Trump’s only on his own side

In the placid summer haze of early August, email a mere trickling deluge and the cottage beckoning, I naturally roll over and ask what can explain Donald Trump. Sorry. But he’s not just a headline machine welcome in the dog days. He really is a mystery.

Not i n some ways, of course. I was amused by Monday’s New York Times headline “Republicans Worry That White House Disarray Is Undermining Trump.” Drat that Disarray. Who hired him anyway?

Surely it is obvious that the president is undermining himself by being an appalling manager and grotesquely flawed human being who can’t even address the Boy Scouts without the organization having to apologize to its members for a crass breach of etiquette Trump’s humiliated staff then deny happened.

Spare me the tweets. I’m not some liberal commentator who lashes every Republican as the worst president ever then belatedly discovers virtues in George Bush Sr. or even Jr. for the sole purpose of contrasting them with the unredeemable awfulness of the current incumbent. I’m certainly not uncomfortable with Trump because he has a conservative agenda. To some extent I’m uncomfortable with him because he doesn’t. But it’s not the real problem.

Nor am I a snob who despises this man of the people for preferring steak with ketchup to any fancy meal all his money could buy. I had wieners and rice for Sunday dinner, and wieners and leftover spaghetti for lunch. (Hey. I was busy. But at least I added Tabasco sauce.) And I can understand people defending a Republican incumbent despite some ideological, managerial or character flaws, because humans are imperfect and politics doubly so.

The real problem is the continued, even i ncreasing, support for Trump from genuine conservatives I know and respect because of his f l aws not despite them. I just got an email from a friend I know to be a Christian gentleman, saying Trump is on our side in the culture wars and is finally fighting in the no- holdsbarred style the left has employed successfully for decades. And while Trump is many ways a Frankenstein’s monster of the left, making his own rules, defying convention, and taking a distinctly postmodern attitude toward truth, why would conservatives want such a thing?

Reading this email I was reminded of something Charles Krauthammer wrote in Saturday’s National Post. Trump, he declared, had the virtue of transparency, or at least the quality. “No filter, no governor, no editor lies between his impulses and his public actions” especially subjecting “his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions” to “a series of deliberate public humiliations.” Trump, Krauthammer wrote, “relishes such a cat- and- mouse game and, by playing it so openly, reveals a deeply repellent vindictiveness in the service of a pathological need to display dominance.”

Indeed. Trump has spent a lifetime dominating and humiliating people in shabbily spectacular ways. Think “You’re fired.” And I fear that for precisely this reason he appeals to people who feel powerless and are sick of it.

This assessment might puzzle liberals, including most American Democrats, who deeply believe they speak for the powerless and marginalized. But from the unemployed Appalachian poor in disintegrating communities to conservatives convinced that, whatever victories “right wing” parties may win at the ballot box, they are not merely losing the culture wars but being humiliated in defeat, being taunted for “white privilege” by smug college students or Hollywood stars adds painful insult to very real injury. Even Justin Trudeau’ s condescending“because it’ s 2015” brushes aside the valid concerns of many men about their shrinking place in the modern world with sublimely unselfaware scorn.

I’m not asking liberals to decide their philosophy is wrong. At least not here and now. I’m just asking them to ponder whether Trump’s ongoing appeal despite, or even because of his bullying, noholds- barred style, is the result of their being ungracious in victory, even vindictive, in ways Trump apes. Repent, I say.

Including to conservatives who defend Trump despite his making a mockery of almost everything we believe, especially about morality. In The New York Times David Leonhardt contrasted Trump praising loyalty before the Boy Scouts with political scientist John J. Pitney’s observation that “Trump’s life has been a long trail of betrayals” of associates, mentors, wives, just about anyone within reach of his dagger.

He is not on our side in the culture wars. Only his own. I even despise him for preferring steak with ketchup, not from a common touch but to be aggressively vulgar for its own sake. And I’m distressed by the eagerness with which many people race to the bottom in public affairs, like children reproached for some ignoble word or deed who say their sibling just did it, as though they were merely waiting for an excuse.

So yes, Trump obsesses me. Even on the dock.