Hillary was right

“What kind of a woman meets somebody … and within minutes you’re playing hanky panky in a dressing room,” he sneered.

  Public Notice

Sounds like an admission to me.

Trump’s cruel monologue was repulsive. But what was even more disgusting was the audience reaction. CNN had shamelessly filled the room with Trump supporters. And as the former president mocked Carroll, those supporters laughed like he was a witty comedian delivering a punchline.

[...]

Trump is Trump; he was a horrible person long before he was president, and he will go to his grave a liar, a bully, and a bigot. When CNN put Trump on the air for ratings and clout, they knew he would spread election lies. They knew he would demean E. Jean Carroll. They knew he would direct abuse at moderator Kaitlin Collins (he called her “nasty,” his standard epithet for women who challenge him).

But commentators like to think that most Americans are better than Trump. The college students, the small businesspeople, and even the Republican activists who vote for Trump do so, pundits hope, despite his manifest cruelty, rather than because those good Americans enjoy laughing at sexual assault victims.

But CNN’s town hall was a reminder that Trump supporters are in fact bad people — in the sense that to support Trump, and defend Trump, requires them to become their absolute worst selves.

[...]

Trump’s voters empathize with Trump, and he in turn empathizes with them, assuring them that they are persecuted and under assault. And then, empathizing together in an organic community of amity, he tells them that the solution to their ills is atrocity. And they enthusiastically agree.

Deplorables.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was widely excoriated when she said in 2016 that half of Trump’s voters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic” — a “basket of deplorables,” as she memorably put it. In 2022, Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institute worried that “to say that tens of millions of supporters of the other party … are fascists, fascistic, or semi-fascistic is to use the language of national emergency.”

And she took a whole lot of shit for doing it.

Robert O. Paxton argues that a core characteristic of fascism is “an obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood” paired with “compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity.” Fascists claim that they, the pure bearers of the nation’s pride, are being assaulted, smeared, and debased (generally by marginalized people). They then use that as an excuse for extremes of violence in the name of revenge and purity.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.