Asked why they support Trump, and why they will support him ‘no matter what’, the couple said in unison, “Only Trump Can Fix It.”

“Can fix what”? I asked.

“The country. The Democrats.”

The female partner, a teacher, added over her shoulder as the pair walked away, “Fix the damned liberals.”

We’re living through a fundamental cultural change. America is being swept up in a tsunami of negative reaction to what liberals have done and are doing in America. Trump didn’t create the anti-liberal tsunami; he’s too dumb to do that. But he’s smart enough to take advantage. It is very likely to vault him to the Presidency again, either by election or by other, less democratic, means.

The couple I spoke to don’t care about his crassness, his fondness for violence, his love of autocrats and autocracy, his trials for sex and money and document theft. They don’t care because they think — no, not think, feel – they feel he can fix it. That is, fix the liberal cultural change — by ending it.

Now, I must make a distinction between liberalism the philosophy, on the one hand, and the policies, laws, and social-political actions — the culture change –that the liberals of today have fostered and enabled.

Liberalism is a political philosophy that goes back centuries and stresses equality and individual liberty. It was prominent around the time of our revolution, and it infuses our Constitution with much that is good, like equality (“All men are created equal”), freedom of speech, freedom of religion, separation of religion and politics, freedom to assemble, freedom and justice for all, equality before the law, natural rights, and other high-minded liberal abstractions. Though we’ve fallen short, America has been trying from the beginning to meet the highest of these liberal goals.

But the anti-liberal movement supporting Trump is not made up of philosophers. The liberals they oppose support same-sex marriage, gay rights, transgender rights, abolition of capital punishment, reproductive rights (e.g., abortion), environmental justice (whatever that means), and government protection of an adequate standard of living (i.e., welfare programs). They also support immigration and immigrants, even illegal. Most of this is the sort of thing that the anti-liberals find objectionable, that only Trump can fix.

Of course, the list goes on and on. See Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The anti-liberals especially don’t want thousands of migrants coming across our borders illegally, and then being distributed to hotels and streets all over the country, including into their town. Biden is going to limit the flow to 2500 per day; my God, that’s nearly a million a year! And the anti-liberals don’t even know the migrants get not just money but phones, and school, and health and dental care, and . . . . Their State used to have a surplus; now it’s going broke.

They also don’t like the pronoun nonsense or boys playing on the girls’ teams. They don’t want Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion; they want people to get ahead by hard work and ability.

And they don’t want to pay $5 for a dozen eggs and $10 for a pound of hamburger, and then be told by government liberals that there is no inflation.

They are just plain sick of liberals. And they hate culture change. And they will vote for Trump ‘no matter what’.

They blame ‘the damned liberals’, especially Biden, for all the change, and they truly believe only Trump can fix it. They feel it in their bones: only Trump can fix it.

The Democratic politicians don’t get it. They think it’s about policies. They think the ‘only Trump can fix it’ crowd can be reasoned or somehow talked out of their feelings. They can’t; it’s emotional. You can’t talk or reason someone out of their emotions.

The situation is very dangerous. If Trump goes to jail or loses the election, autocracy could overwhelm democratic institutions. Trump has said what he will do if he wins; he won’t say what he’ll do if he loses – just that it will be the end of the country. But you know there are people preparing for that. Hitler lost the election in 1933 but became the forever Chancellor anyway. That is, until the Greatest Generation and its Allies did him in, starting with D-Day June 6, 1944.

There have always been fascists and autocrats in America. In the 1930s, quite a few Americans thought the US was favoring the wrong side by joining with Britain and France. Such sympathies are still around. For example, two years ago I got a cardboard swastika in my rural mailbox by the road.

There is a very recently published (2024) book that explains the issue of liberals versus anti-liberals, and puts it into an historical context. The book is entitled Rebellion by Robert Kagan, an Editor-at-Large with the Washington Post. Kagan calls his book Rebellion because, he says, rebellion is what is happening.

Kagan notes that there have always been anti-liberals in the land. A lot of anti-liberal thought has to do with race; there are non-liberal racists in America. And certainly some anti-liberal sentiment is about religion; there are plenty of people who think America is or should be a Christian nation.  And as noted above, there are autocrats, maybe even Nazis, around, too. Who put the swastika in my mailbox?

In his early chapters, Kagan traces the struggles between the liberals and the anti-liberals in politics. I don’t have space here to recount or even summarize it all, but the book is a great history lesson.

The last two chapters, though, are about the current state of affairs. Donald Trump has taken over the Republican party. The Supreme Court has become a friend of the anti-liberals. Its new “originalism” is clearly favoring Trump, sending issues like abortion to the States, and delaying his trials. (We have yet to see how much legal immunity they give to former President Trump.)

Those who feel oppressed by liberal policies feel they are like David fighting Goliath. The only solution they see is to overthrow the system and the Constitution that supports it. They don’t see, or don’t care, that they’d be throwing out the good stuff of liberalism, too. They see Trump as the only way to fix it. And if he loses the next election, he will declare it a fraud, and he’ll have the support of the Republican Congress and probably the Supreme Court in overturning it.

What we are seeing is a tidal wave of anti-liberal sentiment that is using Trump as its spokesperson. He’s dodged two Impeachments, stacked and politicized the Supreme Court, he has the Republican Congress, and he has a populist movement of unhappy anti-liberals supporting him. Pundits and others who are amazed that Trump continues to have all the support he has don’t seem to see that the enemy all those Trump people are fighting is the liberals and their culture change. That’s what unites and motivates them.

It’s about the liberal culture change, and only Trump can fix it. See the handwriting on the wall?

Just Sayin’.