Reflecting On A Trump Trope

A common pro-Trump meme or trope goes like this:

They're not after me [Trump]. They're after you. I'm just in the way.

I've always looked at that as a bit of vote-building bravado. But let's examine it a little more closely.

Trump isn't really that outrageous, politically. He's generally pro-business, generally pro-border, generally anti-regulation. He's hardly a conservative ideologue. It's hard to say what he really is, as far as political philosophy goes.

But it's easy to see what he isn't. He isn't a man who falls in line easily. He isn't fearful of popular opinion as communicated to him by the press. For better or worse, he isn't a man for whom propriety, either by conventional or modern "woke" standards, is important.

That often frustrates me, but it's absolutely intolerable to those of the progressive movement for whom orthodoxy is essential.

If you don't believe that, openly express criticism of any of the prevailing orthodoxies. Suggest that you think the "trans" movement is nonsensical, or that Roe was bad jurisprudence that deserved to be overturned. Use the phrase "illegal alien" in public. Express the in-my-opinion sensible view that the 2020 election was tainted by widespread mail-in fraud, and that the Clinton campaign sabotaged the Trump presidency with its wholly fabricated Russian Collusion story.

Admit that Fauci probably funded the research that led to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak (and call it that, while you're at it).

Suggest that the January 6th riot was neither an existential threat to democracy nor as destructive as countless preceding riots that enjoyed the support of leading Democrats, and that the continuing prosecution of participants is, like the recent Trump trial, politically motivated.

Try to explain that our current pursuit of alternative energy and decarbonization is a recipe for economic disaster, and not at all justified by the science.

Say any of those things in public, among people who depend on mainstream news for their worldview, and see what response you get. I'm not talking about a Ricochet meet-up, where generally sensible people tolerate generally sensible viewpoints. I'm not talking about a chat with friends over dinner. Try saying them in a mixed group of normal Americans, at a basketball game or in the check-out line at a store. See what response you get and how uncomfortable it makes you feel.

Those who agree with you might admit it, if it’s a very safe crowd. But those who don’t agree will make it clear that you’re beyond the pale, that your views are unacceptable.

Trump's sins are plentiful, but his politics is anodyne. His great failing, from the perspective of the left, is not that he's a vulgar and perhaps promiscuous man: vulgarity and promiscuity are the stock in trade of the progressive left.

Trump's great sin (from the left's perspective) is that he doesn't bow to prevailing sensibilities. He's habitually politically incorrect, and so he doesn't serve -- as Obama did, as Biden does, as every apologetic hand-wringing pursuer of public acceptance does -- to amplify and embed the progressive message and create yet another milestone in the left's march to wherever the hell the left is trying to take us.

He isn't useful.

I have said for years that there are too many of us who talk in private of manning the barricades but who shy away from saying uncomfortable things in public for fear of being perceived as impolite, as cranks. I tip my hat to every "crank" who stands up at a school board meeting and protests the gender-studies trash being foisted on kids. I tip my hat to every "crank" who refuses to play the pronoun game, who complains about illegal immigration, who refused to wear a mask, who defends gun ownership and free speech -- and who does it in the company of normal people who don't know or care enough to understand how far we've strayed from our founding.

Trump is often petty, vulgar, narcissistic, and annoying. But his political sin is mine: an insensitivity to and disregard of the prevailing orthodoxies, and a tendency to state bluntly what he believes despite the inevitable opprobrium he'll receive from the arbiters of right-think.

Candidate Trump has always been a frustrating, high-risk proposition. But the things that I consider most objectionable about Trump mean nothing to those who most strenuously oppose him. The things those people find objectionable about Trump are the same things they'll find objectionable about me if they ever discover that I exist.

In that sense the trope is correct: those who seek to destroy Trump will happily seek to destroy me should I ever become a loud enough voice to deserve their attention. Worse, they'll seek to create a world that doesn't allow room for people like me, so that even the small heterodox voices are effectively silenced.

Will I vote for him in 2024? Yes. Obviously.