Center Cannot Hold
Forced to love or hate the prez
LOVE President Trump or hate him, we’re forced to pick a side. Neither his ardent supporters nor his most vehement detractors will countenance any middle ground.
Recently, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg got into a Twitter scrap with Seb Gorka, a former Trump aide. The argument revolved around whether the left has moral standing to criticize Trump over Stormy Daniels.
Daniels says she had an affair with President Trump and was coerced into silence about it. To Goldberg, it’s irrelevant whether liberals also have morally corrupt people, like Bill Clinton, on their side. He said “Trump’s scummy behavior is not mitigated or in any way diminished because liberals who defended Clinton or Weinstein or X are hypocrites. I’m no liberal and I condemn both.”
But to Gorka, no real argument can take place with Goldberg because during the 2016 election Goldberg was in the conservative Never Trump camp. “The Never-Trump thing is getting a tad dreary,” Gorka tweeted to Goldberg. “November 2016 happened. Get over yourself. Try to get back to the level of analysis you demonstrated before @realDonaldTrump ran. And won.”
What’s actually getting dreary is how all in or all out everyone has to be about Trump. From the pro-Trump side, all criticism of the president is shut down in the way Gorka did to Goldberg. You’re suspect if you didn’t support Trump during the election, your opinions mean less if you’re not on board with every single thing Trump does and says.
The intra-conservative battle that has been going on since the 2016 Republican primary shows no sign of waning. Breitbart regularly refers to people like House Speaker Paul Ryan by the “Never-Trump” moniker, despite the fact that Trump’s accomplishments such as the tax plan could not have happened without Ryan. If Paul Ryan isn’t supportive enough of Trump at this point, who is?
It happens in reverse from the left. If you’re not completely on board with “the Resistance” and all it stands for, you’re a traitor.
Lindsey Graham was an outspoken Trump critic during the election, but has since warmed a bit to the president. There could be many reasons for this, including that the president is a member of Graham’s party and it’s easier to get things done when working together. It’s also entirely possible that in a universe where your only options are with Trump or against him, Graham decided that with made more sense.
But the chatter about Graham’s shift is that he’s being blackmailed. Comedian and political activist Chelsea Handler threw an exple- tive-filled accusation about it at Graham on Twitter. Writer Sarah Kendzior posited the theory on MSNBC. “We know that Lindsey Graham’s personal e-mails were also hacked,” Kendzior said. “And we know that Trump has a long track record of blackmailing and threatening those who he sees as his political opponents.”
How Trump could have a long track record of blackmailing his political opponents when he only got into politics in 2016 is unclear.
Famed defense attorney and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz gets the same treatment. A self- proclaimed liberal, Dershowitz voted for Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton in 2016. But he has come to Trump’s defense on legal issues and for that he’s accused of being in Trump’s pocket. The Washington Post reported that Dershowitz “is being shunned by many of his old political allies. His motives are being questioned. And people who used to be his friends just don’t want to hear from him.”
Many politicians have this kind of cult of personality, but Trump’s is so feverish and all-encompassing that it’s particularly exhausting. And the hatred he inspires is so intense, it’s crushing in its divisiveness. It’s OK to like or dislike some things the president does or says but not others.
Conservatives criticized George W. Bush as he expanded the size of government and liberals were angry at Barack Obama for authorizing numerous drone attacks. They weren’t stripped of their conservative or liberal credentials for it. When Democrats like Hillary Clinton voted for Bush’s No Child Left Behind plan, or Republicans voted for Obama’s Wall Street reform there wasn’t speculation someone was blackmailing them.
Both sides need to dial back the emotion a little bit and get to a place where we can criticize the president for doing something bad or praise him for doing something good without lashing out or turning to conspiracy theories. We don’t have to “normalize” Trump, as the refrain goes, but it would be nice if we normalized ourselves.