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Regarding Trump Hatred
I have been bewildered by the intense, beyond all reason, hatred of Donald J. Trump since he became a candidate for the POTUS. Therefore, I have finally come to the Ricochet community seeking your insights. I have no reason to suspect he is any more than a normal human being with strengths and weaknesses common to mankind. So, in all seriousness, please contribute your thoughts as to why his opponents are, I believe, quite literally insane, i.e., out of their minds, in regards to him.
Published in Politics
Trump is disruptive. Many people prefer secure.
Trump is disruptive. Many people prefer status quo.
Trump is disruptive. Many people worry he diminishes their status.
Trump is disruptive. Many people preached their knowledge and were proven wrong.
Trump is disruptive. Many people kept Republicans in a corner, but he refused to stand quietly by.
Trump is disruptive. Many people in media explained how things were; he called them liars and explained why.
Same. It’s been alarming.
That was my reason for voting for President Trump in the first place-he gives the press hell right back.
If you didn’t hate Trump, how could you vote for Biden?
On Hatred
Hatred is an integral part of fallen man. We are all fallen. But I cannot understand — at least not intimately and rationally — any profound hatred for anyone else — certainly not enough to act upon it. This is not to say that I — or everyone else — am not capable of it, but we have consciences which mitigate such unbridled hatred. We have consciences, which at least involves the Holy Spirit guiding us, and at least restraining us (and very likely involves the suggestions and urges of evil spiritual creatures as well). But the Holy Spirit can be thwarted. And He can be ignored. And the conscience can even become seared and insensate to the urgings of the Holy Spirit.
It has been said in other culturally acceptable ways that when you cast God (the Holy Spirit) out of your earthly vessel, you must have some some spirit to fill that void. One doesn’t have to be “possessed” but to merely let it in through the open door. Philosophically this is metaphorical. But realistically this empty place is calling for another spirit to enter and house-sit so to speak. These are the spirits of envy, and lust and greed and hatred, to name a few, and they are not amiable.
I remember about seven years ago the Knock-out Game was at its height. And I remember watching self-recorded videos of the young men knocking out, and sometimes killing with a single blow, young pregnant women, old ladies, middle-aged men, and old men, and then dancing with glee over their fallen unconscious bodies. There was no rhyme or reason to who was targeted (other than that they were alone and often it was night; and perhaps they were acceptably white). This was such a vile and inhuman activity, I remember saying out loud, “The demons have been released”.
It wasn’t the violence, it was the demonic glee.
If you don’t believe in the supernatural, or don’t believe that demons exist, then this would be taken metaphorically, or even should mean nothing to you. But if you accept the existence of the supernatural, then this is the shortest, cleanest, simplest, truest way of explaining the personal violent hatred that we are increasingly seeing.
You like it when he said, He’s covered under the blood, nothing can touch him?
Trump jumped the line. He didn’t do all the prerequisite niceties that party types prefer. You can’t call in a favor if none are owed.
He was also the monster they created that could not be controlled. Bill Clinton urged him to run. So did Joe Scarborough and Jeff Zucker. He was supposed to be Hillary’s patsy, the fall guy. And then he won. How dare he.
He proved the pundits worthless. That 3,500 word piece on “The Conservative Case for (Rubio/Cruz/Kasich/a fourth Bush Term)“ proved not to be worth the electrons it was printed with. The Schmidts, the Stuarts, the Wilsons and the Murphys – who were all collectively 0-for-the-21st Century in consulting wins – what’s not to hate?
The only one Donald Trump owed when he got to the Oval Office was Kelly Ann Conway and the American people. That is simply not done. And of those three, the last one is hated more ferociously than any other. (You m-f, backward racist hicks.)
Yes! So much awesomeness in that man. So much Christ. Love it.
My illustration to my kids is you have two spirits living inside you – the Beast and the Spirit of Christ.
Your choices and what you choose to dwell on feed one of those two spirits. If you think killing people is something you couldn’t do today, feeding the beast your anger and hate today will make it much easier to kill later.
It’s quite simple, really. He’s not an ordinary human being. He puts his pants on two legs at a time. He’s also a robot. Or maybe a lizard. A lizard possessed by a demon. Or possessed literally by the spirit of Hitler. How do you not know this stuff? Geez.
