The president he so admired
I’m reading an Atlantic piece by Robert Draper from October 2022 and got distracted wondering about one claim near the beginning.
In March of 2020, I sat in a federal courtroom in Utah and watched a man stand before the judge and murmur through sobs, “This wasn’t me. This wasn’t me.”
The defendant, a 55-year-old health-insurance salesman named Scott Brian Haven, wasn’t protesting his innocence. He openly acknowledged that over the two-year period before his arrest in the summer of 2019, he had placed 3,950 calls to the Washington offices of various Democratic members of Congress, spewing profanities and threatening violence against them.
But as the prosecutor listed a sampling of Haven’s vile threats in the courtroom, the defendant—a devout Mormon who served meals to homeless people in downtown Salt Lake City—seemed unable to recognize those sentiments as his own…
…Haven, as it turned out, got his news from the conservative talk-radio-show hosts Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh—and, of course, from the president he so admired, Donald Trump.
It was that. The setup is here’s a guy with enough compassion to help feed homeless people, yet he “so admired” Donald Trump. My curiosity about that got between me and the rest of the piece.
What is there to admire in Trump?
That’s a real question. It’s easy to think of lots of people who are bad but also have unmistakable good or at least attractive qualities. Trump is not one of those people, or at least, I get stuck when I try to figure out how anyone can see him as one. Know what I mean?
He’s certainly not the familiar charismatic baddy who seduces everyone with charm and wit and beauty. He’s also certainly not the ordinary mixed-bag baddy who is greedy but generous or cruel but brave or destructive but honest. If you had a lineup of good qualities and a lineup of bad ones, Trump’s qualities would all be in the bad column.
What is it that otherwise decent people admire in him? How can otherwise decent people admire him? It’s like a magic spectacles fairy tale or similar. What do they see that we can’t?
All I can come up with is a bastard child of Telling Truth to Power sort of thing. He’s blunt, he’s honest, he’s not afraid to insult the rich and powerful. He insults everyone, and that shows how truthy and authentic and incorruptible he is.
Mind you, he doesn’t insult Putin, but that’s because…um…er…
Any other explanations?
Maybe what the guy meant was he envied Trump. Maybe he feeds the homeless, etc., as a way of feeling superior to them? I wouldn’t know.
What I do know, volunteering in a prison and with a prison-re-entry program, is that I have met plenty of child molesters, drug dealers, bank robbers, multiple-murderers, etc. who (at this point in their lives) have many redeeming qualities and are far more admirable that Trump.
That’s as about as close as I can too. He certainly is blunt. His motto could be “No thought left unsaid.” He says what’s on his mind, however much it might contradict something he said five minutes ago. I guess that passes for “honesty” in some quarters, even though so much of what he says simply isn’t true, which is sometimes Trump being careless, thoughtless, ignorant, or just plain lying. As far as “incorruptible,” it’s not so much that, as that he can’t be any more corrupt than he already is.
Otherwise, no idea.
I’ve heard that he’s an entertaining storyteller… Not stupid that’s admirable so much as fun to watch.
I’m coming to think more and more that people are so fixated on what they don’t like about the other side, they completely blank out the faults with the people and the beliefs and the ideologies and the values of their own side.
I think back again and again to the Scientologists, who go on and on about how great the book Dianetics is and how much it changed their lives for the better, and yet they cannot answer one single question about what it’s actually about. (Mostly cockamamie misogyny about the psychological ills you got from your mother when you were incubating inside her.) It’s a symbol of safety from the outside world of non-Scientological beliefs. They’ve been taught that the only thing that has saved them from whatever turmoil they were suffering from that they sought to treat through Scientology — loneliness, grief, anxiety, a lack of a sense of purpose, a sense of failure in their career ambitions… whatever — can only be cured through allegiance with the Scientologists, and therefore all their ills are the fault of the outside “wog” world. (Yes, they actually call non-Scientologists a racist epithet for a nonwhite person.)
Likewise with the Trump followers, they’ve come to believe that salvation from whatever turmoil they’re suffering from comes from allegiance with the “anti-establishment” far right, and by extension, the cause of their turmoil comes from the left. From there, it’s almost irrelevant how they rationalize it, because we’ve seen over and over again that no matter how completely insane the far right is, they will find a way to rationalize it, because in their minds, the alternative is succumbing to their fears.
