EPTOn June 25 2018 09:18 micronesia wrote:
Be careful what you wish for everyone. A few years in the future when, perhaps, when Democrats control much of the government, and many conservative Americans are unhappy with the state of politics, there may be a sudden push for any establishment operated by a conservative to never serve representatives of the government. The conservative pundits will say "this is exactly how the previous administration was treated," the liberal pundits will say, "that was different, our party isn't being evil!" and people in the middle will sigh and say, "I knew this would happen."
Be careful what you wish for everyone. A few years in the future when, perhaps, when Democrats control much of the government, and many conservative Americans are unhappy with the state of politics, there may be a sudden push for any establishment operated by a conservative to never serve representatives of the government. The conservative pundits will say "this is exactly how the previous administration was treated," the liberal pundits will say, "that was different, our party isn't being evil!" and people in the middle will sigh and say, "I knew this would happen."
I'm partway with you. People within the conservative movement hated what Obama did, but didn't harass his officials at restaurants to drive them out or surround their houses to make them fearful for leaving them. The Tea Party also did none of these things.
The actions and their widespread defense are absolutely a further step in the wrong direction. The premise seems to be how partisan and crazy-apocalyptic you are about the actions of the current administration. If the nation is one step from the precipice, it justifies resisting in the most anti-civilizational ways you can conjure up. My contention is the new rules from the left is that most anything is justified once you work yourself into a frenzy about the current political opposition. Opposition administration figures can't eat in restaurants. They get spit on in theatres. Their homes are surrounded. A Democratic congresswoman wants to block Trump officials from retailers. That's not a road you want to go down. Trust me.
Meanwhile, it rallies more supporters to Trump. New York Times writeup, Bethany Mandel+ Show Spoiler +
The Left is pushing me to MAGA, and only Trump himself is keeping me from embracing it --author's preferred headline
People on the right are deciding on high road or low road right now. The easiest action is just to reflexively announce support on Trump until his opponents exhaust themselves (read the articles, seriously, if you have any questions on this point. + Show Spoiler [NYT] +
LEESBURG, Va. — Gina Anders knows the feeling well by now. President Trump says or does something that triggers a spasm of outrage. She doesn’t necessarily agree with how he handled the situation. She gets why people are upset.
But Ms. Anders, 46, a Republican from suburban Loudoun County, Va., with a law degree, a business career, and not a stitch of “Make America Great Again” gear in her wardrobe, is moved to defend him anyway.
“All nuance and all complexity — and these are complex issues — are completely lost,” she said, describing “overblown” reactions from the president’s critics, some of whom equated the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children and parents to history’s greatest atrocities.
“It makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him to them more,” Ms. Anders said.
In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: “How can you possibly still support this man?” Their resilience suggests a level of unity among Republicans that could help mitigate Mr. Trump’s low overall approval ratings and aid his party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives in November.
“He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff,” said Tony Schrantz, 50, of Lino Lakes, Minn., the owner of a water systems leak detection business. “But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.”
Republican voters repeatedly described an instinctive, protective response to the president, and their support has grown in recent months: Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is now about 90 percent. And while polling has yet to capture the effect of the last week’s immigration controversy, the only modern Republican president more popular with his party than Mr. Trump at this point in his first term, according to Gallup, was George W. Bush after the country united in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Trump has also retained support across a range of demographics other than the working-class voters who are most identified with him. This includes portions of the wealthy college-educated people in swing counties, like Virginia’s Loudoun, in the country’s most politically competitive states.
Many of these voters say their lives and the country are improving under his presidency, and the endless stream of tough cable news coverage and bad headlines about Mr. Trump only galvanizes them further — even though some displayed discomfort on their faces when asked about the child separation policy, and expressed misgivings about the president’s character.
“It bothers me that he doesn’t tell the truth, but I guess I kind of expect that, and I expect that from the media, too — not to always tell the truth or to slant it one way,” said Julie Knight, 63, a retired personal injury case manager from Algona, Wash.
The increasingly tribalized politics on the left and right have helped insulate Mr. Trump from the paroxysms that have jolted his party and eroded longstanding expectations of restraint, humility and honesty in American presidents. This era of tumult has left Democrats energized and determined to win back Congress and act as a check on Mr. Trump, and their intensity has been reflected by strong turnouts in the primaries so far. But still, in just the last year and a half, Mr. Trump has bounced back from crises that at the time seemed as if they might be too severe for him to recover politically.
