People Who Don't Like Trump

and never did

A very thoughtful essay on Where We Are Now over at ScheerPost

Patrick Lawrence: Notes of a Non-Voter

November 9, 2024

[…]

“I have wondered for years why liberal Americans, to stay with the accepted term, nurse so visceral a hatred of Donald Trump. From the moment he glided down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, the animus has extended magnitudes beyond questions of policy. It has consumed many a liberal, indeed.

“I draw on Otto Rank, one of the early figures in Viennese psychoanalysis, and a little from Freud, to reach tentative conclusions. In others from which we recoil we see reflections of ourselves, if I am not oversimplifying Rank’s thesis in “The Double,” his 1914 book. At the most profound level of their contempt, liberals cannot abide Trump because they recognize in him what they cannot admit they are—intolerant, given to violence, ungenerous toward others, incapable of complexity and prone to simplification, and so on. They see in Trump an American, and they cannot bear it. He is one of them and they, so to say, have Trump within themselves.”

[…]

“To me, the question now concerns the Deep State. Not to put the point morbidly, but the president’s relationship with the national-security apparatus has been, let’s say, essential since Nov. 22, 1963. Kamala Harris, would have served these people like a waiter taking orders. In my view this was part of her appeal to the unseen powers that run the American government. What about Trump?

“Trump went down from New York to Washington eight years ago intent on “draining the swamp,” a foolishly quixotic ambition. The swamp drained him, if I can put it this way. A lot of the people who served in his White House— H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis, the aforementioned Bolton, and on down a long list—were wholly out of phase with his professed plans. Why did he appoint them, many of those watching the Trump circus wondered. 

“I never did. He didn’t appoint these people: They were imposed upon him. I have ever since argued that Trump’s White House was the most opaque in my lifetime. Understanding it required one to distinguish between what Trump did or proposed and what those around him did to undermine him when his plans ran counter to the Deep State’s interests. I mentioned the North Korea talks. Bolton’s subterfuge in Hanoi is a singularly graphic case in point. 

“We cannot know just yet who Trump will have around him, and it will be interesting as appointments are announced. I hope it is not a case of either people who have no idea what they are doing—Tom Cotton, et al.—or people who know well what they are doing—Pompeo, et al.—and you wish they weren’t doing it.”

~~~~~~~~~~

We do now know that Pompeo and Haley are not invited, and that RFK Jr. is.

That’s a good start. Maybe a little of this is in store for some: