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Last week, as every sentient being knows by now, Donald Trump, in what you might call his ongoing “Have You No Decency” Tour, brought the show to Arlington National Cemetery for a photo-op using graves and dead heroes as his props, because, after all, General Bone Spurs certainly thinks these brave men and women died so that he could claim to win an election he is very likely to lose. (I wonder if he bragged about those dead as “crowd size”?: “Four hundred thousand showed up for me! Kamala Harris never had that many!”)
Trump was oh-so-solemn honoring soldiers who had died during the Afghanistan evacuation, his jaw jutting, his brow furrowed like a five-year-old whose parents have told him to look serious, but the General couldn’t resist a fist pump, as if he were at one of his rallies of hyperactive monkeys. In the end, it was all about him, as it always is and as it will always be.
And so it would have gone, yet another disgraceful exhibition, except for this: Arlington is sacred ground, and Trump’s little political event was a sacrilege — both unofficially and officially.
Common decency aside, there is a federal law prohibiting politicking at the cemetery, for obvious reasons, and it has been violated by no one, ever — except now, by one monster. And when a cemetery official attempted to prevent the Trump-capade, a Trump staffer physically tossed the woman aside. She later said that she declined to file charges because she feared retribution from the supporters of the man who promises retribution. That is worth another essay unto itself. My god, what have we come to?
But Trump’s reprehensible behavior is not my point here.
This was only the latest in a very, very long list of comments and actions that show Trump’s contempt for our servicemen and women, and that goes back, according to one article, to his days in high school: his insults at war hero and POW John McCain (“I like people who weren’t captured”); his dismissal, according to his one-time chief of staff John Kelly, of soldiers as “suckers and losers”; his unwillingness to honor war dead at a ceremony at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France because he didn’t want a rain shower to muss his hair, and anyway, by one report, he said the cemetery was “filled with losers”; his not wanting to be seen with disabled veterans because it wasn’t a “good look” for him; or just recently, his absurdly claiming that the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he permanently tarnished by awarding it to radio fascist Rush Limbaugh and congressional fascist Jim Jordan, is a “much better” honor than the Congressional Medal of Honor, bestowed upon war heroes, because “They’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”
But the fact that Trump routinely insults our servicemen and -women isn’t the point either, though similar comments by any Democratic candidate would have forced him or her from the race and ended his or her career. Veterans are sacrosanct, except when one monster dismisses their service and sacrifice as pointless.
The point is that nothing Trump says about the veterans — no disparagement, no disrespect, no slight, slander, or snub — has any effect whatsoever on his support from that group.
In 2016, veterans voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton 61 percent to 34 percent, and though four years later Trump’s lead had declined to 54 percent to 44 percent over Biden, it was still significant. By 2019, in a Pew Charitable Trust survey, veteran support for Trump was still strong: 57 percent of veterans approved of him, versus only 41 percent of all adults. Moreover, nearly half of veterans said that Trump “respects veterans ‘a great deal’” while only 30 percent of all adults agreed.
Last year Pew found veterans supporting Republicans, though not Trump specifically, overwhelmingly — 63 percent, with that support strong across all age groups: 57 percent of veterans 18-49, 65 percent of veterans over 50. And in a poll just issued by Change Research, Trump, for all his criticisms of veterans, leads Harris among them, 54 percent to 44 percent, and among active-duty servicemen, 49 percent to 44 percent.
And there is anecdotal evidence. Despite Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard — service that one might have thought would provide some traction with his fellow Guardsmen — Trump received a rousing reception from the National Guard Association in Detroit last month, even drawing laughs for gibing at Walz and getting cheers — cheers — when he said that the voters will “fire Kamala and Joe on November 5.”
“We need him back,” one former guardsman told The New York Times. Another, asked about the abuse Trump has heaped on our soldiers, said, “We could sit here and nitpick. But what’s the big picture?” A good question: The big picture is of a would-be dictator with five deferments who wants to deploy the National Guard domestically against American citizens. And they love him.
It is fair, I think, to say that despite Trump’s contribution to the deaths of their fallen comrades, and his general disrespect for the law — he is, after all, a convicted felon — rank-and-file police officers are likely to vote for Trump in overwhelming numbers this fall.
But it isn’t only the veterans who behave as if they are the suckers Trump makes them out to be. Trump’s minions assaulted police officers at the Capitol on January 6, injuring 140 of them, while he sat by watching on TV in his office, and then Trump cheered his MAGAites for it, even promising to pardon them for it.
