Opinion

I understand Trump voters. Do I also have to empathize with them?

Then, on Labor Day weekend, Nicholas Kristof, the fiercely compassionate New York Times columnist, argued that former president Donald Trump’s critics needed to find more empathy for his voters. Kristof related the genuinely tragic stories of some of his neighbors in rural Oregon, who in their despair over economic decline and drug addiction, he feels, can be forgiven for embracing easy answers — and shouldn’t be scorned or demeaned for it.

I’ve always agreed with the general principle here; I’ve often argued that you can’t go around calling people morons and then wonder why they’re not in a hurry to vote for you. I remember an ugly email, shared by wealthy Democrats all over the country in the wake of George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, that arrived with the elegant subject line “F--- the South” and proceeded to enumerate all the reasons that southern voters were idiots. No one does sneering contempt like the educated American left.

So if we’re talking about treating Trump voters with basic respect, I’m all in. But empathizing with them, after all we’ve seen? I’m afraid, even for me, that moment has passed.

The problem with Kristof’s argument is that it’s almost as condescending, in its own way, as the leftist derision he criticizes. It was one thing to say, in 2016, that disillusioned rural voters couldn’t be blamed for taking a flier on a TV celebrity over a politician they didn’t trust. I got that. Maybe it even made sense, four years later, to say that Trump’s legions still believed he was trying to protect them from immigrants and China.

But now? After the violent sacking of the Capitol? After Trump’s promise to behave like a dictator (well, okay, I guess if it’s only for a day)? After eight years of bigotry and baseness and flat-out lies?

To say that Trump’s voters aren’t aware of these things, or don’t fully comprehend them, or are firmly in the grip of misinformation, is to say that they’re simply fools. And I’ve met way too many rural Americans to believe that. If they’re ignorant, then their ignorance, at this point, is willful.

Inherent in Kristof’s argument, too, is the kind of moral relativism that often afflicts the left — this idea that the disadvantaged are somehow less responsible for their moral decisions than the rest of us are. One would assume that he feels less empathy for the Trump voters with MBAs and law degrees, the ones who hang Trump flags from their beach houses, who really don’t care much about abortion or the border but who would throw their dog under an oncoming train if it meant extending a tax cut. Without those voters, all the rural towns in America wouldn’t be enough to get Trump reelected — not even close.

I’d assume he also has less empathy for the genuine white nationalists who had long been receding from American life, until Trump gleefully pulled them from the margins and employed their movement in his pursuit of power.

But somehow, when it’s the long-suffering White, working class voter we’re talking about, the Trump sign in the yard should be read as an act of blind nobility. Trump’s just so entertaining! How are such decent, hardworking Americans to know that he is also reckless and malevolent?

By now, they know. In fact, it’s exactly what they love about him. The transcendent appeal of Trump is that he so infuriates the governing elites, the media, the academic left. They hate the intelligentsia, and I don’t blame them. They feel powerless, and every time Trump says something that lights our hair on fire and pays no price for it, we get to know how powerlessness feels.

These voters don’t support Trump because they labor under some illusion that he’s going to rescue their communities — not anymore. They support him because he’s willing to blow up the country if it means teaching insufferable intellectuals a lesson, and so are they. It’s the same vengeful impulse that leads to autocracy in unequal societies all over the world. It is, at its core, unpatriotic, no matter how many flags you fly, or how many ways you try to rationalize it.

Do I understand the fury of Trump voters? Yes. Should I care about it? Of course — and I hope, if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, she’ll at least try to be their president, too.

But let’s remember: Not everyone in rural America sports Trump signs in their yards. There are countless Americans like the ones Kristof describes, people whose communities have been devastated by job loss and substance abuse, who still manage to keep their faith in moral leadership and the Constitution, and who want nothing to do with Trump’s brand of vengeance.

If anyone deserves empathy, it’s them.