“I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, um, he’s an Arab,” a woman said to Senator John McCain at a town hall meeting in Lakeville, Minn. in October 2008. McCain grabbed the microphone, cutting her off. “No ma’am,” he said. “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab]”’ (Vox, 2008). As someone who has been following politics since I was young, I honestly have to ask myself, “Why didn’t we pay attention to this woman?” Now when we ask ourselves, “Where did all this bigoted political hate speech come from?” The answer is there: it’s always been here, we just didn’t pay attention.
So now I ask myself, how do we handle a problem as confounding and persistent as Donald Trump? We could completely ignore him, but we tried that, and he won the 2016 presidential election. We could take him seriously and label him as “The greatest threat to American democracy,” but it only fuels his base. One month before the 2016 election, the infamous Access Hollywood tape came out. In it, Trump said some of the most vile things I’ve heard in my life, then subsequently got elected. At the time, we only knew Donald Trump the showman, but now we know a version much more menacing—Donald Trump the president. During the horror story that was the Trump presidency, we saw awful things—in May 2018 he instated his “Zero Tolerance” border policy which saw the violent and forced separation of immigrant children from their parents (which resulted in the death of five children in these Trump border cages) (Los Angeles Times & NPR). In 2019, the Trump administration withheld $400 million worth of funding for the sovereign nation of Ukraine because Ukraine refused to investigate the Biden family for alleged crimes (Center for Public Integrity). Lastly, when asked by Fox Host Sean Hannity, “under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Trump responded, “Except for day one.” If any of this were to have been done and said by President Obama, we all know he would’ve been impeached for unpresidential behavior. At this point you may be thinking, “Seth you’re getting off-topic,” well, not really. None of this is shocking because we have normalized Donald Trump, and that has been a huge mistake.
“How do we handle a problem as confounding and persistent as Donald Trump?”
Trump’s base grew out of the “alternative fact” believers, the people like the woman at Senator McCain’s rally. As a nation, we were so caught off guard by the fact that he had a base at all since there hadn’t been a candidate that radical before to give them an outlet. Now, Trump is not some sort of calculating genius who planned this. He’s just a narcissist who realized that these politically confused people needed someone to rally behind. Trump really has little productive policy, but that’s okay to the members of his base because most don’t care about (or usually read) policy. Rather, they love that he tells them their hate is warranted and their fears are true. This is especially dangerous because saying “go be hateful” without saying how to be hateful (yes I see the irony) leads to scarring events like what took place in Charlottesville, N.C. in 2017, and what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the question of “How do we handle Trump?” remains. It’s not simple. I already mentioned the two major choices of ignoring him or keeping him under a microscope. As it were, neither of those really work. The best way to deal with his weirdly trendy destruction of the western world is with a “monitor but don’t engage” policy. The reason I say that is this—when we engage with Donald Trump/MAGA, they only get louder and more destructive. Yet, we cannot ignore him for fear of what he might do. In terms of real-world application, what this looks like is following groups that he is aligned with. The Heritage Foundation for example is a group that has gained popularity for Project 2025. It’s more strategic to track these groups because unlike Trump, they have the brains to carry out their dystopian policy through the manipulation of the judicial branch (thanks, Clarence Thomas).
“What matters is to know that the villain is not the random farmer in Ohio who voted for Trump, the villain is the narcissistic, selfish, divisive forty-fifth president: Donald J. Trump.”
The other less aggressive yet potentially successful way to handle him and his base is this—compassion. It may seem like the majority of the MAGA base are people who are ready to deport anyone who doesn’t look like them. But this is only because they are people who are upset with their station in life, confused about our ever changing world and taught that it’s everyone else’s fault, never your own.
Because of where I grew up, I know these are people who believe what they are doing is good for the nation, they have just been conditioned to believe “alternative facts” and ignore everything else. Though their public persona comes to us largely through images of violence and hateful speech, most of this Republican base, deep down, are good people. I attended church and worshiped God with them, I stood for the flag and honored my country with them. The truth is, when you sit down and talk with a Trump supporter, a large majority of the time, the hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories go away. What’s left is Americans discussing their differences and opinions.
Now, this rosy picture of peaceful conversation is not always the case. There are fundamentalists who believe Trump through and through and will never welcome conversation on the matter. But they are not the majority of the Republican party. So, I leave you with this—the position Donald Trump has led this nation too is a scary one, one difficult to navigate. What matters is to know that the villain is not the random farmer in Ohio who voted for Trump, the villain is the narcissistic, selfish, divisive forty-fifth president: Donald J. Trump.