Meanwhile, even as Republicans insist America is undergoing a massive crime wave conducted by immigrants, violent crime is at record lows under Biden — another factor that one might think police would appreciate.
Still, Trump has won endorsements from the International Union of Police Associations and from police unions in Florida and Michigan, and awaits likely endorsements from the National Fraternal Order of Police and the New York Police Benevolent Association, both of which endorsed him four years ago.
It is fair, I think, to say that despite Trump’s contribution to the deaths of their fallen comrades, and his general disrespect for the law — he is, after all, a convicted felon — rank-and-file police officers are likely to vote for Trump in overwhelming numbers this fall.
And then there are white blue-collar workers — the very basis of Trump’s support, the folks without whom Trump would be out begging some two-bit cable network to revive The Apprentice. One would think that Trump would be especially mindful of them. Instead, he has the same contempt for them that he has for veterans and police officers. His one-time press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the Democratic National Convention that he calls them “basement dwellers.”
And in his recent interview with anti-union kingpin Elon Musk, Trump heaped praise upon him for illegally firing striking workers:
I love it. You’re the greatest. … I mean, I look at what you do. You just walk in and you just say, “You wanna quit?” They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, “That’s OK, you’re all gone. … Every one of you is gone.”
He couldn’t even bring himself to celebrate Labor Day last Monday. Now there is a president for the working man. And yet, white men without college degrees — the so-called white working stiffs — prefer Trump over Harris by 27 points in the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll.
And, finally, there are women. No political candidate in my recollection has so denigrated women as this misogynist. As I have written previously, he clearly loathes them and fears them. He attacks every powerful woman with childish epithets: “stupid,” “nasty,” “garbage,” “ugly.” And yet, in a recent ABC News-Ipsos poll, Trump leads Kamala Harris among white women by two points, which at least is down from 13 points up in the last polling. As Harris said at her convention speech, referencing Trump’s proposal for a national anti-abortion czar: “They are out of their minds.” Well, they are not the only ones. So, it seems, are many white women.
Why Do They Lick the Hand That Beats Them?
In some ways, the preference of these groups for a man who clearly has nothing but contempt for them, for a man who has done nothing whatsoever to serve their self-interest, may be the ultimate question of the November election.
How, in God’s name, can you ridicule, insult, revile, and detest voters, and have them not only keep coming back for more, but liking it, even reveling in it? It is a form of political sado-masochism of a sort I have never seen before.
It is certainly the most perplexing mystery of the election. I get that Trump believes, as he once famously said, he could shoot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue in New York and not lose a vote. I get it. He could. He has already shot democracy in broad daylight and hasn’t lost a vote. But how, in God’s name, can you ridicule, insult, revile, and detest voters, and have them not only keep coming back for more, but liking it, even reveling in it? It is a form of political sado-masochism of a sort I have never seen before.
Come on, Donald. Keep slapping me.
Obviously, their attachment to Trump has to be deep, very deep, not only to tolerate his insults, but also to seem to enjoy those disparagements. Since all politics is really a matter of what one prioritizes, they have to have found something in Trump that they prioritize more than their own self-interest and even their own self-respect — though it is Democrats, we have heard for years, who are the ones who allegedly disrespect the white uneducated men constituting the base of MAGA, and it is Democrats who are often warned to be kinder to the Trump voters.
So what is it? The commentariat, ever fearful of being on the wrong side of MAGA and always reaching for the easiest explanation at hand, keeps telling us that Trumpistas are financially distressed, that inflation has brutalized them, that they are with Trump because they are nostalgic for better days, his days. But this, we now know, is pure horse manure.
The economy is basically at full employment, inflation is finally tamed, prices are coming down (though there are items for which prices will never come down; I remember when a Big Mac cost a quarter, but I don’t sit in despair that those days are gone and won’t return), growth is healthy, and, as for nostalgia, these folks must be suffering from terminal amnesia.
The Trump years, including the pre-pandemic ones, were pretty terrible, any way you look at it. In any case, there is no economic reason to withstand the abuse and contempt with which Trump lacerates his own supporters. Eggs are up, so let Trump desecrate Arlington or tell us we are “basement dwellers.”
The commentariat is also big on laying Trump’s support to a larger and much vaguer sense of dissatisfaction among his supporters — the sense that the country has somehow failed them, that it hasn’t delivered on its promises to them, that they are lost.
