Dear A: There’s little point in debating, now that you’re a believing Trumpist, in part because your new faith requires that you insist that you’re not. Facts are no longer facts; they’re whatever Trump needs them to be. This is not new, but is worth repeating.
Trump is not your president but your Savior.
As noted, you’ll deny this, and believe that your denial is authoritative. You’ll mock me for disagreeing, though the evidence is empirical, factual and, for non-Trumpists, undeniable.
You claim to be grounded in what you call “natural law,” but by your own definition you don't believe in it. You still shout it out, from time to time, but your own arguments insist that “natural law” is immutable. Yet in every point you make, you reveal that you don't believe anything is immutable.
Your thinking is flawed at its root.
For a Trumpist, facts themselves -- empirical observation, science, materiality, experimental data, data in general -- the truths that natural law is supposed to be based on, are all mutable.
They change as Trump's fantasies change; your alleged rationalism is in fact non-rational. It is grounded in emotion and faith. If you acknowledged that, at least we'd have a starting point for useful discussion. But you can't.
With respect, you're intellectually dishonest with yourself.
We can't convince you based on logic, because logic depends on facts.
We can't convince you based on research, because research that doesn't comport with Trumpism is fatally flawed.
We can't convince you based on anything, because you start from the premise that what ought to be true, what Trump says is true, is true. You work backwards from there.
You dispute all of this by citing instances in which you've disagreed with Trump, claiming that he's only a means to your ends. Though I abhor most of those ends, that’s not the point here. Your rare disagreements are on the margins, centered on inarguably egregious behavior. Yet you claim those disagreements are substantive, and that, too, is disingenuous.
Yes, you say, he's rough around the edges, and yes he says some crazy things. But, you always add, that's what a leader working on systemic change sometimes does. Watch what he does, not what he says. You don’t see that you’ve set up a false dichotomy: What a president says is a central part of what he does -- his Bully Pulpit. And the Bully Pulpit is not about bullying.
You pretend to believe in rationalism, but your beliefs are really grounded in faith -- the natural, Divine Right of Trump to violate principles of rationalism and laugh at principles of logic, however he chooses.
You accept his claims that what he says on camera is not what he says on camera. How do you deny to yourself what you’ve heard and seen? By surrendering to whatever contortions your mind must perform to convince yourself that yesterday’s perceptions — not today’s lies — are the problem. His comments were misinterpreted, he was kidding, he didn't mean it, he had a bad night's sleep -- unless whatever happens next reflects something he's said in a carpet-bombing press conference, in which he attempts to take every position at once so he can claim later on that he was prescient.
You claim to be grounded in non-relativistic thought, and you mock relativism — progressive and moral -- but, indeed, your entire currency is moral relativism.
Whatever Trump does is moral, whatever progressives do is not.
Facts themselves are fluid, and when thought is founded on mutable facts it's founded on quicksand, not solid rock.
That means it's fantasy -- fiction that presents as non-fiction, which is exactly what good fiction does. In the hands of a gifted realist novelist, fiction seems to be fact, though rational readers know that it is not. I love fiction, I live on it. But I never forget that what it presents as fact is not. Though it may resemble fact, it is mutable in the mind and hands of the writer, and that is not fact.
Trumpism has become a religion, and religions require at least one bottom-line leap of faith, upon which massive edifices (literal and figurative) are then erected.
In this case, Trump is the Savior of the alt-right. Though members of the rational right often don't agree with him, and sometimes say so, many have decided that as long as Trump does their bidding, they can live with him. Such "supporters" aren't what I'm calling Trumpists.
The soul of a Trumpist is different -- it has become dependent on Trump because once committed to him, denying his statements in the face of material fact means denying the part of one’s self that embraced him, argued for him, fought for him.
That's a bridge too far for most Trumpists. The precious few apostates are castigated, vilified, threatened, and ostracized as traitors by Trump and his followers. For most, rejection of the man has become impossible. Acknowledging so deep a perceptual error would be self-annihilating. The deeper a Trumpist's hole is dug, the more the ego prevents the mind from seeing the light of day. Climbing out of a deep hole is much harder than jumping into it.
All contrary arguments are useless.
And a Trumpist’s response to this, when there is a response, takes us back to the grammar school playground: “The irony is that what you articulate is actually true of you, not me.”
In essence, says the true believer, “I’m rubber, you're glue, whatever you say sticks right back on you.”