The horrifying realization that I now understand why people vote for Donald Trump

 If you scour the internet, you will find few commentators with more vehement criticism of former President Donald J. Trump.  My assessments of Trump have run from the satirically scornful to cold analysis of his criminal behavior.  I have referred to him as Tony Clifton, in reference to the Andy Kaufman character.  I call him "the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie."  I have pushed back on misrepresentations of the Mueller Report, which show clear and distressing relationships between Trump, his people, and Russia, along with indisputable obstruction of justice.  I have seen clear and indisputable evidence of further crimes, most obviously and distressingly the Mar-a-Lago Papers.  If there is a lower bound for the respect for which I can have for a person, Donald Trump is at or near it.

Yet I now think I understand why so many millions have voted for him, will vote for him again, and while I stand by every assessment I have ever made of him-- including his history of rape-- I cannot say with absolute certainty that I will not vote for him in November.  This is horrifying.  Horrifying.

The horror, the horror.

(Let's go, Brando!)

In simple terms, one side of political discourse is chanting for the death of the Jews, actively supports a genocidal terrorist organization committed to the extermination of the Jews, and demands that the Jews lay down and die.

"There is only one solution: Intifada revolution."  With this slogan, you cannot hide.  I have heard lying apologists claim that "jihad" is actually an internal, personal struggle.  Bullshit.  You will hear liars say that "From the river to the sea" is a non-violent slogan, as though the Jews are simply vacationing in Israel, and will go home to their true, ancestral mansions in Eastern Europe, where Judaism originated.  Or maybe Brooklyn.

Intifada is war.  It is a call to kill the Jews.  Period.  Note, too, the word, "solution."  Does that sound familiar?  This isn't a dog whistle, it is a bullhorn.  Yes, copies of Mein Kampf were all over the tunnels in Gaza.  Yes, there are swastikas at some protests.  My favorite is this clip of a London cop trying to explain that the swastika needs to be taken in context.

There is only one solution.

Final solution.

Yes, it is intended to make you think of that phrase, but according to DEI/anti-racist ideology, if you give a compliment with the wrong tone of voice, it's a racist microaggression.

They are calling for the genocide of the Jews, across the world, and on college campuses across the country.

Where is the left?  The Democratic Party?  Joseph R. Biden?  The former two are staunchly on the side of the genocidal terrorists, and Biden is trying to figure out how to have it both ways.  He knows he cannot run for reelection chanting that chant, but he has decided that he will only make the most mealy-mouthed, ineffectual, worthless statements about anti-Semitism while substantively siding with the jihadists and their apologists, and turning on the country that was attacked by genocidal monsters who literally rape girls to death for the crime of being Jews.  Don't tell me you hate Trump for being a rapist while siding with the jihadists who literally rape girls to death for being Jews.  Trump should be in prison for his rapes.

The jihadists who used... sharp objects... should be in the grave, every last one of them, and I have no time nor patience for any pseudo-feminist who attacks Trump and chants things like "my body, my choice" but ignores when Jewish girls are raped to death, with sharp objects, for the crime of being Jews.

What about their bodies?  Their choices?

Donald Trump is a sociopath, who cares about no one but himself, but all he'll do is cut my taxes.  He'll cut my income taxes, and he'll pass another corporate income tax, which will boost the stock market, which is worth even more to me, because the stock market is real money to me.

Donald Trump is not calling for the death of the Jews.  Do I trust him?  Anyone who trusts Donald Trump is a fool who deserves to lose his money, but I saw how much money I made when that corporate tax cut hit the stock market.  I made out like a... like a... Jew.

Joseph R. Biden has made a calculation.  He did not used to be like this.  He used to believe in true equality.  He used to oppose bigotry.  He used to support Israel and oppose terrorism and genocide.  But, the Democratic Party and the left have been taken over by psychopaths of the worst form since the 1930s, and Joseph R. Biden has zero moral courage.  He has decided to go along with them rather than stand up to them.

Trump is a piece of shit, but what will he do?  Enrich himself, and cut my taxes.  He is corrupt on a scale we have never seen before, but as I have written, the 2024 election is the worst choice America has ever faced, between the two most intolerable candidates we have ever had.  But for me?  He'll cut my taxes.

