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Why I Will Never Abandon Trump
Lately there’s been a lot of talk among pundits on what it would take for Trump’s base to abandon him. For me, the answer is: nothing. I feel I must support Trump, regardless of what he does, because I fear what would happen if he got impeached. That’s not to say I don’t criticize Trump from time to time. But said criticism has no bearing on my generic support for him.
Ever since World War II, American elites have tried to build this narrative that democracy is about impersonal public policy, not power/status competition between groups. If you believe that policy is all that matters, than of course there won’t be any consequences to impeaching Trump, certainly not for his base. He’ll just be replaced by Pence, and things will go on mostly as they have before.
This is completely absurd. Trump’s base is socially vulnerable, much more so than I think any of us want to admit. Impeaching Trump would be a complete disaster. At the very least we would see a rash of suicides. The discrimination working-class white people face could intensify, especially in employment. The nihilism that’s been growing in the middle and upper middle classes for 50 years could start to spiral out of control. And that’s before we get to the rioting which, let’s be honest, would be intense.
If you don’t believe me, just look at what happened to Christians after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Liberals went on a judicial jihad to persecute them. The status of Christians fell so low that the courts actually ruled that Trump’s travel ban’s prioritization of religious minorities was unconstitutional. Yes, Christians are dying en masse in Middle Eastern countries, but apparently we can’t do anything about it because, well, the First Amendment prohibits it. Go figure.
Elite coups have consequences. Politics is not a dispassionate fight over public policy, but a struggle between groups. The consequences of impeaching Trump would be just too dire for me to abandon my generic support for the man, and I don’t think there’s anything Trump could that would change that.
Published in General
My parents came from classic Jacksonian upper-middle-class culture, where people with money are supposed to refrain from taking advantage of their position, rules are always applied more stringently to them, you were expected to give back to your community, set a good example for others, etc.
Those are deeply unpopular positions, and I didn’t realize how unpopular until just a few years ago. I get the feeling a lot of upper-middle-class people felt threatened by me being “on those people’s side.” Anyway, the bigger problem was probably just that I was a Millennial.
And there it is. I didn’t think you would admit it. I thought you were just going to keep repeating how much you hate Trump over and over until we all barfed.
The reality is you just want him to Shut Up.
I have been saying for months that there is absolutely no difference between the words of the NeverTrumpers and the words of the Hillary Sore Losers. This is just a little more evidence that I’ve been right all along.
1 ) What is your definition of Jacksonian?
2 ) What do you mean by taking advantage of your position? How do you know most people of said class are doing such?
3 ) How do your parents define giving back to the community and setting a good example? How do you know that a majority of others are not doing the same?
4 ) How do you know those are unpopular positions? How do you know those positions are unpopular across the United States of America? If so then why?
5 ) How do you know that said people were “afraid” of “the people”?
This strikes me as a fair bit of speculation.
Wise words have been mentioned on this topic before.
trump tweeted this 2 hours ago.
Quite foolish considering that trump first ran on altering obamacare, then thought the replacement was “too mean” but still wanted it passed, and now he thinks a new bill should be written to repeal it entirely and that Democrats of all people will join in repealing it!
Talk about naivety, foolishness, and that is not even the worst. If trump used twitter far less and when he did use it, used it consistently with his public statements towards public policy goals he would be doing way better. There is a reason why he is polling poorly (losing the positive momentum he had at the start in January) and not even margin of error could make him positive.
You have an extra word in there.
Losing support enough for you to support impeachment is asking a lot. I don’t think even I would support impeachment of Trump, but let us consider a lesser alternative? What would it take for you to lose enough faith or support in Trump to want a primary challenge to him in 2020? Or to just lose your vote/public support?
Joseph,
In a democracy, your loyalty is a little over the top. My head is about where Valiuth’s is but my heart supports you. Never have I seen a more banal spoiled group of shrill children than the fools who scream for Trump’s demise. I am emotionally in your corner if I can’t intellectually endorse everything that you say.
Sometimes art says what we want to be said better than we can.
Regards,
Jim
Okay, so (and this is a serious question) if Trump were to “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody,” would it change things for you?
You are so correct @majestyk. The problem is punishment which is given to one side only. So wrong is wrong, but responsibility for wrong does matter who engages. For the Dems, no problem. For Republicans, throw the key away. And BTW, are you really saying that Trump engaged in an impeachable offense? Or are we just speculating?
Not commenting on the core of the article, but this particular statement at the end of the exchange above struck me as odd.
Isn’t that a lot like someone saying “You can never understand what black people feel–and thus you can never get why there was unwavering black loyalty to President Obama despite poor outcomes for black communities during his presidency–because you’re not black and have white privilege”?
Rising suicide rates are always worthy of examination, and I think some of the feelings that exist within working class communities certainly garner support for President Trump. However, I personally blame some of the despair on the embracing of a secular society that provides little purpose or reason for anyone’s life.
Whatever the root causes for such manic depression, I am also skeptical of the idea that politicians can fix it…. I will concede they can give people some nebulous “hope [for] change”? Are Democrats (en masse) now committing suicide because the guy who crafted that slogan left office?
It’s a strange country.
What the heck does that mean? My computer’s dictionary does not contemplate that word.
Depends on who he shoots. (And this is a serious answer.)
Not at all. My point was that Majestyk would be unlikely to experience the phenomenon that Joseph was describing because he wasn’t close to that category of people, not that it wasn’t possible for him to understand. Though, I do think it’s quite difficult to understand where people are coming from and people are very prone to the typical mind fallacy, so we all need to try really hard to understand people who are different than us rather than dismissing them just because their claims don’t comport with our personal experiences and intuition.