He tried to unilaterally bar visitors from several Muslim countries from the United States, angering U.S. allies and provoking clashes with Congress and the courts over the limits of executive power. He praised some “very fine people” at a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in remarks that shook some members of his cabinet so deeply that they considered resigning. He defended Roy S. Moore, a Senate candidate in Alabama who was accused of fondling teenage girls, by suggesting that the allegations were old and possibly made-up.
And so as another immigration crisis of his own making smoldered this past week, critics inside and outside Mr. Trump’s party predicted another devastating, irremediable low point in his presidency. Yet many Trump voters said that they no longer had the patience or interest to listen to what they see as another hysterical outburst by Democrats, Republican “Never Trumpers” and the media.
“It’s kind of like when you experience a sensation over and over and over again,” said Daniel Arnold, 32, a warehouse manager from Leesburg, Va., about an hour outside Washington. “A sensation is no longer a sensation. It’s just, ‘Oh, here we are again.’”
For many Republicans, the audio of children sobbing at a migrant detention center barely registered, because these voters don’t pay attention to the left-leaning and mainstream media that have covered the family separation crisis far more than their preferred channel, Fox News.
“I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here,” said Lynn Dittbenner, 65, of Elk River, Minn., who took the day off from relaxing with her family at their lake cabin to hear the president speak at a rally in Duluth on Wednesday.
Others said they saw a ploy by the president’s enemies to obscure news that was more favorable to him, like the internal Justice Department investigation that recently uncovered evidence of F.B.I. officials speaking disparagingly of Mr. Trump.
“It’s just incredible what the nation is trying to do to disrupt this president and his agenda,” said Jeff Butts, 58, an unemployed sales manager from Leesburg. “We don’t get to hear about that. We only get to hear about the crying babies on the border.”
Sometimes they seized on made-up or erroneous story lines that were mostly absent from the mainstream media.
“Those cages and those families — that was actually filmed during the Obama administration, not the Trump administration,” said Clayton Smith, 57, a commercial lending underwriter from Cary, Ill., a Chicago suburb.
Mr. Smith was correct about one image. He was referring to a story that was covered widely in the conservative media over the last few weeks about one of President Obama’s former speechwriters who tweeted a picture of immigrant children sleeping in a chain-link pen. “This is happening right now,” the tweet said, despite the fact that the picture was from 2014 when Mr. Obama was president. (He later deleted it and acknowledged the error.)
As isolated as those examples are, they are validating for people who believe their political beliefs are constantly held under a microscope and vilified.
“I don’t have friends anymore because I’ve switched parties,” said Judy Brana, 66, a retired music and art teacher from St. Cloud, Minn., who left home at 10:30 on Wednesday morning to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive up to Duluth for the president’s rally.
“Friends I’ve had for 40 years,” she added. “It’s insane, that’s what I’ll tell you.”
Another factor that seems to be driving up support is a sense that no one is acknowledging Mr. Trump’s successes, which they see as manifold, historic and irrefutable.
“Let’s see,” said John Westling, 70, of Princeton, Minn., reciting a list of the president’s accomplishments that he said no one in the media wants to talk about. “Economy booming, check. Unemployment down, check. Border security being addressed, check. Possible end to the Korean War that started when I was 3 years old, 68 years ago, check.”
“I suspect that if Trump walked across Lake Mille Lacs,” Mr. Westling added, “the media would announce, ‘Trump can’t swim!’”
As measured by the Gallup daily presidential approval tracking poll, Mr. Trump has averaged 87 percent job approval from fellow Republicans in his second year in office, up from 83 percent in his first year. And during the past two weeks, his approval rating hit 90 percent with Republicans.
Yet some say their patience with Mr. Trump’s divisive style is not limitless. Gary Winthorpe, a 17-year-old high school student who was on his way to see the president speak in Minnesota on Wednesday, said he hopes that the first vote he casts for president in 2020 is for Mr. Trump. But he acknowledged being wary at times, aware of protests against the president.
“I’m not blindly for Donald Trump,” he said. “I have a fair bit of skepticism toward him. But I feel like he is trying his best.”
