Hating Donald Trump - Why Operatic, Sturm Und Drang Bombastic Excess Feels So Good

Marfa Poitiers grew up in a normal, serious, politically moderate family.  Her grandparents on her father’s side had been conservative Republicans, but in an era before Barry Goldwater and the naissance of radical conservatism.  They were Eisenhower Republicans who believed simply in the greatness of America – and who could doubt that proposition after victory over Germany in World War II, an America with unshakable beliefs in God, family, community, and country, and a powerful economic engine which would drive recovery in Europe and power American industrial revival? 

Her grandparents on her mother’s side were moderate Democrats who believed in the New Deal and government instrumentalism.  They had loved Roosevelt, voted for Stevenson, ‘the little man’, small business, labor unions, and the welfare state; and looked to European social democracies as the way forward. 

Both sets of grandparents hardened their positions as they aged into their eighties and nineties.  By the time Marfa was a young adult, her grandparents had slid off moderate political rails and shunted themselves onto more extreme sidetracks, but were still within walking distance of church, community, flag, and country.

Her parents had both begun their political lives as 60s quasi-radicals; but bred well-enough within an upper middle class ethos of moderation within a patriotic framework and educated within patrician rationalism and social probity to stay within bounds.  They sympathized with the Far Left but intellectually not actually.  They never rode the Freedom Ride buses, crossed the Pettis Bridge in Selma, or demonstrated with Martin Luther King on the Washington Mall.  They were serious enough in their political convictions, but never throttled up, joined, or insisted.

Perhaps because of her parents’ political diffidence – only the fainthearted and weak-willed cheered on the sidelines while blood was spilled in the cause of freedom, civil rights, and moral rectitude – she felt obliged to take a more principled and active stand.  Looking more to her grandparents – both outspoken in their political opinions and in a day before street protests, as loud and unintimidated as any – she made a choice.  

Liberal progressivism with a storied intellectual political history from Karl Marx, Samuel Gompers, Saul Alinsky; and a radical revolutionary history from the Black Panthers, Mark Rudd, and the Weathermen, had more staying power.  It had moral authority, religious sanction, and social relevance.  Conservatism, while originally based on Enlightenment individualism and Scottish free market enterprise, had become deformed into a chaise longue patriotism, Sinclair Lewis small business boosterism, and Biblical sanctimony.

Marfa not only veered Left, she careened off any intellectual, rational, moderate rails and ended up in the radical fringe.  Unfortunately she came of age in the Donald Trump era, and whatever reasonability she might have had; whatever innate patriotic moderation she might have inherited from her grandparents; and whatever intellectual diffidence she might have adopted from her parents, were set aside, ignored, or jettisoned.

She became a Trump Hater, a woman of absolutely confirmed righteousness and moral outrage.  She hated Trump for his misogyny, his racism, his crass materialism, and his absurd, bourgeois, uncultured, ridiculous persona.  She hated Trump before he ever signed a bill, an executive order, or political directive.  She made up her mind during the 2016 campaign, convinced herself that the man was a boneheaded, macho, self-centered ignoramus.  His one-liners and ad hominem tweets were examples of his simple-mindedness – a man incapable of considered political thought, enlightened social judgement, and anything but capitalist greed incarnate.  He hated women, gays, blacks, and Native Americans.  His vision of cultural homogeneity, Christian hegemony, and economic elitism were not just wrong, but hateful.



Her hatred was so deep, pernicious, and corrosive, that she lost any sense of balance.  Anyone who considered even or a moment the ideas behind the hyperbole, the motives behind the grand guignol or the purpose behind the vaudeville was a traitor.  There was only one way forward – the complete, total, destruction of an American Hitler.

Her hatred was operatic, full of bombast, overwrought, melodramatic sentimentality, and sheer, uninhibited excess; and yet it felt so good.  The intellectual moderation of old-fashioned progressivism was boring.  The parsing of Constitutional issues, public policy, and their moral foundations was schoolmarmish and self-indulgent.  There was no parsing or deconstruction of Donald Trump, no temperate consideration, no caveats or codicils.  

It felt good to spew.  He deserved every drop of bilious hatred she and her compatriots could muster.  Rallies for social justice were Puccini extravaganzas, full of Sturm und Drang.  The arias soared, the orchestral accompaniment loud and compelling.  The festoons, banners, and flags were Florentine, the staging Baroque and the balletic dances elegant. 

