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Trumpworld is preparing for violence

Quinta Jurecic at The Atlantic nails my malaise: President Trump creates a lot of daily brouhaha but there is little to be said about him other than the obvious. He is a four-flushing misogynist and white supremacist grifter. We already knew he hadn’t paid income taxes for many years, but the details grab headlines: $70k in deductions for his hairdresser and more than that for consulting by his daughter-in-law when she was already on the payroll as an employee.

Those details are trivial, however tantalizing. Jurecic urges us not to get caught up in them but rather to think and write about the world that made Trump possible. I see and hear little of that world. In my corner of DC, where I walk more than 7 miles per day, I haven’t seen a single Trump lawn sign in six months. So I was struck when this epistle crossed my desk yesterday:

If you are a liberal who can’t stand Trump, and cannot possibly fathom why conservatives would ever vote for him, let me finally fill you in. It’s not that we love Donald Trump so much. It’s that we can’t stand you! And we will do whatever it takes — even if that means electing a rude, obnoxious, unpredictable narcissist (your words, not ours) to the office of President of the United States — because the biggest threat to this nation is you.

How is that possible you might ask? Well, you have done everything in your power to destroy our country; from tearing down the police, tearing down our history, to tearing down our borders, and systematically destroying our schools while brainwashing our kids into believing socialism is the answer to anything (despite being an unmitigated failure everywhere). You have demonized religion and faith, while glorifying abortion, violence, and thug culture.

You call us racists because we expect everyone, of any skin color, to follow our laws equally. You tell us that our tolerance and acceptance of lifestyles we don’t agree with isn’t nearly enough. No, we must “celebrate” any lifestyle choice or scienceless gender option you throw our direction, or you think it’s fine to calls us homophobic or some other degrading slur you decide is okay to call us. Ironically all while lecturing us on hate speech. While you gaslight us about 52 genders, polyamory, grown men in dresses sharing public locker rooms with little girls, and normalize the sexualization of young children, you simultaneously ridicule us for having the audacity to wish someone a “Merry Christmas” or hang a flag on the 4th of July, stand for the national anthem, or (horror of horrors) don a MAGA hat in public. So much for your “tolerance.” (See why we think you are just hypocrites??)

We are not interested in the fact that you want to abolish free speech, unless we only agree with you. You can’t get the violence in the cities you manage under control, and yet you think you can unilaterally decide that 250 years of the right-to-bear-arms against a tyrannical or ineffective government should be abolished .

The screed goes on in that vein, making claims of victimhood and devotion to America values that can best be described as invented, if not entirely hallucinatory. I’m a political liberal and a Jew, the epitome of the people accused here, but I say Merry Christmas to those I think are Christian and hang an American flag on my house from Memorial Day to July 4.

Why does the right-wing invent this nonsense? Because that is how you justify denunciation of others: it’s really all self-defense. They feel accused, and they know that at least some of the accusations are on the mark, so they try to project back on the accusers all the criticisms, and then some.

Trump is a master of this stratagem. My correspondent cited above is a pale imitator. There is no effort at all in this language to appeal to someone on the other side of the political equation, or even the uncommitted. It is in the first instance intended to rouse the already faithful and get them to the polls. The longer term objective is to justify violence, as that line about bearing arms against the government suggests. There is no reference at all to the constitutionally required “well-ordered militia.” This is a threat of violence against the coming Biden administration and its supporters.

So when I do as Quinta suggests, I find at least part of the world that made Trump possible is one that is armed and regards itself as ready and willing to do violence against “ineffective” government if Trump is not re-elected. It pays no attention whatsoever to the long decline in violent crime in most American cities and pretends it knows far better how to govern them than the people elected to do so. Some of those arms will be used to try to intimidate voters who show up at the polls, which has already happened with early voting in Virginia. Does anyone doubt that they will also be used in the wake of an election defeat for Donald Trump? Trumpworld is preparing for violence.