They think they are, but they’re not
Journalist John Hendrickson, who wrote that incredible piece about Joe Biden’s stutter for the Atlantic went to a Trump rally and asked the attendees how they felt about his repeated mocking of people with disabilities. They professed that they didn’t think it was very nice, but that’s just how it goes and they’ll vote for him anyway. There is no awareness of what it says about his character as a man or a leader. They just don’t care:
On Saturday, as we awaited Trump’s arrival by private plane, my colleague Hanna Rosin and I spent the day wandering the grounds of Wright Bros. Aero Inc., asking rally attendees uncomfortable questions about what they’re comfortable with. Virtually everyone was bothered by specific examples of Trump’s recent bullying. But as they unpacked their thoughts, they continually found ways to excuse their favored candidate’s behavior. Many interviewees repeatedly contradicted themselves, perhaps because of a particular variable: I’m a person who stutters, and that day, I was asking real people how they felt about Trump making fun of stuttering.
Amarried couple from Dayton, Todd and Cindy Rossbach, were waiting in a long, snaking line to take in their sixth Trump rally. “He’s the best president I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” Todd said. “Probably Reagan comes in second.” I asked him if he had seen Trump’s comments during the Georgia rally, and specifically, if he had seen Trump imitate Biden’s stutter. He saw it all. “I think he’s got every right to do whatever he wants to do at this point,” Todd said. “The level of, uh, cruelness, may seem tough, but they’re being very cruel with him, so it seems justified.”
His wife spoke up. “I disagree, because I think when you make fun of people, it just makes you look bad,” Cindy said. “It’s not the Christian way to be,” she added a little later. “I just feel like it makes Trump look bad, when he’s probably not a bad person. But he is just stooping to their level, and I don’t like it.” Nevertheless, neither of them felt that Trump could do anything between now and November to make him lose their vote.
Farther back in line was Cheryl Beverly, from Chillicothe, Ohio, who said she works locally trying to get children out of homelessness. Beverly shared that she has a learning disability and has trouble spelling. Even as an adult, she’s regularly ridiculed. “It does hurt my feelings at times,” she said. She acknowledged that it’s hard to “see a lot of people make fun of people with disabilities,” and pointed to the risk of suicide and addiction among members of the community. “We’ll just go in a dark secret hole and not come out,” Beverly said. Yet she also said she still planned to vote for Trump this fall. She was able to separate Trump’s taunts from her personal feelings by chalking his behavior up to politics. If a child asked her about Trump’s belittlement, she imagined that she would liken it to playing a game: “You’re just finding a way for you to become the winner and they become the loser,” she offered. “It’s just trash-talking.”
Near a food truck inside the venue, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read jesus is my savior, trump is my president, and a dog tag inscribed with the serenity prayer. She hadn’t seen, or heard about, the clip of Trump mimicking Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country.” She went on, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”
A bit later, she told me that “Biden doesn’t stutter; he’s mentally incapable of running this country.” But then she did something surprising: She reached out and grabbed my arm in a maternal fashion. “And I feel what you’re—I feel what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my own stutter. “People that are unkind to people with disabilities, it’s shameful. It’s awful. Absolutely disgusting. And I guess I understand that, like, in an election, you know, it gets ugly, and elections get competitive, and people say things, people do things.”
I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of Trump’s stuttering impression. She turned her focus to the mainstream media in general. She said that “for the press to inflame and use disabilities to get people riled up is exactly what they want.” Nothing would stop her from voting for Trump.
This pattern continued in nearly every interaction that day: skepticism, a momentary denouncement, then an eventual conclusion that Trump was still a man worth their vote. A woman named Susie Michael, who runs a Mathnasium tutoring center, told me, “I don’t appreciate the making-fun-of part, but he doesn’t have to be my best friend. He just has to do the best job for the country and for me. So I have to overlook that, because everybody has their good points and their bad points.”
Shana, a special-education teacher from Indiana who did not give her last name, told me, “I would still support him because I feel like people make mistakes. They say things they shouldn’t say. And I feel like God is the judge on that, you know, and that we’re to forgive him.” She noted that if Trump were to mock Biden’s stutter at this rally, she’d be inclined to write him a letter saying that “everybody was born of God and that we shouldn’t be making fun of anybody.”
I don’t think I have to point out that they are totally unwilling to give anyone but Trump that benefit of the doubt, not even other Republicans who fail to toe the MAGA line. They don’t really care what he says or does. I’m sure they wouldn’t even be truly offended if they knew he had disabled soldiers removed from his presence because he didn’t want them in the shot with him. They just love him. But then I guess that’s what all cult members feel about their leader.
This may be the most depressing thing I’ve read in a while. Their empathy is an eighth of an inch deep and last only as long as it takes their minds to come up with a rationale to excuse this disgusting behavior. They’re not good people.