Boo-hoo, MAGA “victims”
Whatever your plight, you don’t get to wreak vengeance upon America
Jeffrey Denny
“Trump has energized a segment of America whose values and traditions are mocked as bigoted, backward or too religious.”
So writes conservative columnist Gary Abernathy in his July 19 Washington Post op-ed headlined, “I thought the GOP would abandon Trump. I was wrong.”
Abernathy, a former Washington GOP political staffer turned Ohio newspaper editor and rare 2016 Trump endorser, now laments Trump’s subsequent reign of destruction.
But Abernathy doesn’t own and apologize for his role. He spins away his complicity by patronizing the die-hard MAGA base that keeps Trump in power, pat pat on the head, poor dears.
“The world is hurtling past them at breakneck speed,” Abernathy writes. “Their belief that Trump is their last, best hope to avoid being left in the dust is partly disturbing, partly endearing and partly heartbreaking.”
Also bigoted, backward, or too religious.
The latest proof was right next to Abernathy’s column that day.
“Why would Republicans want the military to prepare for real wars when fighting culture wars is so much more fun?” columnist Catherine Rampell mused in her Post op-ed headlined, “Republicans lob a bomb of cynicism at our soldiers.”
Specifically, the House Republican majority contaminated the usually bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act with a starving dog’s breakfast of putrefied red meat that MAGAs — many who never served in uniform — drool over but hurts the troops.
Excuse the further tortured metaphor, but all the MAGA bigoted, backward, and religious slaughterhouse sweepings were dumped into the bill like it was a highway gas station hot dog. Including limits on reproductive, fertility and transgender care, diversity and inclusion, LGBTQ+ rights, and measures to combat climate change that threatens national security and our troops.
“The Trump supporters I know are patriotic Americans …,” Abernathy writes.
Bless their hearts.
But no matter how much proud flag-waving and chest-thumping folks do about loving America more than those lib Americans (and apparently the troops), you cannot be patriotic if you still support Trump. Ipso facto, res ipsa loquitor if you want to get Latin.
That also goes for the vast majority of the Republican Party, including legacy-educated, privileged, piously church-going, old-school Reagan-Bush exclusive country club elites who surely know better but leverage the poor MAGAs while disdaining them.
Are the dubious monetary gains from tax and regulation breaks so important they’ll reluctantly return Trump to the presidency for what every sentient being knows is more outrageous destruction of our nation and everything the GOP they always stood for?
Wouldn’t it feel just a tad soul-selling? Would the Catholic or Protestant Jesus Reelect Trump?
Can they look away from the Wall Street Journal editorial page drumbeat against Biden for a moment and ask objectively, is Biden really worse for America than Trump? Can they tell us precisely how without mouthing the talking points?
Do they really swallow the feed that Biden’s a puppet of the Socialist AOC Democrat wingnuts? More than House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a puppet of the MTG “Freedom Caucus” MAGA-pandering wingnuts?
“Many have observed that Trump tapped into a sense of abandonment felt by large swaths of the population,” Abernathy empathizes.
“But I still don’t think those who are confounded by Trump fully appreciate how profound and widespread that feeling was — and remains,” he writes.
I try to appreciate that feeling. I coulda been a MAGA. I was a high-school dropout at 17 in a Rust Belt city and a runaway from a bad home situation. I had no employable skills other than short-order cooking.
But I was lucky to enlist in the Navy, and after a tour, graduate college with GI Bill help and find a career in writing.
I’m also lucky that, for whatever reasons, I don’t share the MAGA thrill in being mean about other Americans, which Trump represents and inspires.
Sure, sometimes I’m mean about mean people, like here. I desperately try to empathize with MAGAs who aren’t so lucky like me.
But misfortune doesn’t give anyone the victim-bully right to destroy our nation by keeping Trump in power.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
