The Road to Destruction Under Trump
Getting on Trump’s crazy train meant severing their last remaining ties with a culture they had increasingly come to hate.
Trump’s supporters have been on a long journey these past six years, and they now appear ready to take their final stand. Most began as ordinary conservatives, who loved their families, but tried to function like ordinary people in an increasingly complex world. But at some point, it became too much, and they retreated into a political cult, which aggrandized their inability to function, and embraced their road to ruin.
They had struggled with changing gender norms and increasingly integrated racial minorities for decades. They had struggled with the complexities of information age society and the increasing prosperity of the liberal counter-culture. Many had staked their identities on their superiority to the moral degeneracy of the left, but it increasingly came to seem that the very people whose dysfunctionality they had been mocking were the ones who got it right.
Not only had they become wealthier, but they were better parents and coaches, and they increasingly came to be seen as more moral.
Many of these future Trump supporters consoled themselves with the nonstop ranting of rightwing shock jocks, but they almost all had their limits, and few made a virtue of their vices. There was a kind of dignity to the booming voices of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, as they ranted about the excesses of the left, after all. They were at least able to play at moral superiority; they were at least able to pretend they were better people.
But it was different with Trump, who set them on a different path. Like an alcoholic who finally gives in to their addiction, Trump freed them from the resistance to their own worst impulses. At first, it was enthralling to finally act out their worst selves. Trump gave them permission to revel in their racism and sexism. And his rallies opened them to the deeper recesses of their own hate. Suddenly, they were free to let themselves go, and that meant letting go of their tenuous grip on morality. Yet, doing so required them to lie in his defense, because Trump lied constantly.
Everybody knew Trump was a terrible person. They knew he was a liar and a cheater and a swindler. Before coming to office, Trump had been sued well over a thousand times, mostly for racial discrimination and failure to pay his bills. They also knew he was a racist and a sexist and a bully. But they also knew him to be a success. Suddenly, they had a role model through whom they might live their lives as they wanted them to be. In short, they could imagine through Trump what it might be like to finally succeed, not just financially but socially. Trump demonstrated how people like themselves might get what they wanted.
And that was where things started to go haywire.
The first thing to fall apart was their family ties. Rightwing dads were never an easy lot. Many were abusive, but most just lacked the ability to listen, and they were a rather insensitive lot. Now, they were pitting themselves against their children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews. And countless couples were forced to decide whether they would let it all hang out.
Getting on Trump’s crazy train meant severing their last remaining ties with a culture they had increasingly come to hate. Republicans may like waving flags and talking up their love of country, but it is hard to find much evidence of it. After all, they tend to hate well over half its citizens.
Republicans typically can’t stand America’s greatest cities. They hate its largest political party. They mock its media, reject its scientific establishment, fear its universities, spurn its innovators, destroy its nature, kill off its species. Republicans insult the country’s racial minorities, ban discussion of their history, and try to keep more of them from entering the country. They reject the country’s story of progress and its tales of integration, and in so doing they reject the American Dream.
They have even come to attack America’s intelligence community, assault its democratic system of government, and through Trump, lay into its military heroes. Republicans may like to wave flags, but they appear to hate everything for which the flag stands.
Trump’s supporters are terrible citizens by almost any measure. They don’t just disrespect the nation’s norms and institutions, but they revel in their disrespect, making a virtue of their vices, and in so doing, they turn the moral order upside down. To support Trump is to attack virtue and applaud vice, and it is to gleefully harm your fellow citizens. In this sense, supporting Trump implies a radical inversion of values in which everything good is suddenly deemed bad, and everything bad is magically made good.
None of this is new anymore. It has been going on for six years. And it follows a familiar pattern of fascism wherein threatened racial and ethnic majorities seek to bolster their own flailing identities through attacks on the weak and marginalized. Fascist movements are political cults, centered around strongman leaders, who enforce their vision of the world, through endless propaganda, rooted in an endless series of lies.
Yet, vice has a way of imprinting itself on our characters over time, and it tends to entrench itself in our communities. Weekend drunkenness may be innocent enough for young adults, but it is a bit more worrisome after they leave university. And a couple of years later, it starts to look like alcoholism.
But a significant portion of Trump’s supporters are far older and closer to death, and they appear ready to ride Trump’s crazy clown car over a cliff. And their children have been forced to grapple with the possibility that there may be no redemption before they die. In short, Trump hasn’t just torn apart the country, and he hasn’t just torn apart our families. He has locked his followers into their vices, and they no longer feel like they have anything to lose.
Don’t think it cannot happen here. It is already happening here, and if we don’t win the coming election, it will only get worse.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny: The Crisis Before the Fascist Inferno
The Road to Destruction Under Trump
This hits home. Thanks for so accurately and clearly calling out the damage and ongoing danger of the Trump cult.
Theo you’ve stated so well most of what I figured out slowly over time. They admire and support Trump not for his political abilities nor his leadership qualities. They support him because he’s their entire hateful ideologies.
I’m proud to be associated with you!!