Have a question for Matt Labash, ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt, Not to be a sore winner, but after the results of this historic and unlikely election, what do you #NeverTrump’ers have to say for yourselves now?
Andrew Miller
So you thought Bill Kristol was saying “#NeverTrump”? He was actually saying, “#4everTrump!” It was a noisy election cycle. I can see how you might have misheard.
I’ve never cared to technically deem myself part of the #NeverTrump movement for two reasons:
1. I refuse to speak in hashtags, on account of my not being a 13-year-old girl.
2. I don’t care for “movements,” which connote groupthink, and I think faster alone. Plus, I’d look like a dork wearing an angry keffiyeh, toting around a “Not my president” sign.
That said, I suppose I have openly advocated against Mr. Trump for some time, now. An act of ungenerosity, if I’m being honest. After all, for decades, Trump has selflessly provided me with laughs. Sometimes, even intentionally. And I have repaid his kindness by mocking him. By pornographically detailing his Trumpiest moments, by questioning his bi-curiosity for film vampire/heartthrob Robert Pattinson, by writing pieces with titles like “A Chump on the Stump”, by describing his hair as “an abandoned bird’s nest” and as a “mac-n-cheese colored nutria that was hit by an oil truck.”
What can I say? I’m not proud of this. But all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
I am not, however, the #NeverTrumpkin of Sean Hannity’s stereotypes. Unlike Karate Kid Hannity himself, with his $29 million salary and private jet, I do not live as a member of the media elite. I refuse to go on television, even if I watch way too much of it. I live well outside the Beltway in a blood-red, old tobacco-farming county, and some of my near neighbors still farm. I regularly stop by Walmart, not to write anthropological pieces on the hoi polloi, but to pick up a carton of milk, and Liquid Drano, and Betts fishing poppers. (Trust me Blue Staters, they have everything at Walmart.) I not only know and love and respect tons of Trump supporters, I’m related to them. Roughly 90 percent of my family voted for Trump, some reluctantly, some enthusiastically. And even though I refused to vote for Hillary, as well—I may be stubborn, but I’m not insane—I endured many windy lectures from them on why I had a moral obligation to join the Orange Revolution.
Several months into the campaign, I took one of those online candidate-selector tests, where you answer questions to see which candidate most closely aligns with you. My far-and-away ideological soul mate? That’s right: Donald J. Trump. We agreed with each other 91 percent of the time. Apparently, I am an angry little populist. Who knew? I mean sure, I occasionally read a Pat Buchanan column, and say, “He has a fair point.” And I’m against foreign adventurism. And I don’t think it’s racist to build a wall or enforce your borders. Plenty of non-racist countries have been enforcing their borders for years. And I don’t think our techno-utopian globaloney-spewing elites are doing our middle class, or what’s left of our working class, any favors.
So it’s not even what Donald Trump stood for that I was against. It’s how he stood for it. There’s no need to run down the litany of infractions. Everyone, by now—both supporter and foe—has them committed to memory. But more broadly, Trump spent a year and a half of his wall-to-wall coverage insulting people, berating people, threatening people, grabbing people’s p-ssies, if his taped confession and his accusers are to be believed. On occasion, as he insulted some of these people, the vengeful partisan in me stood up and cheered. Because some of these were not people I agree with, and who have frequently shown no qualms about inflicting their own worldview on me. But my better angels knew better, whispering to me, “This is wrong. The people that he is doing this to aren’t just anyone. They’re your fellow citizens.” I don’t have to agree with them. I don’t even have to particularly like them. Often, I don’t. But I do need to afford them the same respect that we’re all due.
The incontrovertible fact that the other side often doesn’t do the same is no justification for how we conduct ourselves. We choose our sides, presumably, because we hope our side is better. Not better at being jackasses. But better at being better. If everyone got into a better contest, instead of a jackass contest, America wouldn’t have half the problems she does now. But we are going about it all wrong. Approaching each other with hostility, instead of humility, which is why Donald Trump, two months before taking office, is already getting blamed for things he hasn’t done, as his presidency promises to be a four-year rolling protest.
The great theologian and writer, Eugene Peterson, distilled how we should humbly approach the world and our own worst selves: “A ruthless honesty will always leave us shattered by our inadequacy. The world is a frightening place. If we are not a little bit scared, we simply don’t know what is going on. If we are pleased with ourselves, we either don’t have very high standards, or have amnesia in regard to the central reality, for ‘nobody is getting by with anything, believe me’ (Heb. 10:31). Pascal said, ‘Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.”
