Ex-Republicans and Trump

I have a friend, a middle aged financial advisor from Seattle, who grew up in a very conservative political culture in the Midwest, and who was a lifelong Republican until Trump came along. I’ve watched him move leftward over the past eight years, along with a couple of other friends with similar backgrounds. (These are all people I know from my internet Michigan football fandom, described in this book).

It’s been gratifying to see, but what always strikes me is how few of these people there seem to be. Trump got 11 million more votes in 2020 than four years earlier! Basically 45% of the electorate is completely in his pocket, and it’s obvious nothing can change that. (A FAU poll today showed him beating DeSantis by 24 points . . . among Florida Republicans).

Here’s his perspective on what Trump has wrought:

It really is hard to overstate how much blame *can* be laid at the feet of Trump.

I mean, he got me to vote for Hillary Clinton. He was that fucking bad. And that was eight years ago. He is quite literally the worst politician in the history of this country. The worst thing he did was make half the population of the country hate the other half. He’s seriously a mountainous piece of shit. The worst.

Maybe all these divisions, bigotry, racism, xenophobia, always existed, simmering below the lid. At different times in history they have all popped up at one time or another. But the country stayed sensible for the most part, the shitheads like Joseph McCarthy or George Wallace or whomever had their time in the sun, and then they went away, rightly cast into darkness by the vast majority of people. Not fucking Trump though. He tapped into an anger and a resentment and a grievance in a way that no other politician ever has. He tapped into it and then opened the spigot and it is absolutely gushing now. And it hasn’t just affected Republicans. Everyone is angrier now, more acerbic, quicker to insult, full of rage and hate. It happens here every day.

But make no mistake about who was the prime mover. It was Trump. He is ass cancer on the body of this country and it metastasized. Man do I hate that fucker.

Hating Hillary is a right wing tic that I’ve never really understood, but hey kill that calf and call the family round.

Still I think this is pretty on the money. Trump has an amazing ability to make everybody he comes into contact with, including his opponents, worse people than they would otherwise be. It’s true he’s to a significant extent a symptom of what the Republican party has been turning into for several decades — if he didn’t exist it would have been necessary at some point to invent him — but his unique awfulness as a human being has also had a profound causal effect on American politics and culture, of the most dire sort imaginable.

But the remarkable extent to which so few Republicans/conservatives/moderate right wingers have rejected him is quite sobering.