These People Voted For Trump Because They Hate You, And You Monsters Won't Befriend Them?

What is the world coming to?

From many of America’s most “reasonable” pundits and corners of the internet, a narrative in two parts has emerged.

Part 1: People voted for Donald Trump because they hate and despise the Left and needed to punish us for being “condescending” to them and for our refusal to throw transgender people under the bus.

Part 2: The Left is being unreasonable and cruel by not wanting anything to do with those people, refusing to date them, be friends with them or spend holidays with them.

And, you know, I have a whole lot of questions about this. I’d love to know what it is, specifically, that we were supposedly condescending about, because they don’t really seem to mention that, ever.

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But I suppose I will start all of this by pointing out that when Groucho Marx said he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have someone like him as a member … that was supposed to be a joke, not an obligation.

As much as I would love to never have to talk about Bill Maher again, we’re gonna talk about Bill Maher for just a moment, because he’s always very big on this particular diatribe. Here he is on Friday, having a chat with former Trump administration spokesperson Sarah Isgur about how bad it is for our society that the Left refuses to be inclusive of Trump supporters, and, of course, the evil liberal women who refuse to date nice Trump supporters just because they do things like scream “YOUR BODY, MY CHOICE!” at them.

“Just because someone voted for Trump, you don’t get to then ostracize them from polite society,” Isgur said, after Maher conceded for a moment that Trump was perhaps a little Hitler-like, what with his comments about how he would have liked to have had his generals.

Counterpoint: You can absolutely do that, because no one is obligated to interact with these people, give them a platform or otherwise acknowledge their existence if they do not feel like it.

Another example: “Influencer” Autumn Witbeck made a teary TikTok video about how her mother and grandmother (and potentially her other relatives) don’t want to speak to her anymore after she voted for Trump.

Naturally, the comments on the original video are chock full of people going through similar rejections.

Image: r/LeopardsAteMyFace

Oh, the poor dears.

This video was also posted quite a bit on other social media sites, including by one fella who calls himself “The Disrespected Trucker,” who captioned it with “The media has successfully divided families. Shame on all of you. This woman voted for Trump, and her family won't even talk to her. How are we here?”

Literally every single one of his other posts are about how the Left is “evil,”
frequently followed by outrage over liberals not liking Trump voters.

So, just so we’re clear — the rule is that these people are allowed to despise us; to insult large groups of people on the regular; to demand that transgender people be pushed out of public society for their own comfort; to talk gleefully about how they can’t want to watch ICE agents pull grandmothers from their beds and deport them; to — again, because this deserves repeating — shout “YOUR BODY, OUR CHOICE!” at women and girls'; to call Puerto Rico a pile of garbage; to denigrate women who don’t have children; to repeatedly claim that “liberalism is a mental disorder”; to talk about how they voted for Trump to punish us; to regularly claim that Black people are lying about the existence of racism and police brutality, to force their religion on us, and so forth!

And yet, we’re supposed to want to be their friends, want to hang around them, invite them to parties? We’re mean if we don’t want to date them and bring them around our friends so that they can insult and denigrate them, because who doesn’t love that?

I need to be clear here when I say that the reason I, at least, do not like Trump supporters and Republicans is because they say horrific and cruel things about people like me and also people I care about — or at least they vote for and with people who do those things. Why the hell would I want to be friends with anyone like that, when I can be friends with people who are actually nice? Explain this to me. Do I have to be friends with people who insult me and people I care about in other ways? Where is the line?

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If they didn’t do and say and believe these very insulting things, or if they didn’t vote for and with people who do and say and believe these insulting things, this “problem” wouldn’t exist. Like, literally, the whole entire problem is that they are assholes. That’s it. It does not go deeper than that.

Much of the Right’s anger is based in their personal terror over a lack of social power. Social power can mean a lot of things, but one of its most potent immediate forms is getting to be really shitty to people and having them treat you with respect anyway. It’s getting to be the person about which people say, “Oh, he’s an asshole when you first meet him, but once you get to know him he’s the greatest guy on earth.” It’s getting people to hold it in when you say cruel things to them or other people because they want so badly to be accepted by you. Another form is going along with them and being shitty to the people they’ve decided are even worse than you are in order to appease them and get them to leave you alone. They will never be satisfied until they get the fealty they crave, until we, as they love to say, “bend the knee.”

That’s no way (outside of middle school) to make friends. If Trumpists want people to be friends with them (which we know they do not actually want to do), they will have to be kinder people — and they’re not off to a very good start.