There is nothing more loathsome to the average upper-crust liberal intellectual than an American holding Donald Trump’s book in one arm and the Bible in the other. At least, that’s what the stock image on Matt Bai’s column in the Washington Post tells us.
Matt Bai — political columnist and one-time screenwriter for a DOA film about Gary Hart called The Front Runner — is going to give the Left all the justification it needs to continue their ongoing hate campaign against ordinary Americans.
He writes:
But now? After the violent sacking of the Capitol? After Trump’s promise to behave like a dictator (well, okay, I guess if it’s only for a day)? After eight years of bigotry and baseness and flat-out lies?
To say that Trump’s voters aren’t aware of these things, or don’t fully comprehend them, or are firmly in the grip of misinformation, is to say that they’re simply fools. And I’ve met way too many rural Americans to believe that. If they’re ignorant, then their ignorance, at this point, is willful.
It’s a rebuttal to a column by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times pleading with the Left to find their humanity when it comes to Trump and MAGA.
It isn’t enough that Kristof writes:
By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him.
We can’t separate them, argues Bai. If they support Trump then they are the named enemy. They are not worthy of our empathy, at least not until — he hopes — Kamala Harris wins the presidency. Then, they might thaw out and treat them like they belong in the country they love. Don’t bet on it. Bai writes:
These voters don’t support Trump because they labor under some illusion that he’s going to rescue their communities — not anymore. They support him because he’s willing to blow up the country if it means teaching insufferable intellectuals a lesson, and so are they. It’s the same vengeful impulse that leads to autocracy in unequal societies all over the world. It is, at its core, unpatriotic, no matter how many flags you fly, or how many ways you try to rationalize it.
Are you starting to see why The Front Runner flopped?
The Front Runner is a rescue operation for Gary Hart’s legacy. It was the mean old media, you see, a media that has suddenly grown a conscience because now they don’t do their jobs of chasing stories lest they weaken a weak candidate like Gary Hart or Kamala Harris. Instead, they spread propaganda on why America should hate and fear Trump and his supporters lest they be accused of “normalizing” them.
The Front Runner was bad for the same reason The Washington Post and the New York Times are unreadable: their bias suffocates any practical purpose they might have otherwise had. It’s like spending time with the kid who sits in the front of the class, always raising his hand with the right answer. After a while, you overdose on the sanctimony.
The problem here, as usual, is not Matt Bai’s read of Trump supporters. It’s his read of Trump. It’s the idea that Trump has done things so horrific, so beyond the pale, that it would justify what has been done to him, to his family, to his staff, and yes, to his supporters, but so far, neither Bai nor anyone on the Left can name those things.
Just ask them. I do all the time. It’s followed by nervousness and outrage: " How can you ask me that?” they say. The reason is that they don’t know. They’ve been fed a steady diet of hatred and dehumanization by the Good People of MSNBC CNN, and the New York Times for so long they don’t know the reason they feel this way they just know they do.
Such is the power of propaganda.
Where are the mass graves? Why isn’t Hillary Clinton in jail? Why didn’t he order the military to take over the cities in the Summer of 2020 and instead patiently waited for the governors to call in the National Guard? Why didn’t he shut down CNN or MSNBC while he was in power? He’s never even come close to doing any of those things, nor has he threatened to. The Democrats have.
They are the ones who banned a sitting president from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. They are the ones who used the FBI to school journalists on how to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, not to mention subverting the First Amendment by forcing social media companies to censor speech. They threw Parler off of Amazon’s server. They threw Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro in jail because they refused to name names.
They indicted Trump four times. They are trying to bankrupt him. They raided Mar-a-Lago. They are now bringing back the Russia hysteria in an attempt to blunt the influence of people like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool. They put Tulsi Gabbard on a security watch list. Show me just one example of Trump doing anything like that. Just one.
Because the dirty little secret is that Trump never had any power. He never had the establishment backing him because he was the chaos agent who sought to untangle the massive industrial complex. Kamala Harris is the perfect establishment stooge. Why else would Dick Cheney vote for her?
And now AOC, Bernie Sanders, Green Day, Jack White and the Foo Fighters are on the same side. One can’t help but think of the end of 1984 - They won victory over themselves. They loved Dick Cheney.
They are the side that cancels and unpersons people for thought crimes and the side that riots and protests as violently as they want with zero consequences.
So, as usual, it comes down to something Trump said. That is really the great crime here and always has been. It’s the words that tumble out of his mouth because he’s not just a rambler but a provocateur and always has been.
And THAT is what people like Matt Bai, who carefully curates every word that comes out of his mouth so as not to offend a single person, is really angry about. If he has his balls in a vice and has to behave like a Puritan, then so must everyone else, even Trump.