This is equally true of the left. Take gender ideology. It’s patently nuts. Especially the stuff about giving experimental sexchange treatments to their own children. But invariably, the gender zealots have projected their internal anxieties into a deep fear of the far right. They will rationalize whatever utterly insane gender woo that gets thrown at them so long as it’s sold as a way to keep the nutters on the far right at bay, because in their deranged minds, the alternative is succumbing to Trumpism.
The Trumpist far right and the “woke” far left are mirror images of each other — both spinning further out into craziness, because they’ve got tunnel vision and they’re running from each others’ terrifying behaviours.
And by now, both sides are kind of right: the far left and the far right are both nuts and dangerous. (I still maintain that the far right is the more dangerous of the two, but I won’t use that to excuse the behaviour of the far left… because that’s exactly what the problem is! Excusing “our” side because it’s not as bad as “theirs”.)
I think that a lot of the culture war impasse we’re stuck in at the moment comes from a sense of instability and insecurity in society and culture. The US has a poor social safety net, which is surely the reason Americans cling to religion so tightly compared to other developed nations. But that sense of social insecurity is also what drives mistrust and division in society. The more and more that technology’s disrupting everything, the more that sense of isnecurity and instability grows, and the mistrust and fighting just grows worse and worse.
Everything’s a big ol’ mess. Interesting times…
Maybe it has nothing to do with Trump. Maybe he just happened to be there to catalyze a reaction.
Maybe a substantial portion of people in the US are just depraved, utterly depraved, ruined by a lifetime of television, religion, and advertising.
Maybe the US public really is as gutted, pampered, and untutored as it seems.
I’m sorry.. A few words come to mind: megalomaniac, sexual predator most of his adult life, found to b a rapist by a civil jury, indicted on several federal and state felony charges, his businesses found to be fraudulently operated, an extreme bully and an overtly despicable human being.
Looking outside the American perspective it seems everywhere is crazy. Which suggests to me we may be facing our very own Bronze Age Collapse. All the advanced, complex empires of the time…disintegrated in the face of climate issues and their own internal contradictions
The last thing any sort of authoritarian, or regime led by such, wants to encourage is original and/or critical thought amongst the general population: the teaching of it, the advocacy of it, or the exercise of it. What began among the Ionian Greeks (science) soon spread to other Greek cities. It is all there in Plato’s account of the trial and death of Socrates. (The Apology..) Would-be Leaders and Fuhrers are nothing without their enthusiastic and obedient followers. And all too many at various stages of history are to be found seeking a strong Leader to submit themselves to.
I have long maintained that Islam is entry-level fascism. The Arabic word ‘islam’ itself means ‘submission.’
Blood Knight @ 3 – But if he is an entertaining storyteller, why is there no sign of it? He tells us stories all the time and they’re never entertaining. On the contrary, they’re excruciating.
The thing is, the whole idea of decent people. How do we know? We see their facade, and sometimes accept what they tell us. Feeding the poor is honorable, it is good, so we assume he is a decent person. But is he? I brought up this question at a conference one time, and the speaker dismissed it with a facile answer. If a woman goes every week to work in a soup kitchen because her god says she should, and then goes home and beats her children senseless because her god says she should, is she a good person? Is it worth it for her to work in a soup kitchen at the expense of her children? The speaker said yes…beaten, abused children are a small price to pay for the good work she did. But is it?
That’s what goes through my mind every time I hear stories like this. What is a decent person? At what point do they cross the line from decent to not decent? I had a co-worker who was one of the nicest, most polite, most civil people I ever met. Imagine my surprise to find out he was a global warming denier and a Trump voter! Why? Because he was scared of immigrants; he wanted Trump to keep the country safe from what he perceived as hordes of immigrants streaming across the border. So is he the nicest, most polite, most civil person? Hell, I don’t know. The question torments me when it comes up, because it comes back to how many beans make a heap, doesn’t it? If everyone does some acts that are less than great, at what point do they have enough piled up to become not nice?
For me, voting for Trump is crossing that line. Also, calling people up and abusing them on the phone suggests he might not have been as decent as he thought he was.
iknklast:
Yeshua bar Joseph, aka Jesus Christ, famously said: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” In that he was at best only half right. For many, his followers included, so is the Kingdom of Hell.
