When Trump Hatred Goes Berserk

I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, and I’m certainly not blind to his flaws and weaknesses. But I’m also not one of those rabid Trump haters who believe he’s a racist monster who will destroy our democracy and our Constitution if enough voters put him back in the White House.

My beef with virulent Trump haters has always been two-fold. One, a general disregard for the genuine grievances of working-class Americans who vote for him; and two, an inability to look in the mirror and realize their own inexcusable sins against democracy.

I once asked a Trump-hating friend if she believed all 63 million people who voted for him in 2016 were racists. After some reflection, she said, “yeah, maybe they are.”

When I’m around Trump haters, I’ve learned to just nod and keep my mouth shut. Any hint that he may not be as bad as Hitler will be met by wild howls of rebuke. Who needs it?

I got reamed by a Trump hater last week because I failed to bash him in a column arguing that hiding President Biden’s mental decline was the “biggest media cover-up of modern times.”

I wondered: “Do you really think the same legacy journalists who went after President Trump with a vengeance on everything from Russian collusion to irregular accounting would have ignored signs of possible dementia?”

My point was not to defend Trump but to highlight the sheer hypocrisy of Democrats undermining democracy as they accused their rivals of doing the same. After all, if you hide for years from American voters that their president is mentally unfit for the job, how is that not a flagrant undermining of democracy?

Every move, I argued, was justified by the need to take down Trump.

When Biden was seen as the best man to beat Trump in 2024 as he did in 2020, it was worth hiding his mental decline, as egregious and unforgivable as that was.

But as soon as Biden’s disastrous debate made it unlikely that he could beat Trump, suddenly it was all guns blazing on Biden.

And why not? If you believe, as James Carville has said, that Trump “will end the Constitution,” aren’t you duty-bound to take all necessary measures, even if it means going after your own?

“We love you, Joe,” his former supporters have told him, “but if you can’t beat Trump, you’re no good to us. You have to go.”

We’re now witnessing this surreal spectacle of Democrats in public meltdown at the prospect that their own man may put Trump back in the White House.

For those who compliment Democrats for having the courage to police their own, I’m not buying. They’re angry not so much because their man is unfit for the job but because they got caught hiding it and are now trapped in their worst Trumpian nightmare.

Had they acted responsibly with the nation’s interest at heart, they wouldn’t have waited so long to make Biden what he was always meant to be—a one-term president. But so fixated were they on beating Trump, they failed to see or refused to see how they enabled an unfit president to run the country.

Hatred is blinding indeed.

Meanwhile, Democrats were also blind to another blunder— their abandonment of the working class.

As I wrote recently, “the Democrats today are more a party of elites, cultural activists and cosmopolitan Wall Street globalists than of hardscrabble American workers.”

Being so hypnotized by their hatred of Trump, Democrats failed to appreciate the genuine grievances of working-class Trump voters who felt ripped off and alienated by progressive policies, open borders, anti-American agitation and a new globalist order.

For Democrats, everything always came down to Trump, Trump, Trump and more Trump. Even when they conceded that the legal assault on Trump was mostly a show of political bias, it didn’t matter. Self-reflection and soul searching were out of the question.

Now self-reflection has been forced on them. How ironic that after years of taking on Trump, Democrats are now forced to take on Biden in a desperate attempt to keep Trump out of the White House. Poetic justice aside, even as an independent it’s excruciating to watch.

Which brings us to Saturday’s assassination attempt on Trump, which came within an inch or two of killing him.

Any violence shouldn’t really shock us given the reckless rhetoric that has permeated our discourse in recent years. It’s one thing to oppose Trump; it’s quite another to claim glibly that he is set to “kill democracy,” unleash “death squads” and make homosexuals and reporters “disappear.”

As Jonathan Turley writes in The Hill, “For months, people have heard politicians and press call Trump ‘Hitler’ and the GOP a Nazi movement. Some compared stopping Trump to stopping Hitler in 1933.” President Biden’s call after the Trump shooting that “it’s time to cool it down” is appreciated, but I wish he would have remembered that when he said recently that “it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.”

In any case, even if we don’t blame the assassination attempt on this pervasive and virulent rhetoric, there is at least one thing that is not up for debate—the virulence itself.

The hatred for Trump has always been notable precisely because it went so berserk. Hatred alone is bad enough, but when it reaches levels that are hysterically over-the-top, the hate itself can backfire and even generate sympathy for the man taking all the fire.

So here is a little message to my Trump-hating friends: Oppose Trump all you want, and often for good reason. But when your opposition turns to hatred that makes you so dizzy you can only think of Hitler, maybe it’s time to slow down, take a deep breath and look in the mirror.