Waking From A Dream
Letting Go Is The Hardest Part
Substack informs me that I lost 4 paid subscribers in April. I’m assuming that this is not because $5 a month was breaking the bank, but because many of my subscribers are unhappy with my assessments of Donald Trump.
So, with that in mind, I’d like to focus this missive on those who still support the president. Let’s get into it.
It’s often said that President Trump is a ‘transactional’ person. That everything he does is a trade of some sort. If you ask Google what the word means, you’ll get an AI overview that reads:
”Being ‘transactional’ in a relationship, whether professional or personal, means focusing on a direct exchange, often with a strong expectation of reciprocation. It's about giving something to get something back, rather than prioritizing the relationship itself or building deeper connections.”
It’s well known that I defended Trump against the worst charges leveled at him leading up to - and following - his first election. I was a registered Democrat, but sorely disillusioned by what I saw as a serious loss of the plot in the party that I’d once thought spoke for me. I won’t get into specifics.
I was hurt and angry. When disagreeing on a number of issues about which opinion had become doctrine within the party, I’d been ganged-up on here in cyber-space and largely run out of my long-time social group.
Looking back, I know that the particulars of online debate had done much to make both my own statements and those of my opponents much harsher than either needed to be. We were all learning lessons the hard way, about what is lost when humans forsake both the subliminal information available in face-to-face contact, and the reflection-time that had always accompanied text communication.
In our pre-social-media lives, these discussions would have happened up close. I’d have read the first signs of anger in your eyes soon enough to dial back my rhetoric before doing damage. And vice versa. Or … if we’d been disagreeing by letter, I’d have spent enough time writing to calm any hostility I felt. If not, I’d have cooled off between sealing the envelope with an angry flick of the tongue, and actually dropping it into a mail box.
In the world that Zuckerberg gave us, the built-in conversational guardrails that we’d never thought much about, were removed. It took many of us years to adjust to the immediacy of this modern soapbox.
Additionally, Facebook algorithms would sense ‘engagement’ and encourage it, for their own commercial reasons. So posts from the people who most often triggered me, would be the most likely to appear in my feed. And my own most provocative opinions would pop up in theirs.
Over time, memes and political ads that affirmed and built upon our political and cultural prejudices, would be held up before our eager eyes. These seeming to us, in our naiveté, to just be ‘what the smart people were thinking’.
In 2015, few of us knew that we were being shaped by mindless computer-brains. Carved into more extreme versions of ourselves.
At the same time, many insta-pundits were staking out ground on YouTube. And between the reaction their videos got in ‘comments’ sections, and how readily a new offering was clicked upon … the same sort of algo-driven processes, were giving charismatic voice to some very ill-formed thinking. And often to straight-up political play-acting as YouTube became a profit maker, with outrage a driver of lucrative engagement.
This is the heated milieu into which Donald Trump inserted himself.
As a branding savant, he knew that political discourse had been reconfigured by heavily biased media. And along with the discourse, political expectations had been changed. What had always been a rheostat of gradations, was becoming a toggle switch.
In previous eras, voters understood that what they wanted in policy, and what they could expect to get, were two very different things. Getting a little bit more than you gave away, was understood as the way gains were achieved. A 60% to 40% ratio on the affirmative side was cause for Champagne.
That was now being lost; that fair-play grace necessary to a pluralistic democracy. The understanding that we win some, and the other guys win some … and that our own views will be alternately more or less represented as elections come and go.
Trump though, with his penchant for real-estate battles and boxing matches and casino gaming and beauty pageants … was only interested in zero-sum contests. Do you remember how often he used the word ‘winning’? “We’re gonna do so much winning, that you might get tired of winning.”
In his world, ‘winning’ requires an opponent who is losing.
I was willing to take his side against the progressives leaping to adopt every novel new human variant, while seeming to issue a nation-wide collective yawn when it came to the regular people just trying to make ends meet.
But those of us who defended him weren’t really taking his side, so much as supporting him so that he could take our side.
Among my own conservative friends, the feeling was that we’d made a deal with the guy. ‘Give us back some cultural ground out there in the zeitgeist, and we’ll back your play from our keyboards.’ That he was an unlovely messenger was beside the point.
I mean, Yankees fans were cool with Babe Ruth showing up late … unshaved … stinking of cigars and whisky … as long as he kept swatting the horsehide over the center-field fence.
Similarly, we put up with the orange face-paint, the barely coherent rhetoric and such transparent BS as pretending to know Christ and the US Constitution. The dishonest boasting that no parent would allow their eight-year-old to get away with. The generally low character on most every front.
We didn’t like it. But we needed someone to go into the breech for us and take the blows. This was the idea of Trump as a street-fighting disruptor. A barely contained bull in a China shop that needed a good dose of creative destruction.
