It’s time for Trump-haters to look in the mirror

I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, but I’m also not one of those rabid Trump haters who believe he’s a racist monster who will destroy our democracy and our Constitution if we allow him to get back in the White House.

My beef with virulent Trump haters has always been two-fold. One, a disregard for the genuine grievances of working-class Americans who vote for him; two, an inability to look in the mirror and realize their own inexcusable sins against democracy.

I once asked a Trump-hating friend if she believed all 63 million people who voted for him in 2016 were racists. After some reflection, she said, “Yeah, maybe they are.”

When I’m around Trump haters, I’ve learned to nod and just keep my mouth shut. Any hint that he may not be as bad as Hitler will be met by wild howls of rebuke. Who needs it?

I got reamed by a Trump-hater last week because I failed to bash him in a column arguing that hiding President Joe Biden’s mental decline was the “biggest media cover-up of modern times.”

I wondered: “Do you really think the same legacy journalists who went after President Trump with a vengeance on everything from Russian collusion to irregular accounting would have ignored signs of possible dementia?”

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My point was not to defend Trump but to highlight the sheer hypocrisy of Democrats undermining democracy as they accused their rivals of doing the same.

After all, if you hide for years from American voters that their president is mentally unfit for the job, how is that not a flagrant undermining of democracy?

Every move, I argued, was rooted in the hatred of Trump.

When Biden was seen as the man to beat Trump in 2024 as he did in 2020, it was worth hiding his mental decline, as egregious and unforgivable as that was. But as soon as Biden’s disastrous debate made it unlikely that he could beat Trump, suddenly it was all guns blazing on Biden.

And why not? If you believe, as James Carville has said, that Trump “will end the Constitution,” aren’t you duty-bound to take all necessary measures?

“We love you, Joe,” his former admirers have told him, “but if you can’t beat Hitler, you have to go.”

We’re now witnessing the surreal spectacle of Democrats in public meltdown at the prospect that their own man may put Trump back in the White House.

For those who compliment Democrats for having the courage to police their own, I’m not buying it. They’re angry not so much because their man is unfit for the job but because they got caught hiding it.

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Had they acted responsibly, they wouldn’t have waited so long to make Biden what he was always meant to be — a one-term president. But so fixated were they on beating Trump that they failed to see or refused to see how they enabled an unfit president to run the country.

Hatred is blinding indeed.

Meanwhile, Democrats were also blind to something even deeper than Biden — their abandonment of the working class.

As I wrote recently, “The Democrats today are more a party of elites, cultural activists and cosmopolitan Wall Street globalists than of hardscrabble American workers.”

Being so hypnotized by the transcendent danger of Trump, Democrats failed to appreciate the genuine grievances of Trump voters who felt ripped off by progressive policies, open borders, anti-American agitation and a new globalist order.

For Democrats, it was always about Trump, Trump, Trump and more Trump. Even when they conceded that the legal assault on Trump was a blatant show of political bias, it didn’t matter. It’s Hitler we’re talking about, remember?

As crazy as it sounds, Democrats have gone from years of bashing Trump to now being forced to bash Biden. If you’re a Trump-hater, poetic justice aside, it must be excruciating to watch.

This brings us to yesterday’s assassination attempt on Trump, already considered a significant intelligence and law enforcement failure.

It may be overkill to blame the attempt on the virulent and reckless Trump-hating rhetoric that has permeated our discourse for so long, including claims that Trump was set to kill democracy, unleash “death squads” and make homosexuals and reporters “disappear.”

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As Jonathan Turley writes in The Hill, “For months, people have heard politicians and press call Trump ‘Hitler’ and the GOP a Nazi movement. Some compared stopping Trump to stopping Hitler in 1933. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) declared Trump ‘is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy and he has to be eliminated.’ He later apologized.”

When Biden claims that the election may end democracy in the nation, Turley adds, “It can be heard as much as a license as a warning, particularly when he adds ‘we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.’”

But even if we choose not to blame this virulent and violent language for the assassination attempt, there is at least one thing that is not up for debate — the virulence itself.

The hatred for Trump has been notable precisely because it has had no limit. Hatred alone is bad enough, but when it reaches infinity, the hate itself becomes not just blinding but dangerous.

So here is a little message to my Trump-hating friends: When your hatred for Trump makes you so dizzy you can only think of Hitler, maybe it’s time to sit down, take a deep breath and look in the mirror.