Sure. I can’t argue with that.
I think a society based on atheistic precepts will produce a rampage of suicide.
Somebody asked me in another place what I meant regarding the “normalization of bad behavior.”
It’s this in a nutshell. It’s the callous (not strictly irrational) calculation that because the other side engages in a particular behavior we are necessarily handicapped if we don’t reciprocate in kind.
This is how you end up in a race to the bottom. It’s also true that one side derives actual benefit from the lowering of the standards themselves, so you might achieve some short-run gains from bowling over the curbs that once existed, but in the end you’ve opened up the road to any old maniac.
Maj, I have a few responses to your comment:
I agree with you about this, but I take Joseph’s statement to be hyperbole. The real issue is how high you set the bar before criticizing the President. This bar is unusually low for some in the Conservative coalition (including you) and unusually high for others (including Joseph).
I encourage you to question your own impartiality, as I question mine. I think that you, and many others on the Conservative side, have a serious prejudice against the President. There are some very good reasons for this, but I suspect that this opinion is largely driven by a visceral reaction against Trump, which is followed by a search for justifications. The same applies to the other side. I’ve recently read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and it is very convincing in his “rider and elephant” analogy, in which the elephant represents our passions and the rider represents our reason. Citing Hume, Haidt argues that our reason is usually acting as a lawyer or press secretary, seeking to justify our passions, and that it is very difficult to actually rely on our reason.
It gives me hope to see you writing about sin. :)
We’ve been burned by this in the past. I gave President Bush essentially unqualified support in the wake of 9/11 and defended him even when he allowed the Democrats to essentially run the entire domestic agenda.
That ended well.
I have no illusions of impartiality, but I concede readily and cheer when the President gets things right.
It would be nice if people would return the courtesy by saying when the President gets things wrong. To hear some tell it, that number is “Zero.”
Its a useful metaphor, but don’t draw any metaphysical conclusions.
Man, I really don’t know if this would bother me if it were the other side. I generally don’t see anything wrong with opposition research. If there is truthful, damaging information about a candidate, I think that it should be made public. Does this somehow change if the source is dubious? A dubious source should make one more skeptical about the truth of such information, but it does not automatically make the information false, nor does it make it somehow inappropriate to get the information and see where it leads. Think of Whittaker Chambers.
I have more sympathy with witnesses who may have faulty memories. In his latest podcast (now on Ricochet!), Bill Bennett recommends that Trump have his entire staff detail all of their contacts with Russians since they first saw Dr. Zhivago. I don’t know if that’s possible. For example, I’ve been a litigation lawyer for about 20 years, and I’ve completely forgotten many cases that I’ve handled.
I also question your assertion that the Trumps lied. I genuinely don’t know what the alleged lie was, apparently told by Donald Jr. Both the NYT and WaPo report that Donald Jr. issued a statement that was “incomplete” or “misleading,” which isn’t good but also isn’t a lie (and is an extraordinary example of the pot calling the kettle black).
Perhaps I’m just a Trump fan, or perhaps years of false accusations against Conservatives (e.g. Bush lied, people died) has left me so skeptical of the media that I don’t trust their reporting.
Assuming that this isn’t intended as ironic, you severely truncated the comment. It doesn’t seem fair to draw such a sweeping conclusion without reproducing what was actually said. Full disclosure, I pretty much agree with what was actually said.
I’m liking this back and forth, but I request chapter and verse on the actual lie.
Me, too, but in addition, I’d like to know in what world the Russian shyster lawyer is an Official?
How many times did the Trump team deny contact with Russia? Every single time they said that it was a lie. The chapter and verse lies within the Google Search Bar with the Terms “Trump Denies Russia Contact”
It happened repeatedly and without compunction.
Then, when faced with the revelation that it had happened, they promptly turned about-face and said, “yeah, the contact happened but nothing came of it, so don’t worry.”
How will the story change next time?
Only if it seemed safe to do so.
That’s the whole point. You need incentives to forge new constitutional norms, and one way of doing that is for both sides to use nasty tactics on each other. One you’ve found the bottom, you can then work together to climb back up.
Sin begets sin, not life.
I’ll be honest, if I were in their shoes I’d lie too. Being the target of a hysterical witch hunt is one of my worst nightmares. Imagine this was the Salem witch trials, and a young girl was asked if she had met with the village’s creepy old faith healer (you know, the witch). Would you blame her if she said no, even if she’d met her a few times?
That’s interesting. Please expand on that.
Catchy, but just because something is catchy doesn’t make it true. Have you read how English constitutional norms came into existence?
It appears that I’ve used up my free Boston Globe articles reading about the Red Sox, so I can’t access the link.
I’ll do some googling, but here’s my thinking. As we know from the WMD fiasco, a statement that is merely incorrect is not a “lie.” I think it would serve the discussion to have an actual statement in black and white so we can assess the words and their context.
I can’t believe I’m reading this.
Your advocacy here is for the burning down of longstanding political and social institutions in the vain hope that they will rise, phoenix-like in the aftermath of the conflagration.
This is approximately like saying that your Church needs new floors and to be spiffed up in some areas and saying, “Well, getting this stuff done will be too hard. Let’s just burn it down and start from the ground up.” Or worse: assuming that the church will spontaneously re-assemble after you’ve incinerated it.