‘If you’re a racist, you found your guy.’

Wrote David L. Nevins in The Fulcrum on Oct. 25, 2024: “On Jan. 23, 2016, Donald Trump was campaigning in Iowa when he made a remarkable announcement: ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?’”    

Added Nevins, The Fulcrum co-publisher and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund: “Unfortunately, with less than two weeks to go until the 2024 election, it appears that despite the absurdity of that statement Trump might have been right.”

Going on 10 years later, reelected Trump is slumping in the polls, for now anyway. The CNN Poll of Polls has the president’s job approval at an abysmal 38 percent. But there’s another way to crunch the numbers: nearly 4 in 10 Americans are sticking with him.

Never mind that Trump proves almost daily that he is an existential threat to our experiment in democratic governance, which will have began 250 years ago on July 4.

Historians are simultaneously alarmed and appalled at the celebration sponsored by the Trump-chaired “Salute to America 250” task force. With Trump calling the shots, the panel’s main job is to glorify the president.

In a story last May, The Guardian’s Robert Tait quoted historian and presidential biographer Jonathan Alter on Trump: “He is not now and never has been a student of history, but is basically a restorationist … a political figure who operates on the politics of nostalgia.

“He’s ignorant of economic history, he’s ignorant of political history. And his idea for the 250 is to use it as a way to celebrate him.”

Nevins summarized Trump’s first term:

“He’s a convicted felon. He’s been impeached twice. There are a multitude of other criminal charges still outstanding. Yet polls indicate he is running neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris.

“An ABC-Ipsos poll conducted in April — after he was found guilty in a hush money case in New York — indicated only 4 percent of Trump supporters said they would not vote for him and 16 percent said they would reconsider it.

“Despite all that and The New York Times recently reporting that ‘the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past,’ Trump’s supporters are standing by him.

“And leading Republicans are ignoring his behavior.”

His authoritarianism has worsened since his second inauguration. Trump is trying desperately to rig the mid-term elections with his Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE), which hearken to old Southern state Jim Crow laws to keep Blacks from voting.

Trump has admitted why he so fervently favors the SAVE Act:

• “I tell you what, Republicans have to win this one. We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race.”
• “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me.”

(The Republican-majority House passed the SAVE Act; only the threat of a Democratic filibuster is preventing the GOP-majority Senate from approving it.

Some critics, including historian Timothy Snyder say, flat out, that Trump is a fascist. Snyder’s 2024 New York Times best-selling book, On Freedom, is a dire warning and is even more timely as our semi-quincentennial approaches.

But one of the best essays on Trump and Trumpism I’ve read comes not from academia or from the Fourth Estate. The essayist is Michael Jochum, a musician, who calls his social media musings, “Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.”

(Wikipedia IDs him as “an American rock/jazz/nu metal drummer” who, “although a session musician early in his career,” has “gained more recognition as a touring member of the band Korn.”)

Jochum essentially argues that the MAGA hard core (not coincidentally nearly all white and largely male) loves Trump because he hates who and what they hate:

I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.

I don’t wonder anymore. I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.

If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy. If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.

If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.

It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.

Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”

And that’s the part that should chill us.

Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?

Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.

Now the mask is off. Now we know.

And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.

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