Mr. Trump fared much worse than prior Republican candidates among well-educated and affluent white voters, and became the first Republican to win the presidency while losing white college graduates. But he nonetheless won considerable support among college-educated and affluent voters. He retains much of that support today. According to a Pew Research survey this month, approximately 31 percent of Trump approvers are white men without a college degree, and 66 percent are either college graduates, women or nonwhite.
According to Gallup, Mr. Trump’s popularity with college-educated voters has remained about equal to his popularity with Americans overall this year.
There is some evidence that Mr. Trump’s base of support may have shrunk slightly, though. In recent polls from Gallup and Morning Consult, the numbers of people who identified as Republicans were about 2 percentage points smaller than they were in early 2017.
Among Democrats, Mr. Trump’s initial approval has been historically low, failing to reach 15 percent since he took office. Presidents have traditionally come in with at least a moderate amount of support from the opposing party.
Just as Mr. Trump has changed the makeup of the Republican coalition, he also appears to have helped change the views of the people who support him.
Republicans appear to have developed more forgiving views on morality and public service in recent years, for example. In 2011, one in three Republicans thought an elected official who commits immoral acts in private life could act ethically in public life, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings survey. By 2016, seven out of 10 did. The trend was especially pronounced among white evangelicals, who strongly supported Mr. Trump and went from being the least likely to the most likely to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality had nothing to do with public service.
The percentage of Republicans who say they have a favorable view of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president for whom Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed fondness, has doubled from 2015 to 2017 to 24 percent, according to Gallup. Among Democrats, Mr. Putin’s popularity has plummeted.
Even if Mr. Trump wasn’t at the center of the national conversation, Ms. Anders, the Loudoun County business executive, said she thinks that the country would still be polarized. But as long as he is, she said, people on the right and the left will probably continue to dig in based on what Mr. Trump does and how his opponents respond.
“It all coalesces around Trump,” she said. “It’s either, ‘Trump wants to put people in cages, in concentration camps.’ Or, on the other side, ‘Oh the left just wants everybody to come into the country illegally so they can get voters.’”
She concluded: “We can’t have a conversation.”
But Ms. Anders, 46, a Republican from suburban Loudoun County, Va., with a law degree, a business career, and not a stitch of “Make America Great Again” gear in her wardrobe, is moved to defend him anyway.
“All nuance and all complexity — and these are complex issues — are completely lost,” she said, describing “overblown” reactions from the president’s critics, some of whom equated the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children and parents to history’s greatest atrocities.
“It makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him to them more,” Ms. Anders said.
In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: “How can you possibly still support this man?” Their resilience suggests a level of unity among Republicans that could help mitigate Mr. Trump’s low overall approval ratings and aid his party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives in November.
“He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff,” said Tony Schrantz, 50, of Lino Lakes, Minn., the owner of a water systems leak detection business. “But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.”
Republican voters repeatedly described an instinctive, protective response to the president, and their support has grown in recent months: Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is now about 90 percent. And while polling has yet to capture the effect of the last week’s immigration controversy, the only modern Republican president more popular with his party than Mr. Trump at this point in his first term, according to Gallup, was George W. Bush after the country united in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Trump has also retained support across a range of demographics other than the working-class voters who are most identified with him. This includes portions of the wealthy college-educated people in swing counties, like Virginia’s Loudoun, in the country’s most politically competitive states.
Many of these voters say their lives and the country are improving under his presidency, and the endless stream of tough cable news coverage and bad headlines about Mr. Trump only galvanizes them further — even though some displayed discomfort on their faces when asked about the child separation policy, and expressed misgivings about the president’s character.
“It bothers me that he doesn’t tell the truth, but I guess I kind of expect that, and I expect that from the media, too — not to always tell the truth or to slant it one way,” said Julie Knight, 63, a retired personal injury case manager from Algona, Wash.
The increasingly tribalized politics on the left and right have helped insulate Mr. Trump from the paroxysms that have jolted his party and eroded longstanding expectations of restraint, humility and honesty in American presidents. This era of tumult has left Democrats energized and determined to win back Congress and act as a check on Mr. Trump, and their intensity has been reflected by strong turnouts in the primaries so far. But still, in just the last year and a half, Mr. Trump has bounced back from crises that at the time seemed as if they might be too severe for him to recover politically.
He tried to unilaterally bar visitors from several Muslim countries from the United States, angering U.S. allies and provoking clashes with Congress and the courts over the limits of executive power. He praised some “very fine people” at a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in remarks that shook some members of his cabinet so deeply that they considered resigning. He defended Roy S. Moore, a Senate candidate in Alabama who was accused of fondling teenage girls, by suggesting that the allegations were old and possibly made-up.
