Another day, another entry into the seemingly unending list of stories about Trump supporters being delicate little flowers who demand America's respect but are too damn stupid to earn it.
But less than one month into Trump’s term, many of his supporters say they once again feel under attack — perhaps even more so than before.
Those who journeyed to Trump’s Saturday evening event on Florida’s Space Coast said that since the election, they have unfriended some of their liberal relatives or friends on Facebook. They don’t understand why major media outlets don’t see the same successful administration they have been cheering on. And they’re increasingly frustrated that Democrats — and some Republicans — are too slow to approve some of the president’s nominees and too quick to protest his every utterance.
Hey, welcome to politics. I see you're new here. Just to set you straight on some things, a shouty man telling you he's being successful is not the same thing as having evidence of success. Republicans slow-walked Obama nominations throughout his entire term—to the point of refusing to allow him a Supreme Court nomination at all—and generally when a sitting president says something even remotely controversial people are going to talk about that, which is a tidbit of knowledge so basic that you could even learn it from Fox & Friends.
“They’re stonewalling everything that he’s doing because they’re just being babies about it,” said Patricia Melani, 56, a Jersey native who now lives here and attended her third Trump rally Saturday. “All the loudmouths? They need to let it go. Let it go. Shut their mouths and let the man do what he’s got to do. We all shut our mouths when Obama got in the second time around, okay? So that’s what really needs to be done.”
Yes, we all remember the shutting-your-mouths part during Obama's second term. Truly, the sound of mouth shutting was deafening.
Lest you get the notion that Donald Trump's most fervent supporters are, in fact, not very bright, what with their saluting-of-cardboard-cutouts-of-Trump in the morning and defending his comically inept lies in the afternoon, they'd like you to know that they get their information from only the best sources. Which would never lie to them, unlike all of the rest of media, because reasons.
Melani, for example, gets most of her news from talk radio — “I listen to Herman Cain on my way into work, I have Sean [Hannity] on my way home,” she said — and Fox News.
She and her husband were well-versed on hold-ups with the president’s Cabinet nominees and legal arguments for the now-frozen travel ban. But they didn’t know much about the resignation of Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn on Monday amid accusations that he improperly discussed U.S. sanctions with the Russian ambassador — and then withheld that information from Vice President Pence and other top officials.
“See, don’t question me on that because I haven’t really been watching and listening too much on it,” Melani said.
Got it. If Sean Hannity doesn't want to talk about it, it's fake news. That it actually freaking happened and is in all the papers is just evidence of how deep the conspiracy goes. Or something.
Anyhoo, the papers have been chock full of stories about the travails of Trump voters—this New York Times effort was very nearly a parody, it was so silly—and chief among the purported lessons is that Trump voters don't want to hear they're uninformed, because it makes them mad. But they are uninformed. They don't want to hear that their conspiracy theories about minorities, immigrants and refugees are just warmed-over racism, because that's rude. But those conspiracy theories are, in fact, just warmed-over racism. They don't want to hear that they were conned, and that the things Donald Trump is doing will in fact make their lives worse to a far greater extent than it would make them better—whether it be deregulating Wall Street, or installing hostile figures in important government agencies, or starting trade wars, or take-your-pick, but those things are all happening whether Sean Hannity mentions them or not.
So we're left with a collection of people who bristle mightily at the thought that we think they're uninformed or gullible, but whose entire support for Trump is based on being uninformed and gullible. They're very, very angry about all the political correctness going on these days, and therefore celebrate Trump and other "conservative" figures who simply say rude, obnoxious, racist, misogynistic things out loud like a proper patriot should, but they live in constant fury over the thought that some "liberal," somewhere, might say rude and obnoxious things about them.
If the premise here is that we all have to shut up and pretend ignorance is a fine American value, or that lying is morally equivalent to stating the truth, or that the real tragedy here is that professional insult factories like Donald Trump or Milo Whatshisface might get themselves insulted and what kind of world would allow that—yeah, no. That's not going to fly. Taking a wrecking ball to American institutions of government, to long-held ethical standards, to basic standards of human decency and to the very notion of objective fact is going to get you, at the very least, derided and condemned. Deriding and condemning such behavior is, in fact, the patriotic thing to do.