Op-Ed: Trump voters won. Why should liberals be nice to them?

Liberals aren’t welcoming enough to Trump voters, or so the headlines say. Every week there’s another batch of think pieces scolding Democrats and leftists for being mean to folks who cast their ballot for the former reality television star. The New York Times quotes a small-business owner complaining that liberals tell him, “You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.” Protests against Trump, we’re told, push Trump voters to double down on love of Trump. The left must assure Trump voters that they are awesome and lovely and wonderful people. Or else.

Isn’t there something backward about all of this? Trump won. Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress; they have the ability to choose a Supreme Court justice. Trump voters are in power; they are going to get the policies they desire, more or less. If anyone has a right to be bitter and resentful, isn’t it the left? Why are Trump voters nursing a sense of grievance? They got what they wanted.

In the usual course of things, it’s the winners who are supposed to reach out to the losers, not the other way around. Generally, the new president takes steps to assure the losing party that he’s planning on governing for all Americans. Shortly before his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama held a dinner honoring his defeated Republican opponent, John McCain. Obama also kept Republican Robert Gates, Bush’s defense secretary, at his post.

Such bipartisan gestures are typical for a new president — and you’d think Trump would be more eager to make them than most. Despite the pundits’ warnings that leftists will never be popular again if they do not make nice with Trump voters, the truth is that millions more people voted against Trump than voted for him. He is a deeply divisive figure even within his own party.

As an unorthodox candidate with few long-term ties to the GOP, it would make sense for him to try to find common ground with Democrats. Trump could have appointed compromise picks to his Cabinet, for example. He could have kicked off his legislative agenda with an infrastructure project, which many Democrats signaled they would support.

Instead, Trump has appointed hard-right ideologues to his Cabinet, relied on right-wing, white-nationalist-affiliated gutter journalists like Stephen Bannon for his advisors and pushed the most polarizing aspects of his agenda, such as banning travelers from majority-Muslim countries. He’s even been weirdly reluctant to condemn anti-Semitic bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers — a gimme bipartisan gesture if ever there was one.

In speeches, he returns obsessively to the November election, insisting his electoral victory was historically large, even though it was one of the narrower ones in recent history, and claiming that people who voted against him did so illegally. Rather than assuring those of us in the opposition that he is our president too, he has gone out of his way to say that our dissent is illegitimate, and that he despises us.

This is the message from others on the right as well. Congressmen faced with angry town hall meetings blame paid protesters, refusing to acknowledge their own constituents. And pundits write incessantly about how the left needs to embrace Trump supporters, presenting those voters as the real Americans with real grievances, whose egos must be eternally salved, even in victory.

People on the left aren’t focused mainly on being mean to Trump voters. On the contrary, people on the left are scared of Trump voters and what they have wrought, and with good reason. Trump and the Republicans have promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, but have not said how they would replace it; people fear what will happen to them if they have no access to healthcare. Trump has made frightening comments about sending troops into cities like Chicago. Immigration agents are arresting people leaving church shelters. The list could go on. Many people are genuinely, and justifiably, afraid of what is happening, and what will happen, under a Trump administration.

Trump is the one in power; Trump voters are the ones who put him there. Why exactly is it up to the left to reassure them?

Trump voters are upset, we’re told, because they’re being called bigots or racists. I can’t speak for the left as a whole, obviously, but I know that I, personally, would love to be convinced that Trump supporters don’t approve of bomb threats against synagogues, and don’t want people with cancer to die without care. I would love Trump voters to demonstrate that they are better than the president’s worst rhetoric.

I don’t have any particular desire to yell at or insult Trump supporters. But I would say to them: You won. Your candidate is in power. If you think the people who voted against you are human, this is your chance to show it. And if you don’t, then yes, the people you’re kicking are going to judge you.

Noah Berlatsky is the author most recently of “Corruption: American Political Films”.

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