Sunday morning’s Los Angeles Times featured a column by Scott Jennings (“Why Republicans will stick with Trump in 2020 — even if they don’t love his behavior“), which offers an analogy to explain why Trump supporters aren’t budging. The piece begins with these words:
Recently, a close friend and fellow Republican told me he was “personally shocked at what the evangelicals have been willing to stomach” from Donald Trump. I’m not shocked at all.
My friend’s sentiment — a variation on the empty “if Obama had done this, Republicans would’ve impeached him” — has become a staple of Democrats and Never Trumpers. “Are you ready to turn on him yet?” Republicans are asked over and over.
No one ever says yes.
Jennings sets up the analogy like so:
Imagine standing at a train station in Louisville, Ky., staring at the schedule board. You want to get to Los Angeles, and you have a choice of two trains — one headed to San Diego and one headed to Washington, D.C. Neither gets you exactly where you’re heading, but there’s really only one choice as the alternative to San Diego is to go precisely the wrong way.
Even if the San Diego train sometimes hits bumpy tracks, and the conductor comes on the PA and says crude and dumb stuff, and there are people on the train you really wish would get off: It is still taking you basically where you want to go.
To the average Republican voter, like the passenger on that train, the destination is what matters.
Let’s acknowledge up front: the analogy has the virtue of accurately characterizing the intractable nature of Trump’s support. Trump’s evangelical base is no more likely to get off the Trump train, than I would be to board a train (or plane or any other conveyance) heading in the opposite direction of my intended destination.
But as usual with Republican talking points in defense of Donald Trump, the analogy – indeed the whole column – serves to divert attention from inconvenient facts, rather than to illuminate the consternation of Jennings’ close friend at what “the evangelicals have been willing to stomach” from Trump.
The first sentence references evangelicals. Of course, if we wish to be accurate, we’ll note that it is white evangelicals who are stuck on Trump (though the 2020 Trump campaign is making a concerted effort to generate the support of Latino evangelicals as well, especially families who have immigrated from south of the border – such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – who are “leery of what they see as left-wing ideology.”). Jennings – who at one point offers fleeting acknowledgement that it is mostly men who comprise Trump’s base, not women – doesn’t clarify that it is white men who predominate.
That detail does not serve Jennings’ analogy, but it is surely of some relevance for understanding the unshakable support of a man who revels in insulting women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and – yes – even faith communities that happen to lie outside the GOP base.
Other details in the fable also serve to obscure critical issues in the real world. Jennings describes a bumpy ride and crude, dumb comments by the conductor on the train. But the President of the United States is the leader of the country – of the whole country, of Americans of all hues and backgrounds and convictions – not just of his partisan base.
Trump has been insulting half the country since his campaign began and – after a tiresome year in office when pundits kept professing to see a pivot – it is now incontrovertible that Donald Trump rejects a unifying role as president. (Fun contrast: even in 2020, as impeachment looms and an impulsive Trump gambles with our security in the Middle East, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president has repeatedly struck a chord for bipartisanship.)
Trump is a divider. By choice. That’s far and away more consequential than an obnoxious functionary hurling insults while collecting tickets.
Trump’s critics aren’t pining away for a “nicer conductor.” One might have expected believers of the Gospel (“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”) to have concerns for the Americans Trump has derided and threatened. But, among Trump’s base, no one ever says enough already.
Moreover, Trump’s talk – in the Oval Office, on the White House lawn near a waiting helicopter, in phone calls to Fox News Channel, at rallies before his fans, and in his Twitter account – is hardly the most significant reason to oppose him.
He is President of the United States. His words command generals, cabinet secretaries, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and much more. He has separated children from their parents, cast aside allies who have stood with us for three quarters of a century, and embraced enemies who have contempt for democratic government and seek to do us harm. In every instance (and we could easily cite additional actions) his behavior is diametrically opposed to values and practices that Republicans and evangelicals formerly embraced – and not so long ago.