And so as another immigration crisis of his own making smoldered this past week, critics inside and outside Mr. Trump’s party predicted another devastating, irremediable low point in his presidency. Yet many Trump voters said that they no longer had the patience or interest to listen to what they see as another hysterical outburst by Democrats, Republican “Never Trumpers” and the media.
“It’s kind of like when you experience a sensation over and over and over again,” said Daniel Arnold, 32, a warehouse manager from Leesburg, Va., about an hour outside Washington. “A sensation is no longer a sensation. It’s just, ‘Oh, here we are again.’”
For many Republicans, the audio of children sobbing at a migrant detention center barely registered, because these voters don’t pay attention to the left-leaning and mainstream media that have covered the family separation crisis far more than their preferred channel, Fox News.
“I think it’s terrible about the kids getting split up from their parents. But the parents shouldn’t have been here,” said Lynn Dittbenner, 65, of Elk River, Minn., who took the day off from relaxing with her family at their lake cabin to hear the president speak at a rally in Duluth on Wednesday.
Others said they saw a ploy by the president’s enemies to obscure news that was more favorable to him, like the internal Justice Department investigation that recently uncovered evidence of F.B.I. officials speaking disparagingly of Mr. Trump.
“It’s just incredible what the nation is trying to do to disrupt this president and his agenda,” said Jeff Butts, 58, an unemployed sales manager from Leesburg. “We don’t get to hear about that. We only get to hear about the crying babies on the border.”
Sometimes they seized on made-up or erroneous story lines that were mostly absent from the mainstream media.
“Those cages and those families — that was actually filmed during the Obama administration, not the Trump administration,” said Clayton Smith, 57, a commercial lending underwriter from Cary, Ill., a Chicago suburb.
Mr. Smith was correct about one image. He was referring to a story that was covered widely in the conservative media over the last few weeks about one of President Obama’s former speechwriters who tweeted a picture of immigrant children sleeping in a chain-link pen. “This is happening right now,” the tweet said, despite the fact that the picture was from 2014 when Mr. Obama was president. (He later deleted it and acknowledged the error.)
As isolated as those examples are, they are validating for people who believe their political beliefs are constantly held under a microscope and vilified.
“I don’t have friends anymore because I’ve switched parties,” said Judy Brana, 66, a retired music and art teacher from St. Cloud, Minn., who left home at 10:30 on Wednesday morning to make the two-and-a-half-hour drive up to Duluth for the president’s rally.
“Friends I’ve had for 40 years,” she added. “It’s insane, that’s what I’ll tell you.”
Another factor that seems to be driving up support is a sense that no one is acknowledging Mr. Trump’s successes, which they see as manifold, historic and irrefutable.
“Let’s see,” said John Westling, 70, of Princeton, Minn., reciting a list of the president’s accomplishments that he said no one in the media wants to talk about. “Economy booming, check. Unemployment down, check. Border security being addressed, check. Possible end to the Korean War that started when I was 3 years old, 68 years ago, check.”
“I suspect that if Trump walked across Lake Mille Lacs,” Mr. Westling added, “the media would announce, ‘Trump can’t swim!’”
As measured by the Gallup daily presidential approval tracking poll, Mr. Trump has averaged 87 percent job approval from fellow Republicans in his second year in office, up from 83 percent in his first year. And during the past two weeks, his approval rating hit 90 percent with Republicans.
Yet some say their patience with Mr. Trump’s divisive style is not limitless. Gary Winthorpe, a 17-year-old high school student who was on his way to see the president speak in Minnesota on Wednesday, said he hopes that the first vote he casts for president in 2020 is for Mr. Trump. But he acknowledged being wary at times, aware of protests against the president.
“I’m not blindly for Donald Trump,” he said. “I have a fair bit of skepticism toward him. But I feel like he is trying his best.”
Mr. Trump fared much worse than prior Republican candidates among well-educated and affluent white voters, and became the first Republican to win the presidency while losing white college graduates. But he nonetheless won considerable support among college-educated and affluent voters. He retains much of that support today. According to a Pew Research survey this month, approximately 31 percent of Trump approvers are white men without a college degree, and 66 percent are either college graduates, women or nonwhite.
