Hating Donald Trump

Robert Kagan has been labeled a neoconservative. Yet, he works at the liberal Brookings, so one wonders how conservative he really is. Now, for your edification, he has written a screed for the Washington Post about the dangers of Donald Trump. Or better, about the dangers of the second coming of Trump.

It reads like a shrieky adolescent throwing a hissy fit. There is no rational thought; no real judgment; no effort to evaluate both sides of the issue. Kagan feels deeply and he feels so deeply that he has dispensed with his rational faculties. In a world defined by therapy it's the emotion that counts.

In a political world, if your emotion counts above all else, then you are on the road to fascism.

Of course, Kagan is describing Trump as the sum of all evils. Obviously, this compromises any claim he has to show rational judgment. Worse yet, it is not an original thought. Recall that Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe called Trump the “the Devil incarnate,” aka the Antichrist, in 2017.

So, Kagan, for all of his stellar intellectual credentials, has dispensed even with the pretense that he is capable of rational thought. He hates Trump; he wants you to know that he hates Trump unambiguously. And this allows him to avoid any judgment of the good, the bad and the ugly about the Trump presidency.

Worse yet, being consumed by his rage and his outrage and his hatred, he makes an absurd mistake at the opening of his screed. Read it and ask yourself which time warp Kagan has gotten caught up in:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.

Kagan took a hard look into his foggy crystal ball and just happened to describe the year 2020. Mass violence, check. A breakdown of federal authority, check. A country divided into red and blue enclaves, check.

Kagan is up in arms and up in a self-righteous lather about January 6, but he offers nary a word of condemnation of the BLM and Antifa riots that consumed major American cities for months in 2020. 

He is quite right to say that the basis for republican government is to accept the winner of an election as the winner. He praises Al Gore for accepting the result of the 2000 presidential election.

And yet, he fails to notice that the Democratic Party and the American left never accepted Trump as a legitimate president. Hillary Clinton herself, while she was not denouncing Jill Stein and Tulsi Gabbard as Russian agents, declared that Trump was not a legitimate president.

Democrats and their satraps in the media did everything in their power to prevent Trump from governing effectively. They held a riot on inauguration day in 2017, in Washington, D. C. They impeached him twice and put him on trial in the senate twice.

The truth of the matter, regardless of the bigotry of a Kagan, is that the Trump presidency was characterized, not merely by Trump's faults and failings, but by the unprecedented hostility that his opponents heaped on him. Surely, you do not have to be a Trump loyalist-- no one has accused me of being one-- to open one’s mind and to see that the hostility shown toward Trump, the unhinged irrational attacks by people like Kagan, who is supposed to be an intellectual, are simply being echoed by Trump supporters.

It is, dare I say, empathy. For those who do not understand the concept, as described by Prof. Paul Bloom and even yours truly, people feel empathy for someone who is subjected to irrational attacks and they want to fight back.

I am not in favor of having Republicans use the tactics that the Democrats used against Trump-- if you answer bullying with bullying you are validating the tactics of your opponents-- but we can certainly understand that Trump supporters are responding to the violent hatred against Trump, unprecedented in recent American history.

For the record, both Mark Penn, formerly of the Clinton administration and Andrew Cuomo noted clearly that they had never seen an American president treated as badly as the way the American media and the opposition party had been treating Trump.

So, there are two sides to the story. Trump was certainly imperfect. He was an amateur thrown into a situation where he did not know the players or the game. Some of what he did was not good; some of it was good. 

The challenge, for people more rational than Kagan, is to evaluate the good versus the bad. And the other challenge is to get over the demonization of Trump and of Republicans and to understand that people like Kagan are the problem as much as they are the solution.

True enough, Trump has erred in ranting about the election that he lost. His behavior has served no purpose beyond making him look bad. It cost the Republicans two senate seats in Georgia.

And yet, no one has a right to call him out on his conduct without recognizing that he was merely giving back what had been thrown at him, and what had been thrown at him every hour of his presidency. 

I believe that he has damaged his future prospects by his behavior, but that does not mean that we do not know where it comes from. Those who are so ardently attacking Trump should recognize that they are simply working overtime to obscure the appalling behavior that they and their fellows directed against Trump. 

More importantly, they are refusing to accept responsibility for the riots that descended on blue American cities throughout the spring and summer of 2020. After all, if you take the Kagan rhetoric, add to it the Democratic rhetoric, and translate it into action, you get the 2020 civil insurrection. If Kagan had been willing to talk about it, he would have had to recognize the extent that he and his unhinged cult followers bore some responsibility for what happened. Blaming everything on Trump and Republicans is merely a way to shift the blame.

As long as Kagan and his compatriots fail to accept responsibility for an insurrection that they cheered from the sidelines, they should be dismissed as unhinged adolescent ranters.