This gets us back to ‘the empty “if Obama had done this, Republicans would’ve impeached him”’ idea, and closer to the astonishment of Jennings’ Republican friend. That friend might well have taken evangelicals, his fellow Republicans, at their word when they professed the importance of personal morality in our nation’s leaders. Jennings’ reply: “To a Christian conservative voter, the individual behavior of an imperfect human pales against the importance of protecting human life.”
That anti-abortion stance and the fear of folks at our southern border seeking refuge are the twin issues that Jennings cites – and I agree that both are central, especially the latter, to evangelicals’ embrace of Trump. But Jennings’ rhetoric suggests a third motivator. A more toxic and pernicious factor, which explains, more than a couple of specific issues, why Republican evangelicals will overlook so much of what Trump does, no matter how antithetical it is to traditional morality and old-fashioned patriotism.
Jennings references Democrats in a handful of passages, disparaging the opposition party, not as citizens who oppose Trump’s policies out of conviction, but as cranks who harbor unreasonable views. A sampling of the language employed: “extreme tilt to the left,” “the wild extremism of his would-be opponents,” and “how the Democrats became so radicalized.” (He also demeans GOP opponents of Trump as “Republicans who make a living hating Trump” as though money, not principle, explains their opposition. I’m confident, though, that Jennings and other pro-Trump Republicans are amply rewarded.)
Virtually all Trump fans in Congress, on TV, and in op-eds featured in print and on the internet delight in demonizing the opposition party. Jennings – who employs mild insults in a casually off-hand way, suitable for the mainstream media (as opposed to the conservative media universe), is a master of the genre. While more subtle than Fox News, he gets the point across.
If Trump’s critics aren’t nutty, what are they getting at? The fierce opposition to Trump goes beyond rude, belligerent language. Alarm from small-d and big-D democrats goes beyond disagreement regarding conventional political issues. Jennings asserts:
Most of Trump’s governance has been what you’d expect from any Republican president (conservative judges, lower taxes, deregulation, an embrace of pro-life policies), and the wild extremism of his would-be opponents is causing some center-right voters who were lukewarm on Trump three years ago to feel closer to him than ever before.
“Most of” leaves out what’s most important to constitutional governance and the rule of law. It leaves out mutual toleration and forbearance as critical virtues for democratic societies (How Democracies Die). It leaves out the fundamental reasons for the intensity of the determined opposition to Trump: the obvious, undeniable ways that Donald Trump stands apart from every previous Republican president in the history of our republic. Jennings could count the ways as well as I could, but he doesn’t.
Instead, Jennings at once overlooks the reasons Democrats (and Republican Never Trumpers) oppose the President and places the opposition as beyond the pale – a well-worn Republican strategy.
That strategy has worked remarkably well. So well that folks who rely on traditional sources of information have found it hard to fathom how and why Republicans have gone all-in with Trump. Jennings’ Republican friend is “personally shocked” because – outside the conservative media bubble – Trump’s behavior (and the celebration of his behavior by the GOP base) clashes with notions of civility, respect, and good will toward other Americans. The two trains metaphor invokes an “intended destination,” but obscures the backdrop. Upon arriving, we get anti-abortion judges and strict border control, but also assaults on democratic institutions, and foreign policies that undermine U.S. security and American exceptionalism.
Why does the evangelical right wish to go there? Because they’ve been taught that Democrats are contemptible liberals/radicals/socialists. Because they’ve learned that the views of the opposition are outrageous and unworthy of a moment’s reflection. Because they have acquired the conviction that their political opponents lack legitimacy.
Democrats (and liberals et al.) aren’t the loyal opposition. They are the enemy.
And Trump stands against their enemies in the other party. Not so long ago Republicans regarded Democrats as fellow citizens who held opinions that were fit subjects for debate. Trump’s evangelical base dismisses this point of view.
Jennings’ parable of the two trains obscures what’s shocking about evangelical support for Trump, instead of bringing it into focus.
(Image: Trump Train on YouTube.)
