nevertheless observed:
Turning out disaffected whites is more politically effective than most people imagined after 2012, but white voters are ultimately too divided to make a “white strategy” work as a foundation for a real governing majority.[1]
I doubt I am the only person who read this analysis with incredulity and concern. Douthat suggested that Trump and the GOP had consciously adopted fomenting such division as their preferred and ongoing course. Meanwhile, once in office Trump has continued almost daily to stoke racial animosity and polarization by encouraging white identitarianism among his supporters. Douthat concluded that this stance is unlikely to win the next national election for the GOP:
But when those anxieties are translated into white-identitarian rhetoric, they cost Republicans not only minority votes but white votes as well, repelling anti-racist white suburbanites even as they mobilize some share of racially-resentful whites.
So even with a slower immigration rate, a slower pace of demographic change, the Republican Party would still need either some of the white voters Trump alienated or some of the minority votes he didn’t really try to win — and neither can be delivered by the white strategy alone.[2]
For the columnist, a “morally superior” winning alternative would,
recognize that Trump’s populist rhetoric as well as his race-baiting helped win the white Midwest, and instead of a white strategy pursue a populist strategy shorn of white-identity appeals. Keep the infrastructure promises and drop the birther forays; pursue E-Verify but forgo the child-separating cruelties; be tough on China but stop vilifying black athletes; embrace nationalism but stiff-arm Confederate nostalgia.[3]
Even as Douthat argued that Trump should drop his “populist race baiting,” he concluded that neither Trump nor the GOP was likely to do so.
While Douthat, a respected national conservative, was surely justified in raising concerns about the President’s and Party’s ongoing race baiting and racial polarization efforts, the facts he treated are not only morally outrageous, but also completely antithetical to the founding principles and Constitution of the nation that individuals seeking elective office under the GOP banner routinely swear to uphold and serve. This is a diverse nation and one that has only grown more so, and that trend looks set to continue and to deepen. It is also a country that has long struggled to cope with that heterogeneity and that has done so unevenly and often amidst the imposition of tragic injustices. Nevertheless, this nation’s declared ideals call for human equality, irrespective of race or any other characteristic. Indeed, however unevenly attained and despite the high price those pursuing progress in civil rights have too often paid, including a prolonged and bloody civil war echoes of whose divisions endure today, those core aims represent a precisely antithetical stance and course to Trump and the GOP’s “strategy.”
So, the elephant in the room is how the nation’s dominant political party and its titular head could embrace so patently cynical, anti-democratic and anti-American a course simply to win votes in the near term. This racist force, ultimately constructed on human fear and alarm concerning difference (the flight or fight instinct), cannot readily be controlled once unleashed. Trump and the Republican Party have nonetheless intentionally opened this Pandora’s Box and actively encouraged a share of the country’s population to hate, and to do so mindlessly and heedlessly, in order to garner votes, irrespective of the costs to the unity of the nation or to its animating aspirations to assure the civil and human rights of all of its citizens. In adopting this course, Trump and his party have sullied the regime as a beacon of hope for freedom around the world, even as they have daily ostracized immigrants, African Americans and those evidencing any difference from a supposedly superior mythical white archetype. To watch this spectacle unfold is both sad and sickening. However obvious it may be to highlight the poison that has been loosed, it is essential to point up the destructive cynicism of those who released it as well, and for that very reason.
Apart from its ugly anti-democratic and corrosive impacts on human and civil rights, the GOP’s “white strategy” exacerbates the difficulties that individuals who appear different (whether on the basis of religion, perceived disability, race, ethnicity, gender or other characteristic) daily encounter precisely because it legitimates discriminatory behaviors rather than encouraging all American citizens to accept human diversity as a foundational reality that has no bearing on the otherwise in-principle equal standing and dignity of all human beings. The poet and essayist Claudia Rankine has written powerfully of the effects of animosity for those who are its targets. In one such reflection she recalled witnessing a conversation with the philosopher Judith Butler in which that scholar noted that the very being of humans makes them vulnerable to the hurt and pain imposed by the hate-filled language of the sort Trump and others in the GOP routinely employ today,
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present.[4]
Rankine’s profound prose-poetry illuminates the harm visited on those stigmatized by an ongoing Trumpian politics of calculated cruelty. These costs are being levied in the name of a “White Strategy” and their toll in human terms is incalculable, laying aside their implications for the rights of all of the nation’s citizens and for self-governance. One of our country’s major political parties has shown itself willing to erode this nation’s dearest principles as it subjects the standing and rights of a broad share of its population to daily assaults on their basic rights in the name of short-term political power. Whatever one’s partisanship, this situation should be unacceptable. No argument or rationalization can excuse, let alone explain, supporting this so-called “strategy” and the shameful costs it imposes on millions of this nation’s residents each day. I am reminded of holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winning author Elie Weisel’s insight:
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.[5]
Just so.
Notes
[1] Douthat, Ross. “The White Strategy,” The New York Times, August 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/opinion/sunday/the-white-strategy.html Accessed August 19, 2018.
[2] Douthat, Ross. “The White Strategy.”
[3] Douthat, Ross. “The White Strategy.”
[4] Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2014, p. 49.
[5] Weisel, Elie. “Nobel Lecture: Hope, Despair and Memory,” December 11, 1986, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1986/wiesel/lecture/ Accessed August 19, 2018.
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