An appeal to Trump supporters ... by gimleteye

A fascinating report in The New Yorker by Peter Hessler: "How Trump is transforming rural America: In Colorado, the President's tone has started rubbing off on residents." One interviewee said, "What they hate about him, is what they hate about me."

This personalization of opposition to Trump feels foreign and strange, in part because the compression of internet-based cultural influences has stripped the capacity of rational discourse to surmount inchoate anger.

It is not "hate", for example, to have mortal fear for the future of our democracy. I do not "hate", but I do have sorrow and anger for the way many American voters and US senators like Mitch McConnell accepted and stirred the non-stop vilification of President Obama. On what evidence?

Trump has no policy prescriptions beyond a willingness to sacrifice ordinary Americans' welfare to make oligarchs richer, an intent to consolidate political power in the hands of a few, a disregard for basic rule of law and to allow predetermined outcomes to defeat fact and science. He regularly and routinely expresses the chaos and disorganization of an egocentric bully with no prior experience in government, an unwillingness to trust a bureaucracy unless they swear loyalty to him personally, without coherent programs or policies from immigration reform to individual rights, and climate change.

How do any of these objections match up with "hating" Trump supporters? Trump famously quipped, "I love the poorly educated." His supporters cheered. His was theirs "inside joke": that the elites they abhorred looked down on them.

These objections are not about looking down, or, feeling morally superior. There are real, factual and practical points that Trump supporters experience as much as the rest of the nation.

In Salon: Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy.

With Trump, one sees the new variant of this where a candidate can run by saying, “Look, we all know — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — that this isn’t really a democracy anymore.” He doesn’t use the words but basically says, “We all know this is really an oligarchy, so let me be your oligarch.” Although it’s nonsense and of course he’s a con man and will betray everyone, it makes sense only in this climate of inequality.

Trump hard liners in the alternate media universe are already spreading the counter-rumor: that a coup will emerge from the left. It is laughable, given that the left has no practical grasp on the levers of power or politics (except perhaps in the vacuum Trump is in the process of creating).

No. When "the center does not hold", as Yeats wrote a century ago, those closest to power will take as much as they can. It is Un-American at its core. That is what we object to, in Donald Trump, not out of hatred but for love of country.