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In advance of Trump’s Fourth of July event in Washington, Trump opponents and supporters squared off all the way from the White House to the expanse of the National Mall. At one point, the red-hats chanted, “I love America, I love America.”
For many Trump supporters, to love Trump is to love white people is to love America. To hate Trump is to hate white people is to hate America. This love-hate duality is essential to understanding Trumpism, and essential to the mind game Trump and his lieutenants have been playing with white Americans.
According to a recent Fox News survey, Trump still retains majority approval from every segment of white voters except college-educated white women. White people, too, are victims of his domestic assaults, his alternative facts, his dalliances with Vladimir Putin, his tariffs, and his tax cuts for the super-rich. But while many white voters break up and make up with Trump, most never leave. Their white fragility, to use Robin DiAngelo’s term, makes them crave the security of Trumpism. He loves them. They love America. He is America.
He is them. They are him. Whiteness all told.
The red-hats don’t like being told that their pro-life label is bogus when they are not fiercely opposing the march to war with Iran; that their defense of American Jews is a charade when they join forces with anti-Semitic white nationalists; or that their Christian identity is a sham when they worship a man who is the antithesis of Jesus Christ. Trump makes the red-hats feel good by telling them he loves them, and by telling them they are not racist—their antiracist critics are the real racists. He makes them feel good when he says that they are the real patriots, that their “civilization” is superior, and that they have more because they work harder and better.
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It was painful to admit that the relationship I had just left was rarely love. Painful to admit that I had not known regular love, had not been regularly loving to people I claimed to love. But with that admission came more freedom.
I felt free to grow through critique. I started reevaluating relationships and people and myself. Who had been a constructive force in my life? Who had been a destructive force in my life? Was I a constructive force in my own life, or in the lives of others?
We can ask the same questions of America: Who is a constructive and destructive force in America’s political life? Who is wounding America? Who is putting Band-Aids on problems that need surgeries?
Growth necessitates deep-seated, fundamental critiques. But radical critiques can hurt feelings. Asking these questions hurt me to my core. But no longer was I equating simply feeling good with love, or feeling bad with hate. Instead, I was starting to think of love as a constructive act, and hate as a destructive one.
Trump says he loves America, and he whispers sweet somethings that sound so good to his red-hatted supporters, but is he really nurturing their growth? Trump has shattered America in two: those who love him, whom he can abuse, and those who hate him, whom he can fight. How is that love? How is he being caring, affectionate, respectful, trusting, and honest—what hooks considers the active ingredients of love—to his supporters, let alone to the rest of us?
If love is a verb, then hate is also a verb. Trump hates America.
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