Look what you made me do

The story of why I voted for the guy who started all this almost 9 years ago

Welcome to the bloodbath. Hard to believe it’s already been 3,199 days—that’s 89 days short of nine years, or 105 months give or take a leap-year—since the golden escalator ride that changed history and sanity in American politics. Time flies; we were having so much fun. I was told my assignment was to explain why I ended up voting for the ringmaster at the heart of this circus, and write on the wall what I’ve learned from the experience, a thousand times.

Prison Photo by Ron Lach : https://www.pexels.com/photo/bed-sink-and-dumbbells-in-cell-10473676/; Tally marks icons created by Icon Hubs - Flatiron

I wrote 4,910 words on the subject, and I wasn’t even trying hard. I could have written 10,000 quite easily. I wrote so much that my co-writers on this site begged me by all that is precious and holy to stop, and questioned how all that could possibly fit in the format of a Substack where we are generally challenged to provide a six-minute read. David, Jay and I are truly grateful about the growing number of you who read us, and do so nearly as religiously as bathing (take it as a compliment, ok?).

My only defense here is to point accusingly and scream, like Donald Sutherland in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It’s not my fault! Look what you made me do! Fortunately for this site, I have been advised not to share the entire thing, which I admit writing was more emotionally wrenching than I expected. I’m talking about distilling hundreds of articles and posts I’ve penned over nearly nine years that defined my attitudes and thinking at any particular point in time.

Paragraph after paragraph about Donald J. Trump; I felt like I was recreating that scene in “The Shining” where Shelley Duvall discovers the typewriter. Or that some evil professor recruited me in a cruel experiment to measure how spewing daily content about a guy who forced John Hughes to include him in a scene with Macaulay Culkin—because it was his hotel—would affect the brain and emotional stability of the writer. Thousands of us fell for it and are still bound to our fate like Ahab to the white whale. I can’t even write a proper literary metaphor. I’m crippled.

Don’t worry, I am not going to share 4,910 words with you—here. Maybe at some point I’ll find a way to put the whole thing online. Or maybe I’ll expand it to 10,000 words. Or 100,000 words: a whole book. Why not? Everyone else and their goldfish has published something on the topic. The New York Times lost count sometime in 2020.

However, you have invested your time reading this. I owe you something beyond words to the effect of “this is all you get, the kitchen is closed.” So as not to waste your time here, since you’ve made it this far, I am going to give you the abstract. The bones, so you can begin filling in the flesh and sinews and blood on your own. Macabre, yes. But fitting.

I voted for Trump in the 2020 general election. It was the only time I cast a ballot in any election for him. And it’s the last time I ever will. That’s the super TL;DR version, and if you stop here, you can make all your accusations based on purity of essence, or whatever religious standard you keep in your heart of hearts. I won’t blame you.

It’s complicated

I remember Christmastime of 2015 when a quite elegant Christmas card from Trump’s campaign arrived in my mailbox. It was really tasteful and remains the only time I’ve ever gotten a memorable Christmas card from a political campaign. It’s stuff like this, along with the absolute thuggery exhibited by many Trump supporters online, and the cruel, stupid things Trump himself has spouted both in public, and written about by those who heard them in private conversations, that muddies the otherwise clearly polluted water.

It's not like the idiocy has personally ruined me. I’ve never had people camp out on my lawn, or call 911 from a spoofed phone pretending to be me, confessing I murdered my family (known as SWATting), or corner me at an airport (or in an airport bathroom!) to tell me just how much they disagreed with me about Trump. I’ve never had a family gathering ruined by political discussions; I’ve not lost any friends (that I know of) because of MAGA. I did leave a writing gig in 2015 because I believed they had become too Trumpy, but they weren’t paying me a whole lot anyway. And I still write for a quite Trump-friendly website, but to their credit, they haven’t exercised editorial control over my views.

It is further complicated, because I have no ax to grind. There’s folks who bleed MAGA and I’m friends with them because they’re cool people. There’s others who wear T-shirts featuring a middle finger to Trump who are genuinely fun people to hang with and whose company I enjoy. There are also flaming, self-important, a-holes on both sides of the Trump fence. My affinity for you—or anyone—is not determined by your opinion of Trump. I’d rather disagree about sports, or cars, or music, or a whole host of things, than one guy who was president for four years, and never held another government position in his life. That’s not true of every issue of course: if you’re using “anti-Zionism” as a mask for your disdain for Jews, I will cut you off in a heartbeat.

Dear Donald

From the summer of 2015 until his ascension to the Republican nomination, I wrote dozens of articles about Trump for The Resurgent, Erick Erickson’s website. I wrote about the very real relationship of Trump to the fictional Biff Tannen; the Republicans and the Know-Nothings; the Christians and the fable of the scorpion and the frog.

