Sean Lester explains in a Federalist column why the overheated reaction to Donald Trump’s presidential victory baffles him.
As a member of the political left, I’ve been harrowed to see the sensational and ever-escalating narratives about Donald Trump (and the election generally) coming from my own supposed half of the spectrum. Trump has many negative qualities worth talking about, but they’re more or less lost in the noise of absurdist alarmism.
As much as I’ve wanted to be objective about him and honestly care about or adequately criticize these flaws, I find myself instead defending Trump from what I see as a stunning lack of honesty, objectivity, or reason from the party that’s supposed to be on the side of facts, education, science, and a compassionate moral high ground.
Bafflingly, I found Trump to be an obviously more acceptable candidate than anything the GOP has put in front us, a noted improvement for a Right that just one election ago was on life support. He’s a Republican candidate who couldn’t honestly claim to be a religious person and who didn’t make religious belief in any way central to his campaign. For the secular left, shouldn’t this be an obviously good thing worth noting?
He’s also a Republican candidate who has expressed very pro-legalization, anti-war-on-drugs positions and expressed during the election his support for a state’s right to legalize drugs?—?something President Obama was pretty sketchy on.
The other day I caught a “Daily Show” clip in which Trevor Noah grilled Trump for walking back the promises he had sold his base on while running, things like jailing Hillary. What is the point of this? That he’s dishonest? That’s not a mystery to anyone, it’s not in any way a revelation. What it does reveal, however, is that the things Democrats literally cried about in a YouTube video because they were so afraid and #literallyshaking are things that he doesn’t intend to do, and yet nobody hears that perspective from Noah or CNN or friends with Hillary icons as their Facebook photos.
Is Trump monstrously anti-LGBT, threatening the safety, rights, and lives of the LGBTQ+ community? No, quite obviously not. He has no positions that would indicate this, and in fact brought on Peter Thiel, a homosexual man, as an adviser. At the Republican National Convention he had Thiel speak, and Thiel received applause after announcing he’s “proud to be gay.”