I am a lifelong evangelical. And I watched a lot of good people—fellow evangelicals—bend themselves into logic contortionists to make excuses for Trump’s inexcusable behavior. I’m ashamed of them. The same way good, honest feminists should’ve been ashamed of Bill Clinton’s behavior back in the ’90s. Though they uniformly weren’t. One immutable law of politics/morality seems to be that unforgivable sin is instantly more forgivable when we find out that the sinner shares our Supreme-Court-pick preferences.
And if I dismount my moral high horse for a second, and revert back to my Southern Baptist once-in-grace-always-in-grace upbringing, I have to admit that there is no such thing as unforgiveable sin. We’re all in need of grace, as even the Donald himself seems to acknowledge, in gracious tweets such as: “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11.”
So where does that leave us with President-elect Trump? Can I support him? I guess I sort of have to. Throughout the campaign, I kept hearing people bellyache about how there were no good choices. Actually, that’s not true. There were plenty. More choices than ever. We just didn’t choose any of them. By the time we got down to the actual business of voting in the general, there were arguably no good choices. But now, there’s no choice at all. Or rather, our choice has been chosen. And it is President-elect Trump.
So I am pulling for him. For the next four years, he’s the nation’s QB. And if he gets sacked, or throws multiple interceptions, it’s not just bad for him, it’s bad for America. The cockeyed optimist in me, then, is both hoping and praying for the best. Though the realist in me is bracing for the worst. Not based on any personal animus but on the prodigious body of evidence that Trump has made readily available to us over the last several decades of public life. Trump is a raging narcissist and a dissembler and a man with no impulse control. If he can control his own worst impulses for the next four years, that will beat his old record by about three years and 364 days. He has lived this way for seven decades. And generally speaking, people don’t change. Not that much.
But to his many detractors, that doesn’t mean good things can’t come of his presidency. A minister friend of mine whom I greatly respect, and who is a Trump supporter, admits there’s a lot of rank hypocrisy in evangelical defenses of Trump. But he also posits that we always get in trouble when we create our own personalized “hierarchies of sin”, usually while judging others. Many of the great men of Scripture, he reminds me, were often complete moral failures. Noah was a drunken nudist. Abraham was an adulterer. Moses was a murderer. Paul was a murderer. David was an adulterer and a murderer. (For whatever reason, God seems to have a soft spot for adulterers/stone-cold killers, Trump having only committed the first sin, not the second—that we know of.)
This is not to suggest that Trump is a King David or Apostle Paul in the making. He’s probably just an orange guy with a lot of ambition, and is now the dog who caught the car. He’s likely more scared than his detractors are of him having to actually take office and govern. All I’m suggesting is that history is replete with good things coming from extremely flawed people. (Half of our founders, after all, were slaveholders, about the worst thing you can be—and yet, they managed to stand up the best system of government in the history of civilization.)
This notion returns me to Eugene Peterson, who has also written: “Each human being is an inseparable union of necessity and freedom. There is no human being who is not useful with a part to play in what God is doing. And there is no human being who is not unique with special lines and colors and forms distinct from anyone else.” Special colors? Peterson wrote these words in 1983. But maybe he was reading Trump’s mail.
If there’s one thing I’m immediately grateful to Trump for, it’s for returning Hillary Clinton to civilianhood and ending the Clinton family’s political designs, perhaps forever. (Assuming Chelsea isn’t inflicted on us at a later date.) I’ve never been a fan of Hillary, and am looking forward to her returning to a quiet life of doing what she does best: playing with her granddaughter, lying, and looting the coffers of the Clinton Foundation. She might still be a problem, but she is no longer our problem.
But in her large-hearted and gracious concession speech, Hillary said something beautiful and true. Maybe it was by accident, since she’s in the habit of saying neither. Points to her, in any case, for what might have been the finest moment of her political career. She said: “We have seen that our nation is more deeply divided than we thought. But I still believe in America, and I always will. And if you do, then we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead. Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power. We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.”
I’ve said a lot of horribly mean things about Hillary over the years, calling her everything from “Queen of the Spelling Bee” to “Ambition on Cankles.” But I’ll give her this: I believe she genuinely loves her country. And I believe Donald J. Trump genuinely does, too.
So here’s hoping God has mercy on all of the above.
Have a question for Matt Labash, ask him at [email protected] or click here.