I wrote a break-up letter I titled “Dear Donald, it’s not you, it’s me.”

“I wanted to be just like you, Donald.” But then I changed and became a decent person.

I wrote: “The Trumpian call to action is one of violence and venom. It poisons our society with an evil that cannot easily be separated out and cleansed once it's running in our national veins. Even Marco Rubio took joy in mean-spirited battle with you. Revenge feels good, and you're a maestro in the vengeance philharmonic and would infect our entire country with your evil bacteria.”

In mid-March, I had gotten myself quoted by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times, in a piece I titled “Our Better Angels: The Case for Saving the GOP.” I (correctly) predicted that “allowing the GOP to move into Trumpism will lead away” from being on “God’s side.” By the end of March, I allowed that “Trumpism is a cult.” Based on what we’ve all seen in the years since, I would challenge anyone to persuasively argue against it.

Deus ex machina

I thought Hillary Clinton, a terrible candidate, would win. “When the mothership arrives, I’ll be proven wrong.” Yeah, the mother-something mothership came. But not before I had wavered. I asked God for a deus ex machina: “A MacGyver solution. An Indiana Jones cliffhanger escape. A Rocky victory.”

Trump was a villain, but even a villain deserves a chance, right? I did think that.

And then I went to Trump’s inauguration, and there I saw the scope and size of The Resistance; the 2,066 chartered buses for the Women’s March on Washington; the staged violence; the $15/hour Craigslist-hired sign-carriers who were instructed to shout profanities at Trump supporters. I saw the regular people who drove themselves to Washington—not the 3,000 buses that brought 1.8 million to Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post led its January 20^th inauguration coverage with “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.” How could anyone who voted for Trump, or beheld the manufactured spectacle of violence at his inauguration have come away with any impression other than the mainstream media is the enemy of that administration, and by extension anyone who doesn't join them in their opposition?

I became one of the deplorables, because I refused to fully embrace the Resistance, and its cynical cottage industry of grift and deception.

COVID lies and the Kraken

When I received a notice from my kids’ school district that as of Monday, March 16, 2020, all schools are closed until further notice, I asked myself if Trump had caused this panic. I wrote: “These are not normal signs of worry. They are evidence of mass panic.”

I blamed Trump for it: “everything the president said last night was either false, misspoken, or pie-in-the-sky. In our heart of hearts, we know we can't trust what he said because just days before he was telling us that COVID-19 was no worse than the common cold.” I knew Trump wanted to fix the problem by Easter, but I also knew it wasn’t possible, and Trump’s remarks were damaging the nation.

The Kraken was not (and is not) real. But in November, 2020, I voted for Donald J. Trump for president.

My reasons were simple. I felt that Trump would be much less dangerous confined in the legal prison of the White House and the federal menagerie than what he would do outside the government while trying to regain that power. I felt that the continuing Resistance, the “Deep State” and the existing structures of government would contain Trump, despite his attempts to use executive orders to gain more direct control of federal agencies.

What I didn’t see coming was January 6^th. I didn’t see the full effect of the Kraken, and the number of people who were willing to come to Washington, D.C. to make their belief in it written in blood and felonies. David Thornton wrote in this website that “no one has a clear window into the mind of Donald Trump,” on December 11, 2020.

Two days before Christmas, I read a tweet by then-Rep. Jody Hice (Georgia Republican): “Big meeting today with (at)realDonaldTrump, (at)VP, the president’s legal team, (at)freedomcaucus and other Members of Congress. I will lead an objection to Georgia’s electors on Jan 6. The courts refuse to head the President’s legal case. We’re going to make sure the People can!”

I warned in a post: “I don’t think Trump is that crazy to force such a thing. But the fact that so many are scared it could happen is discouraging.” I was wrong. He’s that crazy, and more.

Yada yada

Another 2,000 words on how crazy Trump is could easily turn into 20,000. But the guy has more lives than a houseful of black cats.

The nation has a problem with 15 million Trump supporters, some of whom hear the word “bloodbath” without context and their own blood rises in an unhealthy way. Sure, the obvious context of Trump’s statement is about auto manufacturing jobs. But the subtext is that Trump used that word and had no problem with the nation hearing it—the mainstream media is his greatest megaphone.

That’s it. That’s all you get today. The kitchen really is closed. Yes, there is a lot more, but as I said, not here.

If you want to read the whole unabridged thing, complete with many, many examples and long form quotes, let me know. I’ll find a way to publish it.

My conclusion is that I made a wrong bet. I bet wrong because I underestimated the guy who is now running for president again. We all think he will lose, but we’ve all been wrong before.