He'll also demand that his AG concoct some bullshit charges against Biden, but why should I care anymore?  This is a real question.  There is a jihadist movement to exterminate the Jews, it is spreading to college campuses-- where I work-- and Biden is demanding that Jews lay down and die because he has added up the numbers.  There are more anti-Semites than Jews in his base, so fuck morality, fuck principle, and fuck us.  When he won't stand up to calls for the extermination of the Jews, then why should Jew-boy-me ride to his rescue against whatever bullshit charges Trump and his AG would cook up after the 2024 election?

You need my help?  Really?  You sure?  Well, there are calls to exterminate the Jews, and you're telling the Jews to lay down and die.  No right of self defense for the Jews.  But if I don't come to your rescue, Trump will ride into office, and have you arrested on bullshit charges.  So you want to make a moral demand of me.

While we, Jews, are told to lay down and die, and you have no moral courage because you added up the balance between Jews and anti-Semites in your electoral base.

Yeah.  If Biden gets locked up on bullshit charges, that will be unjust, but you know, first they came for the Jews.

The right wants to cut my taxes, and the left is chanting to kill the Jews.

Donald Trump was always the candidate of negative partisanship.  Vote for me, Trump says, because they are evil.

Trump is evil.  Trump is a sociopath.  But he isn't actually, literally calling for the death of the Jews.  The left is, on college campuses all over the country, and Joseph R. Biden is at best half-heartedly asking them to be a little nicer in their calls for the death of the Jews while telling the one country in the world which is a Jewish state that it should lay down and die because it, alone in the world, has no right of self-defense.

Donald Trump is the opposite of virtue.  We live in a remarkable time of plenty and prosperity, and as I remarked in my commentaries on Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground, Trump may be seen as the fulfillment of the bizarre self-sabotage and drive for irrationality upon reaching modern prosperity.  There is even a specific and distressingly prescient passage that almost sounds like Dostoevsky is describing Trump, personally.  (Of course, Dostoevsky was anti-Semitic, but he was a 19th Century Russian, so I judge him by his time and place.)

My point, though, is that if my models of virtue come from figures like Cato The Younger or Marcus Aurelius, then one would be hard-pressed to find a person in all of history further from those I most admire.

Yet Trump is not literally calling for the death of the Jews, nor embracing those who are.

Would he, if he thought that were his path to power?  Of course.  He's a sociopath.  But he isn't doing it now.

Biden is.

All of this is to say that I see what drives the Trump voter, more than at any past time.  Truthfully, academia and a lot of formal institutions have looked down upon certain segments of society, and no one has said "fuck you" to those segments of society-- of which I am a part-- with more directness than Donald J. Trump.  It's hard to tell people that they suck and then demand their votes, and when Trump comes along and tells these voters that actually, those of us heaping scorn are the ones who suck, he can be a total shit and get their votes.

It's hard to tell Jews that we should lay down and die, and keep asking for our votes.  This really is changing.  By the numbers, the Dems have decided that the anti-Semite vote is worth more than the Jewish vote plus morality.  Or at least, that's Biden's calculation.  A lot of them, like the Squad, simply are anti-Semitic.  I do not believe that Biden is anti-Semitic.  He is just caving to the anti-Semites because there are more of them, but moral cowardice is no more honorable than bigotry, so Joseph R. Biden is among the lowest of the low.

Is that moral cowardice a lower low than Trump's sociopathy?

The original Stoics claimed that all vice was equivalent.  I disagree.  I think that there are gradations of evil, and at the personal level, moral cowardice may, arguably, be less evil than Trump's true sociopathy.  Hence, a paradox.  In some ways, at the personal level, Biden is less evil than Trump.

Yet, Biden has sided with those calling for the death of the Jews, and at the political level, Trump's evil is lesser.

Can I vote for Trump?  Can I actually walk into the polling place, pen in hand, and fill in the Trump oval?  The mere fact that I can contemplate it is as distressing as anything, but the left is calling for the death of the Jews.  They used to call Trump "Hitler."  I tried to correct them, and say that Hitler murdered 6 million Jews and 6 million assorted other others.  I hate him, but Hitler was on a different level of evil.

But now, the left is actually calling for the death of the Jews, and Biden is being rhetorically squishy while demanding that the one Jewish state lay down and die.

Trump isn't.

What would it take to get me to vote for Trump?

This may be it.