The other day, I posted a query to my Facebook feed about
who were the worst types of Trumpers. Amidst the obvious choices of wealth fetishists,
racists, overgrown frat boys and the like, I offered the option to write in
your own.
One person replied: “Cognitive dissonance.”
What he meant was that it is human nature to become
intractable about one’s opinions, especially those we hold strongly. That for
most people, once you convince yourself of a position, evidence to the contrary
is so disturbing to your psyche that you are more likely to dismiss it, explain
it away or repress it than consider it fairly. The worst type of Trumpers are those who won't admit who he is to themselves.
But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that if those were the worst type of Trumpers, it wasn't because of their cognitive dissonance, it was because of our own.
We see Trump wallowing in corruption. We see his 40-year
history, a matter of public record, of cheating on his taxes, his wives and his
contractors, of lying literally hundreds of times a week. We see that he is
barely literate, that he has no understanding of the position he holds nor has
he any interest in learning.
We see him committing fraud to the tune of millions of
dollars over and over again, and wonder not just how he ever could have become
President, but how millions of people will respond to these charges with something
on the order of “Yeah, well, what about Hillary and Obama?” despite the fact
that neither of them has been stained with any kind of scandal even approaching
what happens to Trump in an average week. Despite that both boast a long record
of public service while he has had none, and that their professional conduct
compared to his has been impeccable.
We could accept, perhaps, if those people simply proclaimed
they didn’t care for Obama’s politics or even that they didn’t like the idea of
a woman with power. But to suggest somehow that Hillary Clinton should be
behind bars while Donald Trump should be in charge of the entire country? It is
literally impossible to fathom what twisted logical gymnastics one could have gone
through to arrive at such a conclusion.
But that’s the rub, isn’t it? I suspect that most of these people
applied no logic at all. They got it in their head that Trump is the right guy
for them and that was the end of it. They suffer no cognitive dissonance
because they are quite effective at discarding logic and reason when it comes
to Trump.
But the rest of us have no such luxury. We work ourselves into a rage
trying to figure out how a human being with access to basically the same kinds
of neurons, synapses, sulci and gyri as we could have come to the conclusion
that Trump is at all competent, let alone someone appropriate for ultimate
power.
They happily trot down the lane in their MAGA hats and their
“Hillary for Prison” T-shirts, blissfully oblivious to the fact that crony
after crony of Trump’s inner circle has been indicted or jailed, completely
indifferent to the fact that people with years of dedicated service to our
country have cried out that this man is unequivocally and gruesomely abusing
his power, dismissing these brave souls as hoaxers or “never Trumpers,” while
the rest of us are tearing our hair out wondering what we’re missing.
Cursed
with the ability to reason and respect for scientific inquiry, we have to
consider the possibility, however remote, that they may be onto something, while
they get to just decide that we hate America, are somehow not real, or are
brainwashed by “fake news.”
It doesn’t seem fair. We desperately want to say, “well,
they’re just idiots,” or, “there are a lot of horrible people in America,” but
something nags us about the idea that tens of millions of people with whom we share
citizenship are just stupid or terrible. Meanwhile, they seem unfazed by
the absurdity of the idea that half the population of the country actively
hates it here and is trying to destroy it from within.
Well, I’ve thought about it a lot and I’m here to tell you that
we’re not crazy. Trump really is what we think he is and there are really
people who will never care, for a variety of reasons that include some unholy
cocktail of wealth fetishism, racism, power fantasies, fear of cognitive
dissonance and…eye of newt, I guess. I’m afraid the best thing we can do is to
dismiss the ones that cannot be reasoned with and hold fast to the ones that
can, the way our ancestors dealt with bears and sabretooth tigers, and try to hang
on until the winds of change blow our way again.
