No longer underdogs, Trump’s hardcore base should NOT act like their enemies (and neither should those enemies)

Trump and his enemies

When the world went nuts five years ago—empty hospitals hysterically reported to be “overrun”; drivers wearing masks, with no-one else in the car; sheets of plexiglass “protecting”cashiers from their customers (and vice versa); priests using squirt-guns to baptize infants; any and all gatherings forbidden as “super-spreader events,” although no law proscribed them, and so on—there was, on top of all that madness (and as many people know), a dizzying political reversal all throughout the West, as the left that, back in the day, was staunchly anti-war (above all against the war on Vietnam, but all wars, and the agencies and interests that promoted them); pro-integration; committed to free speech for all, along with free assembly (even for Nazis); for workers’ rights across the board, against the growing might of corporate power; against “free trade”; for women’s rights, and, latterly, gay rights; and dedicated to the cleansing and safeguarding of “the environment,” as it was now imprecisely called: i.e., concerned about industrial pollution of the air and soil and water, and the chemical adulteration of our food.

Those aren’t the only issues that the left, as I remember it, addressed, before its infiltration and subversion by the state, mainly via the CIA and FBI (dirty trickery that started in the Sixties, both to divide and depoliticize the left). However, the catalogue above includes the major issues that defined the left—until things changed radically (as it were), so that the left became “the left,” a vast “woke” mob that, for all its incoherent preaching about race-and-gender, was a Bizarro version of the right, c. 1952. Aside from the deep impact of cell phones and the Internet, what thus transformed the left into its opposite was mainly the unlikely-seeming rise of Donald Trump, and then the demonic global spectre of “the virus”—a double whammy that has made “the left” pro-war, especially toward Russia, with a fierce commitment to the Nazi legions in Ukraine; belligerently “triggered” by free speech and free assembly (for anyone except themselves), and therefore hot for censorship, online and off-, with all contrary views reviled as “hate speech” and/or “misinformation”; virulent abhorrence of the working class (except its blocs of “color”), who, “the left” believes, don’t deserve due process, habeas corpus or the right to earn a living; a new belief in segregation—of blacks on campus (a consequence of Critical Race Theory). and of the “unvaccinated” (Noam Chomsky urging that they all be locked up somewhere, with or without food); a weird contempt for women’s rights, in favor of the new misogyny promoted by transgenderism; a cringing reverence for Big Pharma, and (unbelievably) absolute trust in the CIA and FBI; and a lunatic rejection of environmentalism, with its emphasis on cleansing our air, water, soil and food, in favor of the groundless and impossible objective of eliminating CO2.

Those few of us who still believe in the (real) left’s passé agenda started noticing the shift decades ago. (I myself began to doubt the left’s reliability way back in the Nineties, when I became an activist against the corporate concentration of the media, and discovered that the left could not care less about that issue; and then the same thing happened under Bush the Younger, when I shifted my attention to reform of our abysmal voting system, for which the left attacked me and my few allies.) However, it was not til 2020 that the left became “the left”—shock troops for Big Pharma (rather like ACT UP in the Eighties). Since then, it has been all too clear that there was almost no left left, since it was now suddenly the right that was resisting censorship, gathering in defense of free assembly and against the state-and-corporate juggernaut of “COVID measures,” suffering persecution, federal detention and impoverishment for their dissent and/or religion, opposing war with Russia, questioning the narratives disgorged by “our free press” (unintimidated by dismissal as “conspiracy theorists), defending girls’ and women’s rights against harassment, and displacement, by trans activists, and rightly skeptical toward the apocalyptic hooey of “climate change.”

Thus those who had formerly “identified” as being on the left were now “politically marooned” (to quote Del Bigtree), and, primarily because of COVID, gravitated toward the libertarian and Christian right, whose sanest members were as capable of civil conversation as “the left” were prone to foaming at the mouth if you should question any of their pieties. This sea-change has been vividly exemplified by Tucker Carlson’s taking Amy Goodman’s place as a trustworthy oracle (although, in fact, she wasn’t)—a shift that’s been especially disorienting for myself, since, back in the day, I found Carlson’s strict adherence to his party’s line (and preppy smirk) obnoxious, while I appeared on Amy Goodman’s show some half a dozen times, was on good terms with Michael Moore, got along with Chomsky, and otherwise misjudged the idols of the left. Another sign of the times: Goodman, Moore and Chomsky, and their followers, all jeered 9/11 Truth, turned a blind eye to the Kennedy assassinations, and, more recently, stridently condemned the protesters on “January 6,” celebrating their fascistic punishment; while it’s been Carlson—along with punching-bags like Alex Jones and Joe Rogan—who has given us invaluable truths about such pivotal catastrophes. (Carlson isn’t smirking anymore.)