I once put it this way to my great friend and producer, Mark Humphreys: “Republicans are MacGyver jury-rigging a grenade. Trump is the junk lying around.”
The transaction was simple: shore up the border, unleash the economy, and chop back the overgrown vines of identity politics … and we’ll all hold our noses.
I struggled to understand why my mild-mannered musician friends had developed such a vicious hatred of the guy, even before his first term began. And in recent years, I’m just as baffled as to why the heartland has become so damned attached to this guy. He doesn’t only disrupt our governance. He disrupts our values.
I have a belief about belief. I think that WHAT a person believes is a lot less important to him, than THAT he believes. The internal sensation of believing, is itself the draw. The opportunity to lock one’s mind onto a certainty … thereby countering the unpredictability about what happens next.
One of the key differences between the liberal temperament, and the conservative temperament, is that the former often delights in a culture of surprises, while the latter feels increasingly unmoored and anxious.
A firmly-held belief system offers calm in the storm. Somehow, Donald Trump built an association with traditional Christianity into his schtick. Somehow, his fanbase made an accommodation to the man’s over-stuffed suitcase of moral failures, seeing him as the ultimate Prodigal Son.
As Easter has recently reminded us, everybody loves a redemption story, and nobody as much as Christians. But the story of ‘The Prodigal’ hinges on him returning bowed and chastened … hoping only to serve.
As Trump rips and tears away at every norm attached to the Presidency of The United States … I have to think that his supporters are finding it harder and harder to look at this man as redeemed.
How does a good man send a couple of hundred thousand government employees into the unemployment lines, at the behest of a trollish billionaire who very obviously bought his way into influence? Even if DOGE was doing good and needed work, these employees have mortgages, kids in daycare, bills to pay. It isn’t their fault that government is bloated.
Would a redeemed man impose tariff-driven price hikes, on people already scrambling to make ends meet? On the American businesses squeezed between higher supply costs and the limits of what customers can afford? This is taxation! Without even the slightest pretense of representation.
Imposed at the whim of one single man, who is readying tax cuts that will further reward the richest, thereby canceling out gains made so painfully with tariffs and cuts to government agencies.
How does a good man side with a murderous Russian authoritarian who has been actively invading a sovereign nation whose only apparent sin is that it wants to join us in NATO?
How does a Christian man send hundreds of unauthorized immigrants into a central American gulag without due process? People whose only obvious sin was that they took advantage of our schizophrenic immigration policies? Because they wanted so badly to be Americans.
How could a good man have scapegoated MILIONS of these people as mostly criminal, murderous or insane, all throughout his campaign? Stirring up the prejudicial fears native to our species?
How could a good man - a redeemed man - set up bald-faced monetary grifts after he’d been elected to represent our noblest values? From his own crypto scams that transfer big money from his followers to his own family’s coffers, while serving as a way for the uber-rich to bribe him … to something as small and grubby as ‘The Trump Guitar’, where a Chinese knock-off of an American classic went for $1,500 … but sold for ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS, after Trump spent an afternoon adding his signature to a truckload of them.
How could a good redeemed Christian man intentionally troll Democrats and world-leaders with nonsense like the Gulf of America, and the idea of seizing both the Panama Canal and Greenland? And then refuse to let go? I mean, it’s all so stupid. So shallow. So disrespectful of the office he holds.
I’m guessing that he’d just streamed ‘The Rock’, before announcing that Alcatraz was gonna make a comeback. How much time and energy and resources will be based on that one late-night brain-fart?
He treats his job like a license to carelessly tinker with anything and everything, for no reason other than his own need for constant attention.
And really … how could any man with genuine Christian values have filled the leadership of our most crucial governmental agencies with untested amateurs whose only qualification is that they kissed his ass and can be counted on to continue doing so?
Where is the honesty one associates with Christian goodness? Where is the humility? Where is the empathy Jesus showed at every step on his path to destiny? Where is the simple unadorned decency toward one’s fellow man?
It isn’t only that Donald Trump himself violates every tenet of Christian goodness. It’s that - in order to keep supporting him - his millions of adherents are deactivating their own goodness.
Hard-working, God-fearing Americans who - ten years ago - just wanted to be seen and heard and taken seriously in the political futures of this country, are becoming ever less worthy of that.
I wandered into amateur punditry eight years ago, because I was tired of hearing blue-collar Americans written off as ignorant, and treated as irrelevant.
Three months into Donald Trump’s regime of egoism and greed … I have a very hard time connecting to the emotions that drove me then.
If you are still on Team Trump, I ask you to listen. The alarm is ringing and it’s time to wake up. Time to let the dream unravel as your conscious mind asserts itself once again. There is nothing shameful about having been taken in. The shame is in doubling down even when the con-man has pushed your credulity LONG past it’s usual breaking point.