According to Gallup, Mr. Trump’s popularity with college-educated voters has remained about equal to his popularity with Americans overall this year.
There is some evidence that Mr. Trump’s base of support may have shrunk slightly, though. In recent polls from Gallup and Morning Consult, the numbers of people who identified as Republicans were about 2 percentage points smaller than they were in early 2017.
Among Democrats, Mr. Trump’s initial approval has been historically low, failing to reach 15 percent since he took office. Presidents have traditionally come in with at least a moderate amount of support from the opposing party.
Just as Mr. Trump has changed the makeup of the Republican coalition, he also appears to have helped change the views of the people who support him.
Republicans appear to have developed more forgiving views on morality and public service in recent years, for example. In 2011, one in three Republicans thought an elected official who commits immoral acts in private life could act ethically in public life, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings survey. By 2016, seven out of 10 did. The trend was especially pronounced among white evangelicals, who strongly supported Mr. Trump and went from being the least likely to the most likely to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality had nothing to do with public service.
The percentage of Republicans who say they have a favorable view of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president for whom Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed fondness, has doubled from 2015 to 2017 to 24 percent, according to Gallup. Among Democrats, Mr. Putin’s popularity has plummeted.
Even if Mr. Trump wasn’t at the center of the national conversation, Ms. Anders, the Loudoun County business executive, said she thinks that the country would still be polarized. But as long as he is, she said, people on the right and the left will probably continue to dig in based on what Mr. Trump does and how his opponents respond.
“It all coalesces around Trump,” she said. “It’s either, ‘Trump wants to put people in cages, in concentration camps.’ Or, on the other side, ‘Oh the left just wants everybody to come into the country illegally so they can get voters.’”
She concluded: “We can’t have a conversation.”
uring the election, the deluge of hate that came my way when I expressed my disapproval of then-candidate Donald Trump was so violent that I purchased a gun.
But these days, the vitriol is coming from the other side. Chance the Rapper, for example, was was eviscerated online for suggesting that “Black people don’t have to be democrats,” and eventually pressured into apologizing. His comment came after Kanye West faced a firestorm of criticism after tweeting in support of Donald Trump. Earlier this year, country singer Shania Twain, a Canadian, also felt the need to apologize for stating that, were she an American citizen with voting rights, would have voted for Trump.
Expressing anything resembling support for the Trump administration has become nothing short of a taboo. And while these backlashes are hardly the same as the tweets I would get threatening my family during the election, they do raise the question, should Americans really be publicly shamed and bullied into apologizing for stating that they support the President of the United States?
There is more than a chance that this could spectacularly backfire.
During the primary season and general election, I was a vocal conservative against Trump. I could not fathom how anyone could possibly support such an oaf, such a bully, for President.
But I’m starting to understand.
*
Before the election, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf published a dialogue he had with a 22-year old Trump supporter living and working in Silicon Valley. How could such a man possibly support then-candidate Trump, was the question Friedersdorf put to him. “For me personally, it’s resistance against what San Francisco has been, and what I see the country becoming, in the form of ultra-PC culture,” the Trump supporter told him. “That’s where it’s almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion. Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc.”
This backlash against political correctness is what got Donald Trump elected. Not only do Trump’s voters continue to believe his level of political correctness is correct, but surveys consistently find the highest correlation between being anti-P.C. and supporting Trump, stronger even than feelings about immigration. According to a survey in ClearThinking.org covered in Reason, believing “there is too much political correctness in this country” was the second most reliable predictor for whether someone would vote for Trump (the first was party affiliation).
It’s not just on national issues, either. In a survey conducted for their book on the populist revolt that led to Trump’s election, “The Great Revolt”, Salena Zito found that 85% of Trump voters wanted the United States to make our own decisions on major issues and challenge other nations to follow our example.
We’ve seen how that unwillingness to adhere to traditional political norms has paid off in dividends internationally. Every President has been told that he simply cannot move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and watching Trump thumb his nose at that convention has been refreshing for many conservatives including myself.
So it’s ironic that the very cause of Trump’s election — the over-policing of discourse to conform to liberal notions of political correctness — has reached a fever pitch in the wake of his election.
By PC culture, I don’t mean things like the very positive fact that we can’t call minorities ugly epithets anymore. I mean liberals defining what counts as “appropriate” speech and demanding fealty to these standards, such that every perceived wrong step, every comment they don’t like, is turned into something as egregious as the N word.
