All this brings me back to the adamantine animus against Trump. Charlie says that Trump refused to accept and later tried to “overturn” the results of the 2020 election. My own feeling is that the more we learn about the 2020 election, the more understandable Trump’s unhappiness is. The same goes for the January 6 protest: it was not an effort to “overturn” the election; it was a protest against the many irregularities that tainted the election — a protest, by the way, in which the FBI and other government agencies seemed to have played an important role, just as they did in the farcical Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot…
That said, I would eagerly support Trump should he be the nominee. Why? Three reasons. One, I agree with almost every particular of his platform and believe, from his performance the first time around, that he would continue to deliver peace and prosperity for the American people. I just hope that he has a more loyal team and fewer snakes in the civil service. Two, I think Trump would win: he has tens of millions of avid supporters. Three, it would infuriate the cadre of Never Trumpers, on the well-pressed right as well as the left, and that is a spectacle that would be worth the price of admission.
The prospect of that spectacle brings me back to the puzzlement I mentioned earlier: why the unstoppable animus against Trump? I do not believe it is because people think he is a man of “bad character” or that he issued mean tweets or that he is “divisive.” Such things are mere placeholders. I used to say that the main objection to Trump is “aesthetic,” by which term I meant to encompass his unconventional style and unclubbableness. If Nancy Mitford were writing about Donald Trump, she would certainly describe him as “Non-U.” It’s a matter of class.
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