Still More Thoughts on Talking to Trump Supporters

Sometimes we need to love assholes.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

This is an update to my At the Intersection post on talking to Trump voters. I still have some thoughts about talking to Trump supporters and I thought I’d share some additional thoughts now before chicken out and not write them down.

Let’s go back to 2016 during Donald Trump’s first presidential run. What was fascinating about that run was how a few things were coming together that brought to the fore some problems facing America. In the fall of 2015, Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work with his wife Ann Case looking at the white working class in America and how they were dying at a young age from what he called Deaths of Despair. Then in 2016 Chris Arnade, a former bond trader on Wall Street started walking across America meeting people he later called “back row America.” These were the people that were forgotten by both political parties. That same year J.D. Vance released his book Hillbilly Elegy to wide acclaim and shed light on the lives of broken families in the Rust Belt and other areas. These and other events served to provide some context as to why Donald Trump was becoming so popular even though he his character was so terrible. We learned that large swaths of America weren’t doing well. In some aspects, they might be doing well financially, but not emotionally or spiritually.

What I was trying to get at in my last post is that these problems and those people still exist. What’s different in 2024 is that the wider public, especially the media, isn’t as interested in these stories as they once were. In addition, Vance who could have helped his fellow conservatives find ways to better the lives of the working class, decided to join Trump’s campaign of grievance and resentment.

We hear a lot about how dangerous a second Trump term will be to America and how it will harm American democracy. I agree with all this. I don’t think Trump is going to be a new Hitler, and I also don’t think American democracy will end if becomes President. But Trump doesn’t have to be Hitler and American democracy doesn’t have to end for things to be really, really bad. I think the man is nursing a major grudge and seeks to unleash his fury at those who wronged him should be become President again.

The focus in 2023 and 2024 has been on Trump. No one cares about the issues in the way people did in 2016. What people care about is, Trump, Trump, Trump. All the while he continues to make outrageous statements and nothing seems to make a dent in stopping him.

The story of a second-term Trump matters, but if you want to stop Trump you have to focus on what happens to be Trump’s superpower: which is his voters. You have to engage his voters, not with scorn but by actually listening to them.

And that’s a tall order.

In my prior post, I shared an interview with New Hampshire resident Ted Johnson who initially supported Nikki Haley and then switched to Donald Trump. Why? Because he is a “wrecking ball.” Johnson wants someone who will destroy the regular order. He knows Trump is a jerk and a person of terrible character, but none of that matters. He needs someone to burn it all down.

It’s easy for those of us to just write Johnson and others off as crazy and possibly bigoted, but what if there is more going on here?

The fact of the matter is, we don’t care. We didn’t care much in 2016 and we don’t care now. I’ve been around NeverTrump conservative and Progressive circles enough to know what we call Trump supporters which can range from being cult members, to racists. Whatever we call them, the message remains that we don’t want to know them and don’t think much of them.

In 2016, Hilary Clinton got tons of grief for her “deplorables” comment and rightly so. But there is another part of her statement that people forget. This is what she said after the deplorables comment:

"But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."

I wonder what would have happened had Clinton led with this or minimized the deplorable comment. Clinton knew that some of the people voting for Trump weren’t terrible people, but they were dealing with anxiety about life.

Why do people want to vote for someone that they know is so toxic? Many of us, myself included, shake our heads in disgust, thinking that these people are just afraid of a changing America and just don’t like brown people or gays or anyone not white. Some of that is true. But why aren’t we curious to learn more? Why aren’t we interested in wanting to persuade them to seek a better way, not by shaming them, but by loving them?

One of the hardest things we as followers of Jesus are called to do is to love our enemies as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. Especially in the mainline we talk about this verse and look condescendingly at our more conservative sisters and brothers who can’t seem to love people that are different from them. But the reality of that statement is that we are called to love those who might not love us back. Loving our enemies means that sometimes we are called to love assholes. And many Trump voters are assholes. Does that mean we accept whatever garbage they say? Do we allow them to mistreat us? No. But it does mean being willing to listen to them. It does mean asking them questions. It does mean treating them as a child of God.

But I know that what I’m saying won’t change anything. A few months ago, I was starting to write this article about a focus group of Republicans who were interested in voters other than Trump, but I stopped writing that article. Why? Because I know that no one really cares. I don’t think anyone is interested in persuasion or listening. I think we need to listen and persuade because what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. But again, we don’t care.

Writing in the Independent, Skylar Baker-Jordan wrote about how she used to dismiss her Trump-supporting relatives but has changed her mind. “We must not give up on our Trumpian relations as lost causes,” she writes, “Because most of them are not. Everyone can be redeemed.” She started talking to her relatives and learned were not one-dimensional beings, but people with diverse thoughts and feelings. She learned she could find common ground. “We found a shared humanity. And we found our way to living in the same reality. I also found lots and lots of people struggling to make ends meet who felt no one else was listening; who felt lost, ignored, scared, and hopeless.”

She ends her essay by saying that the only way out of Trump is through listening to these people. “The good news is this seems not only possible, but easier than many of us imagined. It requires no magic beans, no all-powerful spell,” Baker-Jordan says. “It just requires patience, empathy, and a willingness to engage. It just requires love.”

But love is something that is in short supply.