Why Is Trump Still So Wildly Popular?
An Answer to Peter Leithart’s Question From MAGA World
I am one of those “friends and millions of fellow citizens” who share the Trump enthusiasm First Thing’s Peter Leithart does not, but that he wants to understand. As one of Leithart’s Birmingham pastor buddies, I thought an answer that by-passes middlemen, one that issues straight from at least one of the Trump enthusiast horses’ mouths might be welcome. So here goes.
The first sign that Leithart is not yet thinking the thoughts of Trump enthusiasts after them emerges right out of the gate in his chronicling of Trump awfulness—sexual promiscuity, dishonesty, exaggeration, fickleness, recklessness, narcissism, and vulgarity.
Today, my first thoughts are these—“thank you God for Donald Trump” because “the Democrat party is evil” and “Trump is the only instrument to hand who demonstrates the strength and courage to take them on” and “I hope for a day when there is no need for a Donald Trump on the national scene.” A confluence of convictions animates the Trump enthusiast psyche; convictions classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson associates with a tragic or pessimistic view of human nature and history over against an optimistic or utopian view.
Perseveration over Trump defects in 2016 is one thing, but in 2024 it suggests the workings, consciously or not, especially among ostensibly conservative Christians, of the utopian view Hanson and us Trumpers tend to eschew. For Hanson, the Trump phenomenon maps perfectly with the arcs of the careers of the mythical figure Ajax and with that of the actual Generals George Patton, Curtis LeMay, Douglas MacArthur, and William Tecumseh Sherman. These variously loathsome persons were first borne with in the face of enemies deemed undefeatable without them, then wildly popular as they fought the enemy and won, and finally discarded as once urgently required and effectively deployed tools but now no longer needed.
The tragic view periodically assesses the character and greatness of threats to civilization such that extraordinary means are needed and sought in order to resist and quash them. To do otherwise in such circumstances exhibits not reason, love, or some laudatory cool-headedness aware of “complexities” and “nuance” beyond the kin of MAGA world, but perhaps some combination of blindness and/or cowardice—blindness to the comparable heinousness of and threat posed by, for example Hitler and the Nazi Party; cowardice because the evil now being perpetrated by the Democrat party demands costly, self-sacrificing heroics to resist.
Should a potential rescuing hero arise who presents with a truckload of moral defects, never mind. Imagine Donald Trump as the only person able, willing, and actively attempting to rescue you or someone you love from a fire or an icy lake. Would not the MAGA mindset, “Thank you God for Donald Trump” settle in pretty quickly? That happened to us Trump enthusiasts years ago. Immigrant survivors of Mao, Ho Chi Min, Warsaw Pact, and Soviet proper varieties of totalitarianism confirm our concerns and our posture toward the Orange Man.
Heroics sometimes involve what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “getting one’s hands dirty” for the sake of others even if it costs the loss of one’s reputation. Bonhoeffer, with his eyes wide open, took the tragic view of human nature when he joined the conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Hitler took Bonhoeffer’s life before Bonhoeffer could take his. A bust that memorializes Bonhoeffer as a Christian martyr was erected in Hodges Chapel at Beeson Divinity School where I teach and worship.
Bonhoeffer famously bemoaned the many churchmen prepared to pop the champagne corks should the conspirators succeed, but were not prepared to put anything dear to themselves at risk in the meantime. Bonhoeffer saw civilization itself in the crosshairs of evil. So do Trumpers. Bonhoeffer volunteered to carry one of the bombs with Hitler’s name on it. Hitler had him executed by hanging two weeks before Allied forces would have rescued him. Bonhoeffer missed out on the champagne.
Trumpers view themselves and Trump, like Bonhoeffer viewed himself, as knowing what time it is and who the enemy is. It’s not them, and it’s not Trump—it is the Democrat Party.
The words “Democrat Party” are crucial. The threat is not some vague, un-opposable, abstract “Left” or “Far Left” or “Radical Left.” It’s the party with the media, the universities, the district attorneys, and the guns. Not rank-and-file Democrat voters, but elected Democrats and Democrat-serving, unelected bureaucrats who facilitate that party’s agenda. It’s the party whose defects Trumpers fixate upon rather than the Trump-defect list that may rightly have commanded our attention in 2016, but not, at least to us, in 2024.
Such a list includes such items as (1) not just pro-choice but celebration of abortion on demand up to and even in the midst of the birthing process and willingness to punish those who refuse; (2) Biden’s instruction to children that adults, even their parents, who don’t support their transgender identification, are doing them harm; (3) the open fentanyl delivering, child-trafficking, cartel and gang controlled border; (4) K-12 schools flush with critical race theory- and transgender-affirming textbooks that offer illustrated instruction in fellatio and cunnilingus; (5) boys and men in girl’s and women’s bathrooms and locker rooms; (6) the weaponization of the IRS, FBI and Justice Department against political opponents; (7) Lia Thomas (8) intersectional admissions guidelines in higher education; (9) double-standard legal system; (10) totalitarian, free-speech squelching DEI police at school and the workplace; (11) Bars open—churches closed; (12) the collapse of trust in health professionals serving at the highest levels of government; (13) Parents complaining at school board meetings called and investigated as domestic terrorists; and (14) Lawfare.
For those who reject the comparable heinousness of and threat posed by the Democrat Party to that of the Nazis, we millions of Trump enthusiasts ask the question, why? Is the body count not yet high enough? Please explain. The burden is on you.
The dazzlingly illuminative thought of Catholic anthropologist René Girard (1923–2015), whom Leithart references, does help to account for one feature of Trump enthusiasm. At present, the Democrat party offers the nation not one, but several scapegoats upon whom righteous indignation and all manner of hate is encouraged. These include, as Leithart recognizes, Trump, but also “cisgendered” white men and all identifiably un-woke Christians—the Basket of Deplorables, remember? These are the lepers of contemporary America. Trumpers want to shield themselves, their children, their communities, and the nation they love from the woke, totalitarian onslaught now being unleashed upon them where they live, work, study, play, and worship. They are convinced that people still perseverating over Trump’s defects don’t know what time it is and so will not help them. They’ve already seen Trump doing so.
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