For some, only to a small extent. For others, Hell takes over their whole being.
Closest thing I can come to is this:
I think of Emalahleni. Emalahleni is not a good municipality. It has the worst air quality in South Africa, the water is, well, don’t drink the water. It is perpetually dicing with bankruptcy – with all that implies for general service delivery. Emalahleni is so bad that the ANC mayor lives in Middleburg.
So I asked someone who ran a factory out there why people keep voting for what is a complete screwup. His answer was that the people were concerned that if someone competent got into power there, they’d collect the rates.
And that I think is part of why people vote for awful people. There is this mentality amongst some Americans that the system isn’t a useful tool for making things livable, but the enemy. Fight the machine and all of that.
Donald Trump is the precise sort of man who, when put in charge, will absolutely break the machine. Some Americans seem to think that a broken machine will be easier to game, the same way folks in Emalahleni seem to think a broken municipality will cost them less money.
Throw in economic concerns around Alaska’s reliance on oil, as well as general anger around the enshittification of the economy, and I can sort of see where Trump’s supporters are coming from.
The mistake we make on the left is that we assume that our opposition wants a functional state. If you shift your assumption to people seeing the state as the enemy, well who would you want in charge of your enemy?
Many years ago I mentioned to a friend that I thought I should run for mayor of the small town I was living in, because the incumbent mayor was [insert random slurs]. Friend pointed out that there were a lot more people in the town who were [insert random slurs] than who were like me. I wonder if part of the Trump hero-worship is that the hero-worshipers have the same unpleasant physical and character traits as he does, and admire his success despite having them (without acknowledging, of course, that the success came from his rich and well connected father and from his connections with organised crime) – the kind of success that eludes the hero-worshipers.
Like Arty I think the motivation is entirely negative. Timothy Snyder has made the point that, unlike the authoritarian leaders of the 20th century, the likes of Trump, Orban, Duterte etc. don’t offer any positive vision of the future. Their focus is entirely on some imaginary golden age in the past, before godless liberals and lefties came along and ruined everything. Even the promise to bring back the golden age (MAGA etc.) sounds half-hearted and unconvincing compared to the promise to screw the people on the other side: “I cannot offer you a better future, but I promise that the people you hate will suffer even more”.
I also think iknklast is making an important point about what it even means to be an (otherwise) “decent person” anyway. I constantly worry that my despair about… everything is making me too uncharitable at this point, but I can’t honestly say I believe in decent people any more. Or at least decency is entirely situational and contingent on external factors. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the most frightening thing about people like Adolf Eichmann was that they were not monsters. This is what normal people do under the wrong circumstances. I’m increasingly convinced that the only thing that separates “decent people” from the likes of Eichmann is having the dumb luck of not finding themselves in such circumstances. Yet.
That’s Draper talking, not Haven.
I haven’t read the piece. Does Draper have evidence that Haven did actually admire Trump? From the description, it sounds like Haven does suffer from some kind of psychological disconnect, but it’s not clear what exactly that disconnect is.
Draper also says that Haven is a “devout Mormon”. This may be uncharitable, but I think the Mormon church is a mind-control cult, specially pernicious on account of its size, wealth and influence. If you want to understand how Haven got so screwed up, that might be a good place to start.
I just want to point out that I never said anything about “decent people.” That’s not what I was asking about. I’m not so dim that I think there are decent people and indecent people and we all know what boxes to put them in [except Trump, who is the rare and exceptional person who is 100% indecent]. What I said was “a guy with enough compassion to help feed homeless people” and “people who are bad but also have unmistakable good or at least attractive qualities.”
Having watched a series of exchanges between people employed or once employed at the British Post Office and their questioners in the Select Committee, I am not sure that Bjarte’s despair is justified. The solicitor representing some of the sub-postmasters who were unjustly victimised described those employees or former employees as ‘a chorus of cowards’ and as ‘a parade of liars, bullies, amnesiacs and arrogant individuals” – which they certainly were from what I saw. They are the sort of people who, like Eichmann, are entrusted with dirty work precisely because they are mediocre, weak, and cynical, and will follow orders from their equally mediocre and cynical bosses whose only interest lies in defending the organisation that rewards them so generously, and who are protected by distance from the actual dirty work and its effects.