While it was “COVID” that mainly drove the right’s resistance, their stance was also based, of course, on their fierce faith in Trump, especially since the “liberals” and “progressives” who dumped endlessly on him dumped almost as heavily on all the “Nazis” cheering him. (Trump is no less dangerous than “Trumpism,” Chomsky proclaimed last year, meaning the majority of the electorate—i.e., the working class.) And now that Trump is “back”—and acting largely as you would expect him to, what with his thin skin and feral court, the incessant vitriol drenching him since he first ran for president, and the sketchy “lawfare” used to drive him out—the right seems far less righteous than they did as underdogs, scorned and persecuted by “Joe Biden” and the government-and-media that (barely) propped him up. (None of “the resistance” ever took the high road against Trump: indeed, by ceaselessly and often crudely mocking him, they were not opposing him so much as emulating him.) Now that their leader is in power again, his staunchest fans support his every move as zealously as his attackers raged at everything he ever said or did, even though Trump’s moves appear increasingly to be insane.

Such support is troubling, to say the least, even though it’s dwindling, primarily because of economic hardship, and, as well, because, this time around, Trump has been wildly overdoing it, as if trying to freak out and/or punish everyone who doesn’t worship him. Thus ICE (whose agents Trump allows to break into people’s homes without warrants) has been deporting not just illegal immigrants, whether otherwise criminal or not (even schoolchildren seized in class), but US citizens born in the U.S.A.—including children, one as young as two years old—and even blocking entry to (white) foreigners whose works or world-view he dislikes, or that his myrmidons believe he wouldn’t like. (A Venezuelan deliveryman who accidentally went to Canada was seized up there by US agents, and was then disappeared, according to his lawyer.) And thus Trump’s efforts to purge DEI from government and the academy have extended to a Soviet-style purge, banning the study of topics like black history, ridding the Smithsonian of “improper ideology,” and even taking down the MLB’s webpage honoring Jackie Robinson.

‘He’s gone’: Attorney ‘shocked’ after Trump admin ‘disappeared’ delivery worker (April 22, 2025) (Link)

And thus Trump’s (and, until recently, Elon Musk’s) attempts to cut “wasteful” federal funding have included cutting back on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—programs that Trump and Musk will surely never need, but that keep countless Americans alive. And thus Trump’s stand against transgender “healthcare” for children has entailed the targeting of trans adults. And thus, in spite of his apparent preference not to go to outright war, and his assurances that he can always “make a deal” to end hostilities, his (weakening?) support for Netanyahu’s ongoing massacre in Gaza maintains Biden/Harris/Clinton’s bloody policy, as does the attack on Yemen (the second-poorest country in the Middle East and North Africa). And thus, intent on payback as he is, Trump is blowing off the Supreme Court, and going after judges whose rulings have annoyed him. And thus he has imposed whopping tariffs to revitalize domestic manufacturing, regardless of its economic impact on real people, and without much bothering to explain their rationale. (Now Trump has imposed a tariff of 100% on movies made abroad.) And so on—especially including federal harassment and economic clout against protesters, and the schools that respect, or did respect, the latters’ First Amendment rights.

What Trump has done, in short, is build on rational and even necessary policies—deporting foreign criminals, pushing back on DEI, protecting kids from mutilation, saving taxpayers money—to go hog-wild across the board, and without clearly saying why; Trump’s rampage seems intended mainly to project himself as mean and tough (as well as infallible), and to encourage the same bully posture in his “base.” In other words, he almost always doubles down—just like his attackers, who are now reacting to his provocations even more hysterically than they did when he first ran, and throughout his first term, and even afterward; and, far from trying to bridge the gap, his “critics” (if we can so dignify their virulence) savage anyone who dares even talk to him, as opposed to screaming at him, as we’ve seen lately with Bill Maher.

In the face of Trump’s imperial excesses, and the seething hatred they’ve whipped up throughout “the left” (although they would go after him in any case), we need to get a few things straight:

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