Marfa was not alone of course, and she found a sense of belonging, community, and family in the progressive movement.  Here there were brothers and sisters who shared the same hatred, who all despised the villainy and retrograde ignorance of the President and his sycophants.  They were a team out to win, a progressive avant-garde, a phalanx of the righteous.  It felt good at night after the hoopla, the banners and signs, the tear gas and dogs, the courage of African Americans and the transgendered, and the great emotional sweep of generational good.

Hatred became a positive good.  The Movement to remove and destroy Donald Trump had nothing to do with Christian tolerance or Buddhist acceptance.  Jesus and the Tao were irrelevant, too soft, generous, or philosophically wobbly in the face of such malevolence.  Trump was no less than a Hitler, a Stalin, and a Pol Pot – a vicious, amoral, dangerous, and destructive force.  Such evil incarnate deserved no less than absolute, unmitigated, unrestrained howls of hatred.  Each political diva sang an aria for the collective hatred of their savagery, plaintive notes of sorrow for the victims in a verse, the rest of pure, undiluted hatred. 

Marfa's bilious hatred for Donald Trump was among other things an angry rejection of her parents and grandparents who underlined Adam Smith, John Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, dismissed them, and took in the Cuban apologists, Marxists, and European Social Democrats.  This intellectualism set back the course of true social reform for decades.  Political hatred for Donald Trump was no different from Black Panther hatred for the white man - unrestrained, pure animus.  Hatred energized, consolidated, propelled the movement. 

How did Marfa become so hostile? It would be too much to say that she was simply a victim of idealism and a deformed reading of history.  She was far more intelligent than the MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, opportunists whose one claim to fame was their manipulation of the gullibility and idealism of their supporters.  Her resentment was only the afterburner of an already sun-hot political engine of hate. 



Perhaps for the first time in recent American history has there been such vitriol, profound hatred, and hysterical frenzy over a president.  A dispassionate observer would quickly conclude that the violent opposition to Donald Trump has little to do with the man, his policies, or his governance than progressive idealism.  Such a man and such a populist, conservative movement was not supposed to interrupt the progressive movement towards a better world.   

Progressivism, it was thought, was part of the end of history, a final movement of social justice which would resolve international conflict, configure a multi-cultural, tolerant, and inclusive American society, even out capitalist excesses and inequalities, and balance faith and secularism.  How could such an intrusion into a beautiful, purposeful, ideal vision ever happen?

Hatred was the only responsible response to such a man and his deformed vision.  There could be no such thing as a loyal opposition, no reasonable, moderate, and temperate response to perfidy and evil.

However, life and human nature being what it is, Marfa, like many of her progressive colleagues, simply found themselves having babies, mothering, and working at demanding professional careers. It was not that she turned Right or saw the hysteria of her political excess for what it was; nor that she grew older and lost her youthful fire and idealism.  It was simply that she wore out. 

For one thing radical populism and conservatism were spreading throughout Europe and Asia.  The inertia of this movement would serve to propel it farther and longer than anyone had expected.  Continued opposition to America's version of such drastic cultural and political change would be wasted. And besides that, there was more to life than Donald Trump.

As for Donald Trump himself? He was no worse nor no better than any of his predecessors.  Yes, he was certainly not cut from the same cloth as they, culturally conservative members of the social or intellectual elites; and yes, he was certainly his vaudevillian, Las Vegas, Hollywood, mean streets of New York persona was indeed something new; but so what?  The more she watched him, the more she enjoyed the show - a spectacular show of glamour and glitz, irreverence and Borscht Belt humor, and as politically incorrect as the young Eddie Murphy and Joan Rivers.



What was she thinking when she went off into the deep, dark end of the pool?  So many anxieties, worries, and concerns in this progressive establishment there.  No light, no fun, no historical perspective.  It was, after all, a desperately ugly place for a young, attractive woman to be.

She was never happier than when she jumped ship, gave up on the progressive moroseness and universal anger, and began to live again.  She got out of her dowdy clothes, dressed to the nines, wore perfume and high heels, stepped out, joined high-toned revelers who had like her given up politics.  Life was certainly too short to be morose, she now realized, regardless of who was in the White House.