I’m also a protestant, but Vigano’s letter is worth the read regardless of denomination. It was powerful.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/archbishop-viganos-powerful-letter-to-president-trump-eternal-struggle-between-good-and-evil-playing-out-right-now
Ricochet founder Rob Long can’t order coffee without taking a side kick at Trump. The question I’ve asked repeatedly on the podcast is why and how is he uniquely vile compared to what we now know about the shenanigans of JFK and LBJ, hookers on staff, naked swimming with interns , seducing 18 year olds etc. What has Trump done to warrant Rob’s continuing disgust?
Young human males are programmed to be violent and aggressive by genetics. If that aggression is not channeled into positive ends, bad things happen. I’d prefer to think about the problem of male violence as a secretion of hormones that originates from our mammalian tendency to compete with others of our own species for dominance.
But evolutionary psychology and Christianity always end up at the same place when it comes to human nature. Humans are theologically fallen/designed with some unpleasant tendencies from their evolution. We got to direct towards the good/socially constructive path or things get very bad very quickly.
Trump is going to be the new Chuck Norris. The jokes are being written already.
Right.
Native Americans told remarkably similar stories.
You’re ignoring our Creator.
It’s one of the key precepts to Christ’s teachings – that murder begins with anger in our hearts. What proceeds from our mouths and our actions begins with a thought.
It takes discipline and conscious effort to halt the anger, forgive, and love those who hurt you. Do that enough (70×7 or until completion) and it becomes easier to do.
Christianity teaches to shift our hate not to the people acting, but to the spirit animating them. It keeps us from seeing people as irredeemable and reminds us they can be saved by grace and made new by rejecting that old spirit and embracing the spirit of Christ.
Also, Romans 1 says he has revealed himself to all men, so I am not surprised that there exists bits of truth in other religions. He redeems all people and all cultures.
I often ignore things that are unprovable. It beats ignoring the proveable.
The liberal/progressive response to Trump is because his election, and the support he gets, tells them something unpalatable about what America is and who Americans are as a people. iow it tells them something they don’t want to believe about themselves.
I think that’s also why there’s such an appetite for blaming the Russians for Trump’s election. “It wasn’t really us, the Russians tricked us into voting for him.”
I rarely ignore the provable. But even so God is provable. Not reproducibly provable through experimentation as you limit proof to be, but provable nonetheless. Are you willing to try?
The idea that the hate is because he’s a “threat to the establishment” is self-congratulatory hogwash. The reasons he is hated are very simple:
This post is about the prevalence of irrational hatred.
Added: I don’t recall any conservatives hating 0bama or Clinton like this. And even given Bush Derangement Syndrome, I don’t recall liberals hating Bush 43 or Bush 41 or even Reagan like this. What explains the irrational hatred and rage?
I wrote this elsewhere as a response to another empiricist. I feel blasphemous admitting to the following but there’s some sense of solidifying my faith rather than abandoning it.
@saintaugustine can take me to task for any true blasphemy (please!)
The Christian worldview has three points:
–Creation,
–Fall,
–and Redemption.
Very well put.
I’m an empiricist, like C. S. Lewis before me. I wrote this.
Pure empiricism leads to skepticism, as Hume figured out. I wrote this.
We should never rely on our own experience alone. That’s bad empiricism.
What else is going on here in this conversation? I don’t know. I gotta do offline stuff. Maybe I can come back later and try to figure out what’s being said.
Yes, Henry, to Stina’s point, you’re framing of empiricism is so limited and stylized that you pick and choose what you want to believe, and denounce everything else that — well, that is found in life, or that doesn’t fit your preexisting intellectual conditions. :)
It’s irrational to hate someone because you’re like them at some level.
Conservatives got/still get pretty nutty about Obama. (And [Hilary] Clinton.)
The Bushes were too beige to attract that kind of response.
From memory Reagan really was hated, though by a smaller cohort.
I was kind of wondering if Rob’s TVLand sitcom was on against Celebrity Apprentice. I’m not doing the legwork on that one.
No Creator?