The only thing that lasts

There’s a scene in the 1987 Charles Bukowski movie “Barfly” where the female lead is bathing in her flophouse bathtub while the male lead waits for her in the next room. He hoots with laughter as he listens to a drunken couple brawling through the paper thin walls. “What is it?” she calls from the tub. “It’s hatred,” he calls back, “the only thing that lasts.”

I’ve learned a thing or two myself about hatred in the last eight years. I don’t know if it’s the only thing that lasts, but it certainly has staying power and motivating power. I suppose you might say it got me off my apolitical ass and into politics. It’s why I joined Palmer Report.

In my 68 years (precisely today, as I write this) I never hated a president of the United States — not even Nixon — until Trump. I was born smack in the middle of the Eisenhower presidency, the last decent Republican. I suppose the strongest thing I ever felt about Nixon was I felt sorry for him. I thought Nixon was pitiful. I hardly noticed Ford. I vaguely disliked Ronald Reagan and his pusillanimous Vice President. I found George W’s martial rhetoric mildly repellant.

It wasn’t until Trump that I actually knew hatred. Real, visceral, abhorrent loathing. I despised him, and I continue to despise him, like my worst enemy. It’s personal too. He’s a despoiler, a ruiner of the land of my birth. He has transmogrified my mother country into a place of strife and division. I hate him for that. I hate him today the way a former slave would hate the cruel master who has been cast down from power.

But it was Brian Beutler writing in his substack “Off Message” who brought that hatred into focus and showed me the real power that hatred can have. He pointed out something to me that I’d never noticed on my own. Sure there are people who are anti-Biden. But they don’t hate Biden the way we hate Trump, not really. Oh, some of them probably hate him as an abstract symbol of all things “woke liberal.” But I doubt that very many of them hate him personally. After all, MAGAs have subsisted all these years on a steady diet of lies and propaganda, a poor diet indeed for fostering hatred that’s beyond the theoretical.

But never Trumpers? Never Trumpers despise Donald Trump to the last man and last woman. They hate him with a core hatred. Their extreme animus comes from long, real, bitter experience.

They’re New Yorkers who are fed to the teeth with decades of his grift. They are Covid survivors who lost loved ones because of his lies and ineptitude around the pandemic. They are victims of sexual assault who are horrified that this self proclaimed pussy-grabbing rapist would ever defile the sacred corridors of the West Wing. They are business owners he ruined, members of the press he’s threatened, innocent election workers he’s stochastically terrorised. They are Americans like me and you.

That’s a hatred we can use. As Brian Beutler made clear to me, never Trumpers “comprise a majority of the country. It suggests that anti-trumpism is the most powerful force in American politics, and if husbanded well [it will make] an insurmountable obstacle to his hold on power.”

That is how we are guaranteed to win. Donald Trump has created our hatred. It’s a huge motivator. However this thing ends, whether or not he’s a viable candidate by November, our hatred of him is what’s going to get us out to the polls in unprecedented numbers to defeat him.

A lacklustre movement that must be constantly whipped into anger is no match for a motivated army full of passionate haters like us. We are that army. We will crush him, completely, absolutely, by an unprecedented historic number of votes. This time our votes are bombs, our ballots bullets, our mandates grenades. We will destroy him. We will victoriously defeat him this year. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.