I Don't Hate Trump Enough

An article by , November 2, 2026

Bold black, red, and blue poster illustration: a crowd of dark silhouettes with stones raised surrounds a woman; beside her stands one man with both hands open and empty.
Illustration by Eunice, in bold black, red, and blue.

This article, read aloud:

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This morning a friend of mine—Sean, first name only, he knows who he is—posted about the fight between the Justice Department and California over the voter rolls. I commented that the fight is bloodsport, zero-sum, winner take all, and that law is a cure and not a prevention. Sean answered with the civics book: Congress controls the money, the courts review, the guardrails hold. He closed strong. Power is supposed to have limits precisely because presidents are human beings who get angry, feel wronged, and want revenge. That's the whole fucking point of the guardrails.

I answered with the only sentence that mattered: the proof is in the pudding. Look at what is actually going on. Look at the lack of accountability by anybody, for anybody. Say your pretty words. They have no bearing on reality.

And then the thread did what every thread does. The argument stopped being about guardrails and became about me. Why are you defending him?

The test

I have never defended Donald Trump in my life. Not once, not in print, not in private, not today. What I have done for ten years is decline to hate him in public at the required temperature, and in the current accounting that is the same thing as loving him. The test is not agreement. Nobody checks your policy positions. The test is hatred, metered. If you don't hate him enough, you don't hate him at all, and if you don't hate him at all, you love him, and if you love him you are the enemy. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. There is no third box on the form.

Anybody who calls me a Trumper gets the same answer I have given since 2016: I'm not pro Trump at all. I just do not hate him remotely enough for you. I do not pass your purity test. That is the whole confession. I fail a hatred exam, and the failure gets filed as allegiance.

The armadillo

You cannot be the armadillo in the middle. The middle of the road has two directions of traffic on it, and both directions run over the animal standing there. A man who stands still while the parade marches away down the street will be reported, by the parade, as marching toward the other side. I have not moved an inch since 2016. My position this morning is my position from a decade ago, word for word, a scratched record. But the scoreboard cannot register a stationary man. It can only book each year of refusal as another year of devotion, so every year my friends conclude I love him more.

The rocks

The crowd drags the woman into the open, caught, guilty, no defense available, and every man in the circle has a stone in his hand. One man declines to throw. In the Gospel the accusers eventually drift away one by one, convicted by their own conscience, and the woman walks. Refuse to throw rocks at the lady and the crowd does not shrug and go home. It stands you next to the lady and throws the rocks at you. Refusal gets reclassified as membership. The man who will not throw is treated as the woman's accomplice, and there is no sentence you can say while standing next to her that will be heard as anything but her defense.

I know, because the sentences get said. I called Donald Trump an instrument of a vengeful God—Bamm-Bamm's club, lawful vengeance, the rod swung at a people who held dominion and never expected ramifications. That is not a compliment. Isaiah's Assyria is the rod of God's anger, and the moment the chastisement is finished, God judges the rod and burns it. Nobody compliments a club. My friends hear the word God in the sentence and stop reading before the sentence ends.

The record

In April 2023 I recorded a full episode on the weaponization of extreme Trump hate and what the government did with it. This past May I published The Gold Standard: Donald Trump is not America's first ostentatious president—he is America's first ostentatious president who didn't have the decency to be ostentatious on behalf of people the taste-making class had already decided to find charming. The claim is about the hatred aimed at him, not the man. The hatred has a texture: revulsion at the gold, the name on the building, the accent that never got laundered. Class contempt in a policy costume. The same month I wrote Please Don't Throw Me In That Briar Patch, about his pursuers as Wile E. Coyote: seventy-five years of unlimited ACME budget, rocket skates and portable holes, and the Road Runner uncaught. The hatred does not diminish him. It feeds the show and sells the tickets.

It works the same way with the comedy. Every rally riff the news quotes as an indictment—the asses, the needling, vote for me or you're going to hell—is the first ten minutes of every Rotary Club speech in the history of American manhood. I sit there and laugh, because it is funny, objectively, in the genre it belongs to. The people quoting the punchlines read them in a level prosecutor's voice and cannot understand why the jury is grinning. They bought tickets to a comedy club and filed a complaint about the comedy. Worse for them, the quoting sells him: people read the lines, laugh in spite of themselves, and think that guy is charming, that guy is unfiltered, that guy is as good a comedian as anybody working today.

The casting

My mother loved Donald Trump. Watched every episode of The Apprentice—the boardroom, the finger, you're fired. I thought he was a terrifying, appalling windbag, and that was my settled opinion of the man for years. It never changed. I just watched him get cast. There is a difference between the windbag on a reality show and the same windbag cast as the lead man, President of the United States, and the second one is audacious and objectively hilarious. Any Gen X man who cannot see that should tear up his card. We were latchkey kids raised on irony; we learned to watch the show with the laugh track off. A generation that cannot laugh at the casting has surrendered the one instrument it was issued. Google the proposition and the search engine reads you a both-sides safety briefing—perspectives vary, the stakes are serious, the humor is complex.

Drawn that way

Jessica Rabbit said it in one line: I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way. Trump was drawn that way. He was issued a cartoon villain's face and a cartoon villain's palette, and the verdict gets read off the drawing before a word of the record is opened. Run the control case. George W. Bush was ten times worse than Donald Trump by my accounting, and the country filed him under stupid instead of mean—because he was slender, neatly dressed, soft-spoken, Yale, a little bit goofy, drawn like a man you'd trust to fumble something harmless. Stupid gets pitied. Mean gets prosecuted. Nixon was drawn like a villain too, and got a villain's trial in the public mind for fifty years. If Trump were Obama-shaped—same mouth, same grudges, same everything, delivered in that frame—the perception of him would be unrecognizable. The hatred is aesthetic before it is analytic. It arrives at the drawing and calls the arrival a conclusion.

The fence

The man pushes. He pushes to the fence, loudly, the way he does everything. Then a judge rules, and he heels. He obeys court orders. He backs off the electrified fence every time the fence turns out to be live. A decade of watching says both halves are true: the boundary-testing is real, and so is the compliance. There are no shallow graves. Nobody has been fed to a chipper. There are no ovens. Ten years in, the literally-Hitler framing still has no referent, and a funny man who follows judges' rulings cannot carry the temperature the hatred runs on—so the hatred generates its own weather and calls the weather reporting.

The pudding

So back to Sean. He has the civics book; I have the pudding. The guardrails he lists are real the way a fire alarm is real: somebody still has to hear it, care, and come. His strongest sentence is the one about presidents being human beings who get angry and want revenge, and it proves more than he wants it to. A man whose restraint has been spent by a decade of humiliation is not restrained by a paragraph, and everybody in this fight knows it, which is why the only civil exit in living memory was a resignation one man chose—Nixon—and Trump is not Nixon and there is no delegation of senators coming to walk him out.

And it is not one side's game anymore. It's not gentleman pool; it's pool sharking, on every team with a roster. I guarantee Sean this, and I put it in the thread: the DSA left, handed the same existential weather, will behave with as much abandon, as much zero-sum, as much disproportionate response as Trump and his populists ever have. The referee class is still blowing a whistle for a league that folded.

I have been a scratched record since 2016, and I refuse to capitulate. The record does not change because the position does not change: I describe the man and the machinery; I do not defend him, and I do not hate him on command. If that puts me standing next to the lady with the rocks coming in, then that is where I stand. Somebody should hold the job of not throwing them.

The guide

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