I hate Trump, but I’m glad he won

The workings of my mind continue to surprise me, even at age 67. On the evening of Nov. 5, as I watched Pennsylvania flip from blue to red on my TV screen in Toronto, I waited for the expected pang of alarm to tighten my chest.

But it wasn’t alarm I was feeling — it was excitement.

What the hell was going on here? I thoroughly dislike Trump. He wears his ego like a neon placard, the words spilling out of his mouth an endless riff on “look at me.” He has no oratorial game, no gravitas, no class. And I won’t even get into the weeds of his moral character.

Point is, I’m no fan of the guy. And yet I couldn’t mistake the poke from my subconscious: it was rooting for him. I was rooting for him. It made no sense. Was I a sociopath, or what?

“This is not about Trump,” my son suggested the following day. “It’s about your anger at the left.”

Indeed. My irritation with the progressive left, initially a soft hum, had swelled to a trumpet blast over the past few years. It started in spring 2020, when the online scolds began hurling epithets at anyone who suggested, ever so timidly, that locking down an entire population might do greater societal damage than accepting that a few grandmas might get COVID.

Then “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” exploded — on college campuses, in corporate boardrooms, online. Every subculture, no matter how esoteric, began braying for recognition (or “centering,” in DEI language). Two-spirit indigenous people? Incarcerated women with HIV? Nonbinary semi-professional athletes? They all had a laundry list of grievances, and demanded that governments provide the salve.

This new movement rests on two absurd ideas: that certain groups require extra help in perpetuity because of harms they incurred in the past — what dissenters have aptly termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — and that inequality of intergroup outcomes can only arise from systemic discrimination. Cancel culture, the DEI movement’s enforcement arm, locks in these ideas by grabbing the mic from anyone who dares to contest them. It betrays the movement’s subliminal impulse: to squash free speech like a bug.

Oppressor and oppressed. Perpetrator and victim. And above all, Black and white. It’s all so tiresome. Coleman Hughes, author of the book “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” regards his blackness as one of the least notable things about him. Likewise, I have no interest in looking at people through tinted glasses.

In a poignant article for the Free Press, Paul Kix describes how progressives have turned their backs on interracial marriages like his. Friends who just 10 years earlier would have celebrated his union are now telling him that, as a white man, he cannot possibly understand his mixed-race children. How sad is that?

I have no interest in denigrating men, either — a pet project of the new left. Toxic this, toxic that. Never mind that we owe much of civilization — from iron mines and the printing press to the jet planes that bring the world to us — to the ingenuity of men who came before us. That nobody gives them credit for it speaks to the level of misandry in our midst.

Apparently all this bothered my subconscious mind enough to nudge it toward Orange Satan on that fateful November evening.

Jonathan Haidt, author of the book “The Righteous Mind,” writes that our responses to social and political events flow not from a rational thought process, but from deep-rooted intuitions — what Haidt calls our “moral tastebuds.” Then rational arguments about morality come later to justify these preferences.

Well, my moral tastebuds — triggered for years by an increasingly priggish, intolerant and, yes, racist left — wanted to see Team Blue cut down to size, even if it took a Trump to make it happen.

In the disgorgement of social media confessions that followed the election, I learned that I’m not alone. Millions of other people are just as fed up with the new left as I am. They felt the same guilty relief at the election results as I did, for the same reasons. Political commentator Wesley Yang said it best: “I still feel foreboding about Trump … But my schadenfreude toward the Democrats is totally untrammeled. I wanted to see them pay a price for their derangements.”

Democratic strategists, take note.

Gabrielle Bauer is an award-winning journalist and author based in Toronto. Her book “Blindsight Is 2020” was published in 2023.