As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a good man but a longtime apologist for the Trumpistas, put it in a recent column, “Working-class Americans have a right to feel betrayed,” as he chides Democrats, “increasingly … the party of the educated,” for scorning those less-educated Trump voters. They are “angry and frustrated,” he says, at how the “fabric in many blue-collar communities has unraveled,” though what they really seem to be angry and frustrated about, given the racism and misogyny that accompanies Trumpism, is the ever-increasing threat that white male hegemony will end, and that they will be disempowered and dispossessed.
Nevertheless, there is, I think, a kernel of an answer to the question of why these folks accept abuse: They accept it in return for the retribution Trump promises. I have always felt, and have discussed in past substacks, how important the idea of disruption — or, more accurately, destruction — has been in the appeal of Donald Trump. Trump trashes everything — traditions, laws, institutions, alliances, codes of conduct, the Constitution, and, above all, morality.
A Passion for Destruction
Trump has a penchant and a passion for destruction, which he justifies as vengeance against a system, namely America, that he regards as corrupt because elements of it have pushed so hard against him. And this is a place where Trump’s anger and frustration meld with those of his uneducated white male supporters who also condemn the country. They want to see the system torn down too. They want to see it all reduced to rubble.
Kristof compares these people to Franklin Roosevelt’s Forgotten Men at the beginning of the Great Depression. But there is no comparison. Those Forgotten Men — those men who suddenly found themselves adrift, through no fault of their own but because the economy betrayed them — turned to FDR for relief. Trump’s supporters have turned on America and their fellow Americans for revenge.
Justified or not, theirs is a big grievance — one, I think, large enough to tempt them to accept Trump’s disdain for them. They hate America, or, at least, they hate what America is becoming: more diverse, more tolerant, more equal, more sensitive, freer. Trump hates that America too. And I am fairly convinced that when the dominant national temper is one of hate, it tends to spill over — not only from them, but to them.
Trump has no self-control. When he launches one of his hateful rants, it rolls over everything and everyone, including people who are Trump supporters. You can’t separate things out. So, yes, Trump maligns veterans, police (if they are doing their duty to protect and defend), the working-class (who, one might guess, he disdains because they are obtuse enough to fall for his act), and women; and they are engorged with his hate as he himself is.
Trump’s contempt for them is the price they pay for his contempt for all the other things they likely despise. The reason that the pundits have such a hard time latching onto this — besides the fact that you can’t really call some 45 percent of the electorate hateful in the media, even if they are — is that it isn’t as simple to define as financial distress or cultural dissatisfaction over abortion or immigration or guns or voting rights. It is far more slippery. It is psychological — a massive national epidemic of hate.
But that overload of hatred toward a nation that keeps drifting away from them doesn’t explain everything. In order to let Trump abuse you, and like it, you have to take one more step. You have to disengage from your own primary identity or one of your major identities: veterans from being veterans, police men and women from being police officers, working-class whites from being working-class, white women from being women. You have to surrender that identity to a superseding one — a new, larger identity than your previous one. Otherwise, you would never tolerate Trump degrading your “people.”
You tolerate it because there is something more important to you — a higher priority. You tolerate it because Trump hates most of what you hate, fears most of what you fear, and says that he will return the nation to what it was when you ruled it. You tolerate it because you have a more profound allegiance to something else now. How do we know? We know, in some measure, because Black veterans don’t support Trump. Their identity still seems bound up with race and service.
And this embrace of a larger identity, I believe, is the real answer to the mystery of why Trump can piss on his supporters, and they will call it rain. It’s because when he pisses, they don’t really think he is pissing on them anymore. Donald Trump has been called a cult. He has been called a religion. He may be both. But in these capacities what he has really done is create not only a new identity, but a new social fabric, to use Kristof’s construction — or perhaps anti-social fabric — for his supporters. MAGA bundles all their frustrations, angers, hatreds in one place.
It is one-stop shopping for antagonists. And it obliterates both other identities, to which one is now only nominally connected, and other communities to which one may have been connected, like the bonds among veterans, police, working-class, and women. Trump’s supporters find themselves in MAGA the way, I suppose, disaffected Germans found themselves in Nazism.
This is no mean feat, but then MAGA is no small movement. Sad to say, it is very likely the largest community in America now. It has destroyed American politics as we have known it, and has destroyed America itself as we have known it. And now it has destroyed the traditional bonds of identity and community as we have known them.
Donald Trump is a monster. In ravaging those bonds and replacing them with another, larger, uglier bond, he has created tens of millions of monsters in his image: an army of monsters whose hatreds are so large they obscure Trump’s hatred of them.
Which is precisely why Kamala Harris must win this fall.
Reprinted, with permission, from Neal Gabler’s substack, Farewell, America.
