Learning To Live In a World Where Trump Is Winning
It defies all sense. That’s no reason to ignore it.
Nine years on, you’d think we’d have gotten used to it by now: that wordless dread that comes from realizing tens of millions of American voters are not just ready but eager to put Donald J. Trump into power. Time doesn’t seem to cure it. No number of heartland diner-based think pieces seems to dispel the mystery. That wordless nausea will outlast any attempt to account for it.
I came face to face with this old dread again recently, as a new New York Times/Siena poll of battleground states made it really very clear now that Donald Trump is likely to win this election, alongside even more belief-beggaring reporting from Axios suggesting Joe Biden and his closest advisors are in deep denial about this fact. Having been forced to stare into the Trump polling abyss, they see the abyss staring back at them, and I suppose they don’t like it one bit.
Trump’s appeal is ineffable. Common sense rebels against it. Seeking to understand it does violence to our sense of reality.
The closest I’ve seen anyone come to capturing the feeling came from a British comedian whose name I can’t recall. He described the experience of finding Donald Trump really was in the White House as being as though you went into hospital for surgery and, on entering the operating theater, found a friendly-looking Golden Retriever in scrubs where the surgeon should have been.
You jump off your gurney, appalled, huff out and demand to see the hospital administrator.
“I’m sorry,” you say, “but I’m afraid you’ll see a dog has been assigned to perform my surgery.”
The hospital administrator looks at you quizzically and says “ok, but has the dog done anything specifically wrong?”
The reasons to reject Trump as a leader seem so many, so obvious, it’s trite to even list them. That his followers cannot, will not acknowledge them will never stop being weird: the behavior not so much of political opponents as of people living in an entirely different moral universe.
Now, I do need to be careful here. I’m not an American. The last time I lived in the United States, Bill Clinton was president.
The America I hear about now seems to have simply nothing in common with the one I knew as a college student at the end of the last century. The America I hear about now looks much more like the place I grew up in, and the country I moved back to in 1999: Venezuela.
Donald Trump and Hugo Chávez are unlike one another in every single way except one: the one that matters. Each is largely defined by an attempt to take over the state by force. For Chávez it was an armed coup in 1992, for Trump it was a mob takeover of the legislative branch to disrupt his rival’s election. Both stood by their decisions to seek power through unconstitutional means, and were showered with love in response. Both events became so iconic that people in their countries can call them forth with just its date: Cuatro de Febrero in Venezuela, January 6th in the United States.
I remember looking at the Venezuelans who supported Chávez in 1999 with the same kind of blank incomprehension I now feel for Trump supporters. There’s a self-destructive atavism at work in both cases, a blind determination to wreck institutions the elite tell you ought to be cherished because you’re in no mood to be preached to about what is and what isn’t worth cherishing.
As a young reporter in Venezuela, the hardest part for me was to accept that, to Chávez’s supporters, what they were voting against was just as objectionable as Chávez was to me. More objectionable. Where I saw a flawed-but-functioning democratic regime that at least guaranteed basic rights and liberties, they saw an elite stitch-up to rob them of their birthright. Try to explain to them that without those rights and liberties there’d be nothing to protect them, and all you’d achieve was to convince them that you, too, were part of that elite conspiracy. It became literally impossible for Venezuelans to talk to each other about our political differences. And once civil discourse had become impossible, the damage was done—even if it would take the ultimate consequences of that damage 25 years to play out.
Hundreds of thousands of my countrymen are undergoing a harrowing 2,000 mile ordeal to reach the United States. They were pre-school age when I moved back to Venezuela 25 years ago. They fled because in Venezuela they risked outright starvation. There are a lot of them. In one of those cosmic curlicues that bind fate together, Trump may just be helped over the line by the toxic anger caused by a migration crisis made up largely of people who had to flee the collapse of Venezuela’s democracy and prosperity.
Look, America in 2024 is immeasurably richer, vastly more powerful and immensely more institutionally developed than Venezuela was in 1999. There are many excellent reasons to believe the United States will hold up better than Venezuela did. And yet the chasm that has opened up between one half of the country and the other on the basic meaning of political reality feels eerily similar.
The chasm cannot be bridged, at least not for the foreseeable future, but nor should it be ignored. Not when the polls make it increasingly clear Trump is winning. Those of us who cannot understand how such a thing is possible struggle with the cognitive dissonance of it all. But I’m Venezuelan, I’ve seen this movie before. And I don’t like the ending.
Quico Toro is a contributing editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack 1% Brighter.
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The commenters below sum it up pretty nicely. As a recovering progressive with many progressive friends who fit the quintessential affluent liberal mold, married to a bright red conservative, I can tell you it has been a real struggle at times to actually listen really deeply to my husband and his orbit. I lived in Austin Tx for 27 years (the blueberry in the tomato soup as Rick Perry amusingly put it years ago) but have lived in small Texas sommunities for long stretches as well so I think I have earned the street cred here to comment. My observation is that there is an intolerant, sanctimonious, authoritarian streak in the progressive mindset that sets teeth on edge (I speak in general, there are individual exceptions of course). It is a scolding, critical and self-righteous spirit that disrespects any concerns conservatives have about many of the cultural issues of our day. It is so much more trouble to listen to people, engage with their concerns, accept they are where they are and be IN RELATIONSHIP with them and trust that will eventually win the day. And yet that is the only way real changes of heart are accomplished. Trump is where he is because the left agenda comes across as you WILL SUBMIT and a pox on your concerns you bigot. No one knows more than me how vexing Trump can be, and how unreal our current situation is. But conservatives especially do not take kindly to being told/forced to do things or disrespected, really most people don't like it. Someone who fights back with the relish Trump does has their vote. Basically it brings us where we are today. I know I know. To tolerate is to be complicit, that has been swallowed hook, line and sinker. But maybe that assumption is wrong and plays more on your insecurities about being a good person than it is about transforming folks. Love means taking people where they are. I suggest a reading by Thicht Nhat Hanh where he described a PTSDd ex soldier who came to Plum Village as an example. Also, Daryl Davis, black musician who has directly or indirectly converted as many as 200 KKK members to renounce that group. My marriage and coming around to see with my husband's eyes has been emotionally wearing and tearing, caused my relationships with my best friends to cool at times, but the learning about myself and about Love has been incomparably valuable. I have learned that maybe much more valuable to my evolution as a human has been less about being 'right' about issues and more about learning to love and respect. Slow work (which the modern mind really hates) but I'm convinced it's really the only way for all of us for the long haul.
Only people who do not know history are surprised by Trump’s success. The last century showed endless examples of having to choose between two evils. In the 1930s, who did you root for : Nazis or Communists? In World War 2, did you support Hitler or Stalin? I am not saying that Trump (or even Chavez) is in the same league as the great dictators. But for a lot of people, Biden and the left represent a true and profound danger. Some of MAGA people are true believers. But for many swing voters, the choice is between two bad candidates who represent two conflicting worldviews. And as chaotic as Trump is, they reject the ideology and practice of the “progressive” left so strongly that by default, they may vote for Trump.