My Friend the Trump Supporter

Entirely by accident, I found out one of my friends was a Trump supporter. Someone had sent me one of the "Vote Him Away" videos.  I forwarded it to almost everyone in my address book, and 99% of my recipients expressed delight.  My friend represents the other one percent.

A very good writer, someone whose work has been nominated for a prestigious prize and someone who teaches at a university, my friend doesn't fit the typical profile. He's neither wealthy nor uneducated. 

Initially my questions were rebuffed--until I made it clear I wasn't criticizing him. I just wanted to understand the appeal of Donald Trump to a person who seems far more intelligent and aware of the world than the president he admires. 

If I discovered anything, it was fear: he thought the country would head for "Marxism and Socialism" without Trump. He didn't want free-loaders. What he didn't want to see, he wrote, was "socialism" in the sense of "industry run by the government and the ideas of competition and the potential for gain eliminated." He added that any such government interference "would bring about the end of America as I have come to know it. This is what I'm afraid of."

He believes "the media" suppresses "anything positive about the president." He believes "the president brokered two middle-east peace deals." He insists that Obama started the policy of separating children from parents (see Politico for a lengthy refutation).  He defended Trump's comment about pussy-grabbing as locker-room talk that's been exploited to harm his reputation. He suggested that "crass dialogue" on Sex and the City was just as bad, but perceived as feminist. He thought Trump's Charlottesville remarks had been selectively misquoted: "What he actually said was "There were very fine people on both sides, & I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists--because they shold be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists."

And COVID? Trump's refusal to wear a mask? My friend said that as the leader of the free world, of course the man would not wear one. He compared Trump to FDR, pointing out that FDR took care to hide the leg braces he wore after being crippled by polio. I couldn't resist pointing out that FDR didn't have a contagious disease. My friend did not reply. I don't expect him to do so, and perhaps he's no longer my friend. I ask myself how someone this sensitive to art and literature could come to such conclusions, but there's a long history of the very gifted having very strange ideas. How could Ezra Pound have said--have thought--the anti-Semitic things he apparently believed? Or wished that Roosevelt would get shot? 

Maybe the greater mystery is my own revulsion. I take one look at Trump and recoil--before he speaks, I know all he wants is admiration. I know he doesn't give a damn about anyone else. I know this from his face, his gestures, his voice--I know this without the daily horrors, each one so awful as to make us forget the thing he did the day before. I know he's cooking up some awful thing, that he'll assemble his thugs and try to buy the Republican party or run the government from some four-star secure location. But I hope I'm wrong, that he'll end up with a ball and chain and in an outfit that matches his fake tan.