If like me, you are temperamentally more conservative than progressive, your role in American politics is being reconsidered. There’s a growing consensus among the intelligentsia, that the downfall of the Democratic party has much to do with the lack of more cautious voices within the tent.
If you are a conservative in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, who continues to hold pre-MAGA Republican values … you are now welcome at the cocktail parties.
Whether you are a softer conservative as exemplified by David Brooks, or a more rock-ribbed guy in the mold of George Will; you’ll have a seat at the table, as long as you can admit to yourself and to others, that Donald Trump is NOT A CONSERVATIVE!
Enough is enough. Yes government is big and unwieldy. But unleashing a pretend entity like DOGE into it with a machete, is just epically irresponsible. Yes, international trade is tricky, but letting one impulsive vindictive guy decide for us all how it will proceed, goes well beyond irresponsible. Even if Trump was an expert on the subject. Which he’s not.
Learned men and women devote their whole lives to understanding the complexities involved in governing a complex society. That Donald Trump possesses a sometimes uncanny degree of animal cunning, does not mean that he’s capable of remaking the country to his own specifications.
Even if he was capable of that, the result would not be as idyllic as his supporters seem to think it would. This guy’s a silver-spoon rich kid. He doesn’t have a clue what it’s really like down here in the trenches. Nor does he care.
I continue to insist that his first term was nowhere near as troublesome as my liberal debate partners in L.A. predicted that it would be. There were missteps, to be certain, but also some solid triumphs, and some refreshing outside-the-box thinking.
And I still think that if he’d been treated more fairly by his detractors both in and outside of government, he could have been something of a centrist.
His neophyte status in DC forced him to surround himself with seasoned politicos. He got some push-back. And he is exactly the kind of guy who needs push-back.
Lord Acton wasn’t just playing with words when he talked about absolute power corrupting absolutely. His axiom finally has it’s modern poster child in Donald J Trump.
The lessons we learn from this episode will define us going forward. If we react only with further partisan entrenchment and mutual disgust, we’re certain to see an acceleration of our decline in the opinion of the world.
But what if we realize that we are all prodigals now and then, and that the understanding and forbearance of others has many times made us whole? What if we can therefore offer that grace across the divide, welcoming the inborn political leanings of others as balance to our own, in pursuit of the greater good?
If this can become our political philosophy and project … well then we might really Make America Great Again.
Happy Mother’s Day! And thanks for reading. -Dave
Really thoughtful, honest and well-reasoned post. I know the impact of some of President Trump's impulsive decision-making and ignoring of the best of our political norms first hand because I personally know faithful decent Christians in the asylum process who are being summarily deported without benefit of a hearing -- back to a communist dictatorship if not into one of the worst prisons in the world. Being summarily punished without a hearing, whoever you are, doesn't embody the American values that I cherish. That doesn't mean that the Democrats are an ideal and perfect party. I have come to a much deeper respect for Republicans over the last few years; that is Republicans who are for the traditional values that they are known for -- free trade, law and order (not carelessly violating or changing laws), rewarding hard work, supporting small business with common sense regulations etc. President Trump isn't apparently about any of that. I am hoping and praying that a coalition of the willing from the moderate wing of both parties reins in the abuses. I am a lifelong Democrat because I believe in economic justice and an inclusive society - but I can see that my perspectives need to be balanced by other perspectives in order for us to be the best country we can be. I don't think I am alone in that, and I think that the number of people who believe that are growing; President Trump is a "homeopathy", a shock to the system that hopefully activates the immune system. I have heard good rumblings from different sectors, but I think that there is a lot of suffering in store before we get to a better place. Taking seriously where we have all gone wrong is good step in the right direction.
I don't have the heart, the energy or the stomach to list out the horrors leftists, i.e., democrats in government are doing to this country, as you have done in stating your case for why we should be deathly afraid of Trump. Those who allow MSM to be their bible and who vote for democrats and republicans in name only are also complicit in tearing this country apart. There's plenty of scorn and blame to go around on both sides.
No one who supports Trump believes he is the pinnacle of human perfection nor do I expect him to be, or any other person who has led or will lead this country. I hope and mostly believe that Trump loves and wants what is best for America, along with her people, all of us, not just one side. I have little to almost no faith in politicians in general, no matter how ethical they may start out to be. Trump isn't a politician and he shouldn't be judged by those characteristics. The only price he isn't willing to pay in order to overcome what America has become, is destroying America to achieve it. The same cannot be said for hard left democrats. There is no love of country, or honor or ethics in their single-minded hatred of Trump. They fear him because he isn't like them, and that's why almost half the country loves him, warts, bluster and all.
You and I will likely never agree about Trump, but I do believe you truly want America to be a great country, not at the expense of beating or destroying any other country, or side, but because we live here and want to participate in a culture that hinges on the values on which our country was founded.