This obsession with political correctness, which fueled Donald Trump’s election, has now spread and mutated to incorporate him. Part of being a member of politically correct culture has now become an insistence on repudiating the President and his election. Americans are told they should not, they cannot, support this man, under any circumstances. To do so is racist, the cardinal sin of our generation.
In 2018, supporting the President of the United States will get you labeled a racist.
Liberals point to things like the new policy on immigration which separates children from their parents, comparing it to the Nazis. The overreaches and abuses in the realm of immigration are heartbreaking and disheartening. It’s disingenuous, however, for liberals to suddenly be concerned given how much of Trump’s treatment of immigrants is merely an extension of Obama-era policies. Recently several instances of abuses were shared, from kids in cages to prison buses, which were at the time blamed on the Trump administration, but were later exposed to be from before his inauguration.
It’s impossible to take liberals and journalists concerns about the welfare of immigrants at face value after their eight year slumber through the entire Obama administration.
But it’s not only disingenuous. What the President’s opponents don’t seem to understand is the hysteria and excuses are only driving more Americans into believing that we were desperately in need of a corrective.
The refusal to accept that millions of Americans knowingly voted for Trump will only help the President earn another term. For the hysteria from the left over dissent of any kind, but especially pertaining to Trump, is precisely what has resulted in the “owning the liberals” mentality on the right, which is only gaining steam.
As Salena Zito explains in “The Great Revolt”, “Rust Belt voters watched on cable television as the Left and journalists pigeonholed their rebellion as an ugly bout of white nationalism, doubling down on all the elitist snobbery those voters sought to rebuke.”
And it’s starting to get to me, too.
Instead of trying to understand Americans and their choice for President, anyone voicing even a modicum of support for the administration is bullied into apologies and silence. The media turn public statements of support for the President into a news story for their viewers and readers to get outraged over. That’s the least of the media’s campaign against the President, which includes countless mistakes and corrections which only seem to break one way: against the administration. For a group of professionals who express shock and horror at the label “Fake news!” many members of the media are doing nothing but providing more ammunition for Trump’s attacks.
When he does do something well, like finally moving our embassy to Jerusalem or stepping out of an extraordinarily flawed Iran nuclear deal, it’s ignored or villainized. Americans notice the double standard; the refusal to see anything positive, and the fixation on everything negative. There are some accomplishments every American can, or should, admit are positives. The economy is in fantastic shape; Trump has brought home American political prisoners from North Korea and Venezuela; he has pushed through the first steps of important criminal justice reform. Those stories are roundly ignored by a media intent on taking down the President, not reporting on his administration.
It’s enough to make even a NeverTrumper like me into a MAGA hat wearing Trump supporter.
Well, it’s almost enough. Every time he opens his mouth, I am reminded why I couldn’t vote for him. I’m reminded of his words about there being “very fine people” on both sides of Charlottesville. But if the President’s opponents continue to ignore his accomplishments and mindlessly attack him for another few years, it could create even more spiteful Trump voters as a result.
But these days, the vitriol is coming from the other side. Chance the Rapper, for example, was was eviscerated online for suggesting that “Black people don’t have to be democrats,” and eventually pressured into apologizing. His comment came after Kanye West faced a firestorm of criticism after tweeting in support of Donald Trump. Earlier this year, country singer Shania Twain, a Canadian, also felt the need to apologize for stating that, were she an American citizen with voting rights, would have voted for Trump.
Expressing anything resembling support for the Trump administration has become nothing short of a taboo. And while these backlashes are hardly the same as the tweets I would get threatening my family during the election, they do raise the question, should Americans really be publicly shamed and bullied into apologizing for stating that they support the President of the United States?
There is more than a chance that this could spectacularly backfire.
During the primary season and general election, I was a vocal conservative against Trump. I could not fathom how anyone could possibly support such an oaf, such a bully, for President.
But I’m starting to understand.
*
Before the election, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf published a dialogue he had with a 22-year old Trump supporter living and working in Silicon Valley. How could such a man possibly support then-candidate Trump, was the question Friedersdorf put to him. “For me personally, it’s resistance against what San Francisco has been, and what I see the country becoming, in the form of ultra-PC culture,” the Trump supporter told him. “That’s where it’s almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion. Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc.”
