The New York Times Sunday Review section featured various neurotic Donald Trump-loathing articles, delving into personal psychological issues while blaming him and Republican men in general for pretty much everything. Besides Susan Faludi seeing anti-feminist hatred in opposition to Hillary Clinton, novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge blamed Trump for making the author age rapidly, and writer Peter Orner bashed a Trump-supporting "friend."
Radical feminist author Susan Faludi contributed “How Hillary Clinton Met Satan.” The text box read: “The ‘radical feminist’ has been deranging conservatives since ’92.”
It was my third day at the Republican National Convention in 1996, and my notebook overflowed with a one-note theme: “You do know that Hillary Clinton is funding the whole radical feminist agenda?” “She had Vince Foster killed.” “She’s behind many more murders than that.” “It’s well-established that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does.” The consensus among Pat Buchanan’s supporters seemed ardent and universal, though the object of this obloquy wasn’t even on the opposing ticket.
Faludi couldn’t imagine that someone would oppose Hillary Clinton for purely political reasons.
One of the mysteries of 2016 is the degree to which Hillary Clinton is reviled. Not just rationally opposed but viscerally and instinctively hated. None of the stated reasons for the animus seem to satisfy....
Proving that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like nail, Faludi traced everything back to wounded male pride in the face of feminism triumphant.
But political restoration was only one head of the Cerberus. The other -- wounded male prerogative -- was personal and sexual. The 1990s produced a generation of men who felt (and still feel) left behind by a society redefining power and success in terms of ornament and celebrity and demoting the value of industry and brawn, while simultaneously challenging men’s value as family providers. Though women weren’t the source of men’s pain, the antagonist conjured up by aggrieved men I talked with in those years had a feminine face, and very often that face was Hillary’s.
A startling aspect of the rage that greeted Bill Clinton was how much of it was aimed at the women he entrusted -- or tried to entrust -- with power. When I was investigating one of the early skirmishes of the Clinton years, the burning of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., which right-wingers attributed to Clinton’s F.B.I., I was treated to the fervent rants of “Patriot” men, aimed not at Mr. Clinton but at what I came to think of as the Three Witches of Waco: Attorney General Janet Reno (“Reno’s master is Satan,” a Third Continental Congress militiaman told me), the gun-control advocate Sarah Brady and, most of all, Hillary Clinton....
Republican ideological absolutism, nourished by masculine insecurity, created an amalgam corrosive to pragmatic politics....
The G.O.P.’s gender grudge feeds on its own defeat. As the culture moves further away from the conservative ideal -- as women gain freedoms, minorities assert rights, same-sex marriage proves commonplace -- the monster’s howls grow louder. But the howls say nothing new. This election is the decisive battle in a Thirty Years’ War.
Novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge contributed the embarrassing “2008 Was a Celebration. 2016 Is the Opposite.”
After getting naked on Obama-Biden victory night on the grody floor of a Brooklyn bar (don’t ask) she attacked President Obama from the left.
As much as I celebrate President Obama as a statesman and a magnetic persona, when I think about that night in 2008, I think of all the ways our country hasn’t changed. The naïveté has soured. In its place is my disillusionment with a president who continues policies of drone warfare that have killed hundreds of civilians and who has deported huge numbers of Central American children. There is the frustration with a Congress that would rather see the country fail than collaborate with a president they believe to be inferior.
Trump is such a fiend, he’s even making her age:
A few days later, I brushed my hand against my cheek and found, on the tip of my finger, my first gray eyelash. As if it couldn’t be clearer that it was not 2008 anymore, here was the proof in the body, white and glaring. I looked at it for a long moment, thinking of what this meant -- my body is no longer young, this world is so greedy and grasping it’s mining the very life of my lashes away. Then I took a photo of it to post to Instagram and blew the lash away, making a wish.
Writer Peter Orner contributed “Emails With a Trump Supporter,” where he lambasted a supposed "friend" and Trump-supporter in vile terms.
I have an old friend. If I need something, he’s the guy I call. A good father, a good husband. He’s got a Ph.D. and is a well-respected college professor. That I also believe he’s a racist, misogynist, homophobic lunatic, I’ll get to in a moment, because I first want to make very clear that I love him like a brother.
....
My friend is an evangelical Christian and is, reluctantly, even now, supporting Donald J. Trump. He believes that Mr. Trump represents the lesser of two evils. He recently sent me an article from The Wall Street Journal arguing that Christians must do their duty and commit themselves to the difficult task of voting for Mr. Trump in the spirit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, accused of having supported the bomb plot to kill Hitler, was executed by the Nazis. Because sometimes the greater good requires, etc., etc., etc.
Then Orner went on to criticize his late father.
I have it on good authority (my mother) that my father wept for hours on the night Bobby Kennedy was killed in 1968. In the ’70s and early ’80s, he was an active member of the finance council of the Democratic National Committee. But by the ’90s he had come to embrace a shouting Fox News worldview of anti-immigrant and misogynist fervor, and he railed against what he called my hopeless political correctness.
Another tidbit: On the front of Monday’s Business Da,y David Streitfeld used one of the very few public Trump supporters in liberal Silicon Valley to take a shot at Repubican opposition to Obama: “Peter Thiel, Contrarian Tech Billionaire, Defends His Support of Trump.”
“It would be a mistake and inappropriate to instantly demonize Hillary and to try and sabotage her presidency,” [Thiel] said. That would be repeating what happened in 2008, when the Republican Party did exactly that to President Obama.
