I Know I Should Stop Calling Them MAGAts... They're Our Brothers And Sisters

Trump Supporters Don't Want To Be Replaced Or Dehumanized

My friend Adam is a Zionist— all in— and he likes arguing about it. The things he says are horrific because almost every argument he makes dehumanizes the Palestinians. He can’t see how they’re as human as the Israelis and as we are. He’s a smart guy but there’s just something blocking that. I asked him to meet some Palestinians and get to know them and then restart the conversation in a couple of years. That didn’t work. His confirmation bias is through the roof. He seeks out information that confirms his existing beliefs and dismisses anything that contradicts them. This seems to be creating an echo chamber effect where he’s never challenged to reconsider his views. I think he’s a high school drop out and although he’s an intelligent guy who made millions of dollars on eBay, he never learned critical thinking skills— like questioning assumptions, identifying bias, and evaluating evidence, which makes it more natural to accept information without scrutinizing its accuracy or considering alternative perspectives. Couple that with experiencing a legitimate sense of fear and anxiety about the future of Israel and the Jewish people, and that leads him to cling to strong beliefs for a sense of security, even making up nonsense about progressives killing Jews and an inability to understand that only right-wingers— by definition— are anti-semitic and that anyone who is anti-semitic is, by definition, a right-winger.

Anyway, yesterday, his barrage of e-mails reminded me of a time when I was driving my van through the Rif Mountains in northern Morocco with my old girlfriend, Martha. It was a dangerous area then (1969) and when we saw a couple of Americans standing on the side of the road hitchhiking, we both agreed to pick them up. As it turned out, they were 2 Jewish guys from New York. Unfortunately, they both launched into a series of racist and bigoted jokes that went on and on. Martha was fuming and it didn't take long before she signaled me that she wanted me to throw them out. I didn’t want to do that; it was bandit country and I didn’t want any karma if they got robbed or even killed. So, I thought of something different. I told an anti-Semitic joke. They were so horrified that they asked to be let out of the van immediately. They seemed to find the idea of an anti-Jewish joke absolutely incomprehesible. Funny how that works.

But for sure, dehumanizing a group of people is always totally wrong. And that’s something I’ve been grappling with. You may have noticed that I do that with Trump supporters. Everytime I use the word "MAGAt," I feel a twinge of guilt. It’s a really horrible word and I feel like a horrible person when I use it. Mark Leibovich decided to deal with something like that in the “If Trump Wins” edition of The Atlantic with an essay called Trump Voters Are America Too. Keep in mind I left America for the Nixon presidency. There were plenty of other reasons but I couldn’t contend with the idea that I was sharing a country with people who chose to elect that man. He was bad enough; Trump is incalculably worse.

Leibovich noted that “when political elites [or just educated people and wokes] insisted ‘We’re better than this!’— a close cousin of ‘This is not who we are’— many Trump disciples heard ‘We’re better than them.’ Hillary Clinton ably confirmed this when she dismissed half of the Republican nominee’s supporters— at an LGBTQ fundraiser in New York— as people who held views that were ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.’ Whether or not she was correct, the targets of her judgment did not appreciate it. And the disdain was mutual. ‘He’s our murder weapon,’ said the conservative political scientist Charles Murray, summarizing the appeal that Trump held for many of his loyalists.”

After the shock of Trump’s victory in 2016, the denial and rationalizations kicked in fast. Just ride out the embarrassment for a few years, many thought, and then America would revert to something in the ballpark of sanity. But one of the overlooked portents of 2020 (many Democrats were too relieved to notice) was that the election was still extremely close. Trump received 74 million votes, nearly 47 percent of the electorate. That’s a huge amount of support, especially after such an ordeal of a presidency— the “very fine people on both side,” the “perfect phone call, the bleach, the daily OMG and WTF of it all. The populist nerves that Trump had jangled in 2016 remained very much aroused. Many of his voters’ grievances were unresolved. They clung to their murder weapon.

Trump has continued to test their loyalty. He hasn’t exactly enhanced his résumé since 2020, unless you count a second impeachment, several loser endorsements, and a bunch of indictments as selling points (some do, apparently: more medallions for his victimhood). January 6 posed the biggest hazard— the brutality of it, the fever of the multitudes, and Trump’s obvious pride in the whole furor. Even the GOP lawmakers who still vouched for Trump from their Capitol safe rooms seemed shaken.

“This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace, the newly elected Republican of South Carolina, said of the deadly riot. “We’re better than this.” There was a lot of that: thoughts and prayers from freaked-out Americans. “Let me be very clear,” President-elect Joe Biden tried to reassure the country that day. “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”

One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists. But then, on the very day the Capitol had been ransacked, 147 House and Senate Republicans voted not to certify Biden’s election. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, skulked back to the ousted president a few weeks later, and the pucker-up parade to Mar-a-Lago was on. Large majorities of Republicans never stopped supporting Trump, and claim they never stopped believing that Biden stole the 2020 election and that Crooked Joe’s regime is abusing the legal system to persecute Trump out of the way.

Here we remain, amazingly enough, ready to do this all again. Trump might be the ultimate con man, but his essential nature has never been a mystery. Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent. A durable coalition seems fully comfortable entrusting the White House to the guy who left behind a Capitol encircled with razor-wire fence and 25,000 National Guard troops protecting the federal government from his own supporters.

You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here— to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”

I watched as the Nixon regime crumbled and came to an ignominious, wretched end from my safe, cozy house on the Overtoom across the street from the Vondel Park in Amsterdam. I’ve thought about going back and setting up house there again. I was very poor when I lived there but it was a glorious time. I wonder what it would be like now? And the… did you read what happened there a couple weeks ago? Voters in Amsterdam and Utrecht gave him around 5% of the vote and in the two other big cities, Rotterdam and the Hague, he only won around 10% of the vote. But the damn MAGAts in the provinces-- Limburg, Flevoland, Zeeland, Overijssel-- sure voted for him.