This backlash against political correctness is what got Donald Trump elected. Not only do Trump’s voters continue to believe his level of political correctness is correct, but surveys consistently find the highest correlation between being anti-P.C. and supporting Trump, stronger even than feelings about immigration. According to a survey in ClearThinking.org covered in Reason, believing “there is too much political correctness in this country” was the second most reliable predictor for whether someone would vote for Trump (the first was party affiliation).
It’s not just on national issues, either. In a survey conducted for their book on the populist revolt that led to Trump’s election, “The Great Revolt”, Salena Zito found that 85% of Trump voters wanted the United States to make our own decisions on major issues and challenge other nations to follow our example.
We’ve seen how that unwillingness to adhere to traditional political norms has paid off in dividends internationally. Every President has been told that he simply cannot move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and watching Trump thumb his nose at that convention has been refreshing for many conservatives including myself.
So it’s ironic that the very cause of Trump’s election — the over-policing of discourse to conform to liberal notions of political correctness — has reached a fever pitch in the wake of his election.
By PC culture, I don’t mean things like the very positive fact that we can’t call minorities ugly epithets anymore. I mean liberals defining what counts as “appropriate” speech and demanding fealty to these standards, such that every perceived wrong step, every comment they don’t like, is turned into something as egregious as the N word.
This obsession with political correctness, which fueled Donald Trump’s election, has now spread and mutated to incorporate him. Part of being a member of politically correct culture has now become an insistence on repudiating the President and his election. Americans are told they should not, they cannot, support this man, under any circumstances. To do so is racist, the cardinal sin of our generation.
In 2018, supporting the President of the United States will get you labeled a racist.
Liberals point to things like the new policy on immigration which separates children from their parents, comparing it to the Nazis. The overreaches and abuses in the realm of immigration are heartbreaking and disheartening. It’s disingenuous, however, for liberals to suddenly be concerned given how much of Trump’s treatment of immigrants is merely an extension of Obama-era policies. Recently several instances of abuses were shared, from kids in cages to prison buses, which were at the time blamed on the Trump administration, but were later exposed to be from before his inauguration.
It’s impossible to take liberals and journalists concerns about the welfare of immigrants at face value after their eight year slumber through the entire Obama administration.
But it’s not only disingenuous. What the President’s opponents don’t seem to understand is the hysteria and excuses are only driving more Americans into believing that we were desperately in need of a corrective.
The refusal to accept that millions of Americans knowingly voted for Trump will only help the President earn another term. For the hysteria from the left over dissent of any kind, but especially pertaining to Trump, is precisely what has resulted in the “owning the liberals” mentality on the right, which is only gaining steam.
As Salena Zito explains in “The Great Revolt”, “Rust Belt voters watched on cable television as the Left and journalists pigeonholed their rebellion as an ugly bout of white nationalism, doubling down on all the elitist snobbery those voters sought to rebuke.”
And it’s starting to get to me, too.
Instead of trying to understand Americans and their choice for President, anyone voicing even a modicum of support for the administration is bullied into apologies and silence. The media turn public statements of support for the President into a news story for their viewers and readers to get outraged over. That’s the least of the media’s campaign against the President, which includes countless mistakes and corrections which only seem to break one way: against the administration. For a group of professionals who express shock and horror at the label “Fake news!” many members of the media are doing nothing but providing more ammunition for Trump’s attacks.
When he does do something well, like finally moving our embassy to Jerusalem or stepping out of an extraordinarily flawed Iran nuclear deal, it’s ignored or villainized. Americans notice the double standard; the refusal to see anything positive, and the fixation on everything negative. There are some accomplishments every American can, or should, admit are positives. The economy is in fantastic shape; Trump has brought home American political prisoners from North Korea and Venezuela; he has pushed through the first steps of important criminal justice reform. Those stories are roundly ignored by a media intent on taking down the President, not reporting on his administration.
It’s enough to make even a NeverTrumper like me into a MAGA hat wearing Trump supporter.
Well, it’s almost enough. Every time he opens his mouth, I am reminded why I couldn’t vote for him. I’m reminded of his words about there being “very fine people” on both sides of Charlottesville. But if the President’s opponents continue to ignore his accomplishments and mindlessly attack him for another few years, it could create even more spiteful Trump voters as a result.
![[image loading]](http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/img/charles/2015/11/22/LGF1827.jpg)