One should add to that list of adjectives (‘mediocre, weak, and cynical’) ‘greedy’, since those liars and bullies, etc. were given bonuses for their work if it led to a conviction.
@Bruce Gorton @12
A few actually believe there’s actually a conspiracy to destroy America and replace it with a socialist dystopia, run by evil people who run pedophile rings from a pizzeria in Washington. Pedophiles, because, once you reject God and destroy our values, anything goes, right? Few really believe the part about the pizzeria, but the narrative captures something about their anxieties.
Then there are the believers in small government and laissez-faire economics. They want to cut the government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” as lobbyist Grover Norquist famously said.
But I think most of them do see “the government” as an enemy, but not because they want to game it. It’s that it’s made up of “elites” who, as they see it, have no idea what life is like for the average person. These elites keep spending “our” tax dollars on programs meant to help other people, not them. And meanwhile, things aren’t getting any better, are they?
The question remains, why is Trump, of all people, so appealing as a hero? Well, who else is so outspoken, so willing to disrupt the system? Other politicians talk like what they are: politicians. They read speeches written for them by Harvard graduates. They’re part of a huge bureaucratic machine which has been or is in danger of being taken over by radicals who read Saul Alinsky.
In talking to his supporters, I’ve found that many are aware of his flaws, and use one of two opposing stories to account for them:
1) Yes, he’s awful, but we’re not electing him to be a role model. We just need someone outspoken to oppose the big powerful government people
2) He’s not really THAT bad; when he says those awful things he’s just trolling the libs
(Third story: his enemies lie about him. This one is handy for wiping up any lingering cognitive dissonance.)
Ultimately, most of these people don’t want a dysfunctional government, though they do want a smaller one. They want one that’s overseen by someone who stands against the baby-killing tax-dollar-spending criminal-immigrant-loving Ivy League-educated insiders. They can relate to Trump’s iconoclasm. The icons he’s supposedly destroying may not be real, but when did icons ever represent reality? The world is big and scary and we make sense of it as best we can. Trump will turn things around, just you wait and see. Pay no attention to the man behind the bluster.
Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article in the British Post office Scandal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
It reads like a scary remake of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil featuring a Special Guest Star appearance by 2001’s HAL 9000, playing the Post Office’s “robust” Horizon software system.
I’m waiting for the sure-to-come horror stories of convictions of innocent people based on AI “enhanced” photo “identification.”
Usually listening to Trump for any length of time is proof enough that he’s a narcissistic, bullying, thin-skinned, know-nothing, blowhard who shouldn’t be put in charge of a lemonade stand, let alone a government, but that’s just me. Maybe he’s actually brilliant, and all I’ve seen are Deepfake clips manufactured and strung together to make him look like a complete fucking moron. That nobody seems to be claiming this gives me some confidence that this is not the case, and that his manifest self-centered cruelty and stupidity is real, and neither manufactured nor some elaborate, long-form performance-art piece designed to highlight and mock the lethal weaknesses of the Americamn political system to the allure of a celebrity, would-be, populist dictator.
Of course it doesn”t help “our” side when at least some of the media really are lying to the public about gender ideology It is truly corrosive of public trust and a danger to democracy. It’s a journalistic own goal, an unforced error that they won’t or can’t admit that they’ve made. “If they’re lying to me about this, what other lies are they feeding me?” How do we answer that. It’s infuriating. It’s another example of the maxim I have stated before:
“Any movement that is, at its very foundations, so fundamentally reliant upon lies and the secrecy required to maintain them, will inevitably and unavoidably corrupt any individual or organization that embraces and supports it.”
Or, in its short form:
“Every organization that embraces trans ideology turns to shit.”
Unfortunately, the press has willingly fallen victim to this to a very great extent. They didn’t have to. Nobody told them they had to use “preferred” pronouns; there is no power that could compell them to if they chose not to. There is no reason consistent with the public interest that says they should conceal the sex of any person of interest in a news story. “Humans have only two sexes” and “Humans can’t change sex,” are not hateful or even controversial statements, and should not be presented as such; to do so is to deny reality and take the side of a reality-denying movement. And so on. What the media gets for championing this “cause” I will never know, but I do know it can’t possibly be worth the price they have paid in doing so.
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