But on the other hand, I think many of these Trump supporters think that the fact that Trump can be so shockingly rude, boorish, shameless, and arrogant just proves his manhood, and the fact that no one is rude back to him just shows how much a p—-y these rivals are. Like a fifth grade schoolyard bully, these folks may not understand anything but a good solid punch in the nose.
When conservative politicians and pundits disagree with people on the left, more often than not they claim that people on the left are wrong. Very often, they will even try to explain why a certain policy might be expected to backfire. I will grant right away that not all of them will be exceptionally civil all the time, but even as someone who often finds myself in disagreement with many of those people, I'd say most of the time it's really about arguing over what they perceive to be mistakes, errors and misunderstanding.
When liberal politicians and pundits disagree with people on the right, they do not limit themselves to claim that those people are wrong. Most of the time, they will try to make the point that they are malign, evil. Of course, there are very prominent counterexamples such as Barack Obama. It's one of the things that I like about him: he has never been very inclined to demonize the opposition. He is willing to talk over disagreements, to figure out compromise and to seek ways to strike deals even with people who insulted him. I even remember Paul Krugman and others from the NY Times complaining about Obama being too nice with Republicans and it shows. If you ask Obama what he thinks about a problem, he can weigh pros and cons, go through arguments people on the right will tend to make and provide response without relying on strawmen. That guy clearly listened when people criticized his ideas and took some of the criticism on board.
However, Barack Obama does not seem to be the typical Democrat anymore as far as the politicians, though not necessarily the voting base is concerned. What at least a sizable portion of people on the left do is accuse the right of being insensitive, bigoted, racist and then some on frankly tenuous grounds. If you want an example of this, consider the two press conferences Donald Trump held years ago following the Charlottesville incident. What most of the media and most of the left got out of those two conferences is the infamous "nice people" commentary. They made the point,
ad nauseam that Donald Trump was speaking about Nazis and White Supremacists... However, this interpretation is completely inconsistent with what Donald Trump actually said. If he was talking about the violence, this would have required him to call both Nazis and Antifa "nice people." Even I would not call anyone supporting or participating in Antifa protests "nice people." More to the point, in the second commentary he provided, he explicitly said that "racism is evil" (I'm quoting him verbatim) and he spent about 3 minutes ripping on white supremacy and neonazis. He call them evil, bigotted, racist and he explained that those ideas are antithetical to the promise of the Declaration of Independance, basically calling all of them unamerican and unpatriotic.
The truth is that Donald Trump never
explicitly took the side of any racist group, but he
explicitly denounced them. To call him a racist is to try to divine intentions he never expressed. Granted, the guy makes stupid comments on Twitter, but I suspect he is trying to get people on the left mad for political gains more than anything else. Irrespective of that point, where I am getting at here is that people on the left, especially more radical people on the left,
have been bullying people on the right for decades. If you ask an average conservative or an average moderate if they could befriend liberals and hang out with them, they tend to reply in the positive. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to reply in the negative...
It's not some kind of macho nonsense that people like about Trump. What some of them like is that they finally have a guy who throws punches back. It's granted that he is not making the atmosphere better in Washington D.C., but he's not responsible for the foul air. He is merely the sane, strategically sound response to aggressive leftists in the media, the academia, and elsewhere who spend their time demonizing everyone on the right. It's also granted that most ordinary Joes and Janes such as you or me don't do that, but I am not a news anchor and neither are you. Donald Trump is a gigantic middle finger to people like Don Lemon. If Democrats and journalists were more moderate, none of this would work.