Everyone on the Left knows this feeling. They know the fear that rises up every time they formulate a sentence. Every time. Do I capitalize the word Black? Is this offensive to trans people? Am I stereotyping homeless people? But rather than stand up to it, they crumple like a paper airplane in the rain.
Most of them are too ignorant to have bothered looking into the violence Trump supporters have endured since 2015, some of them even murdered, when people like Matt Bai felt it their patriotic duty to call Trump supporters “ists” and “phobes,” not caring what happened to them after that.
There is no coverage of the rising popularity of Trump among Black voters, like this woman on TikTok:
But Matt Bai doesn’t want you to care. They are not patriots. They are not even people. They are the bad things. The evil ones. The real threat. Fear them, destroy them, vanquish them.
But most of us want to free this country from the clutches of fanaticism. We want to save our kids from this bizarre new religion that has overtaken our schools and our culture.
Some of us feel like Trump is the only person who can stand up to totalitarian rule. And the only way out of this mess. We know what this government is by now. They’ve been in charge for 12 of the last 16 years. We want real change.
How much worse will it get if we hand them even more power? Will they overtake social media, shut down X if Musk owns it, shut down Rumble and every other “right wing” site? Who knows because people like Matt Bai won’t even ask, not that Harris would even answer. Because we the people don’t matter to them.
Young man, there’s no need to feel down…
Elton John recently became a trending topic because he dared to humanize Trump in an interview.
Even Bill Maher has had enough of the Left after Bradley Whitford went after RFK Jr’s wife, Cheryl Hines:
Humanizing people isn’t that hard. It might cost you everything, but the alternative is nothing less than the ruination of society.
I accidentally stumbled into MAGA world back in 2020. I was in a dark place, for sure. It was during lockdown. My daughter had fled the nest. My ex-boyfriend overdosed. My cat died. Every time I signed on to Twitter or Instagram, or Facebook, I was greeted with a firehose of hate.
It was hate like I’ve never seen, a tsunami of hate that stretched all the way from the least known user up to the most powerful people in the world. All sanctioned and accepted as the status quo.
Something shifted inside of me in that moment. It felt like whatever defines evil. I decided I could not participate in it anymore, and I did the hard thing of escaping my fear bunker and getting to know those I’d been conditioned to hate and dehumanize.
What Amber Rose calls “The people in the red hats” saved me in 2020. They really did. They were kind and open-hearted. They were nothing like as described. Yes, many are religious but they are accepting of every kind of person. It might surprise people to know that I follow every kind of Trump supporter on TikTok - Black, Hispanic, gay, even transgender. Why is this never shown in the news? Why don’t more people know about it? If they do, they are afraid to say.
I always knew it was dangerous for me to take a walk on the MAGA side. I knew from watching how other people were treated that I could risk it all just in humanizing them. I tried for a time on Facebook to do what Kristof just did, even as a Democrat voting for Biden. But even just that brought so much rage upon me eventually I had to leave the site.
I didn’t become a Trump voter or supporter until I watched the lengths our government was willing to go to stop him. He’s not perfect. He almost doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he is strong enough to stand up to them, and for that, he has my support.
The thing that surprised me the most about Trump and MAGA is that the media always portrays them as full of rage, with angry pictures of Trump and his supporters. But when you get to know them, you see the opposite is true. Trump is cheerful and optimistic and always tries to give his supporters hope.
How could Trump be so happy, I thought. Doesn’t he care what people like Matt Bai think of him? No. He doesn’t. And maybe that is what drives them crazy the most. That Trump doesn’t care, and he gives his supporters permission not to care either. Maybe that’s why they all have such a good time dancing to the Village People.
A compilation of MAGA voters on TikTok doing the Trump dance (a great watch):
You will have to give me something better than a joke about being a dictator for one day or the riot on January 6th to justify everything I’ve seen the Left do to Trump and MAGA for the last ten years. And if you don’t have the receipts, man, shut up and sit down.
I do know this much: America, like speech, information, like the truth, wants to be free. If it isn’t Trump who unlocks the cage, it will be someone following in his footsteps four years from now and for the foreseeable future.
I’ve lost nearly everything just trying to hold onto my humanity. And if I’ve learned nothing else, I know for sure that human decency takes the courage to stand apart. It takes the courage to speak out. To be hated. Those of us who do it only do so because we can’t do the other thing. And if that makes us witches for the modern age, well, someone hand me a broomstick. I’m ready to fly.
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WaPo's Matt Bai is Okay with Dehumanizing Trump Supporters