Donald Trump Didn't Win the Election. Fear Did.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I finally figured out why this is all so frustrating.

Now I know why we’re all so exhausted, why many of us can’t sleep at night.

In the aftermath of the election, it's clear that Donald Trump didn’t win.

In many ways, he is irrelevant to the lion’s share of his supporters.

Nothing about him really mattered to them during this campaign:

It didn’t matter that he was nearly devoid of substantive policies regarding healthcare, crime, education, the economy, foreign policy, or terrorism.

It didn’t matter how vile or disrespectful he was toward women, Muslims, veterans, immigrants, or the LGBTQ community.

It didn’t matter how grossly uninformed he was on the most fundamental issues.

It didn’t matter how reckless and impulsive and immature he acted.

It didn’t matter how fast and loose he was with the facts or details on any given topic.

It didn’t matter how corrupt his business practices and his previous administration had been.

It didn't matter that he was unable to engage in anything resembling coherent, nuanced conversation on complex matters of race, economics, immigration, or sexuality.

It didn't matter that his temperament and intellect are more suited to a WWE wrestler than the Leader of the Free World.

It didn’t matter that he seemed to be completely unaware how the Presidency or our government actually works.

It didn’t matter that he holds complete contempt for the Constitution, the teachings of Jesus, or the Rule of Law.

These things are of little consequence, because many Donald Trump supporters just wanted to vote for Donald Trump—period.

It's a decision they made at some point many months or years ago, and they weren’t going to let reality influence their vote, no matter how terrible that reality was or is. Truth was simply not going to get in the way of how they felt, and so they weren’t the slightest bit interested in delving into his past or critiquing his daily embarrassments or talking about what his coming Presidency would actually look like, and how his Administration would affect them or those they love. For them, fact-checking him has always been unnecessary. Demanding accuracy or consistency has been of no value. Asking for decency was never on the agenda. Holding him legally accountable wasn’t a pressing issue.

Whether Trump's supporters believe he represents a strident middle finger to the political establishment, or some renegade cowboy coming in to shoot up all the bad guys, or whether he simply pisses-off the people they despise—they were going to vote for him regardless of how terribly he acted or what disgusting things he said or how many laws he broke. His verbal filth, his cognitive decline, and his unapologetic criminality were all unimportant.

And that's why arguing with people who voted for Donald Trump is fruitless and why we should refuse to do it any longer.

When someone chooses something without reason as their primary motivation, trying to use reason to convince them to discard it is a fool's game. All the cogent, rational arguments in the world will fall on deaf ears, because those ears are permanently closed to anything but the sound of their messiah’s voice. None of the rules of engagement on finding common ground in matters of disagreement that people in good faith relied upon in the past, apply.

Making fun of Trump supporters or assassinating their character serves no valuable purpose either, other than to cause them to further entrench themselves in conspiracy or drive them deeper into cultic fervor, and distract us all in the fight against the incoming tide of unfathomable chaos they’ve unleashed on November 5th.

Ultimately, many Trump voters are motivated primarily by fear, and fear is a heck of a drug to get out of your system once you're hooked on it. When your kids are afraid of the dark, you can turn on the light and show them everything around them is exactly the same, but if they're convinced the Bogeyman is real, they'll still be terrified when the lights go off again and they will work themselves into hysterics.

Donald Trump has convinced much of his base that the Bogeyman is hiding in public restrooms, hoping the border, taking their jobs, and stealing their opportunity; coming for their money and their guns and their freedom and their children. They can't see reality no matter how much you shine a light on it all with data, facts, and objective information.

Most of them aren't bad, stupid, or hateful people—just really terrified people doing bad, stupid, and hateful things in the panicked state inside their heads. They aren't the enemy, the fear that Donald Trump and the GOP have leveraged and continually stoked in them is. That fear, is what won in this election.

And so this is really about the rest of us, now.

It's about we who see through the hissing hyperbole and the brash alpha male antics and the ever louder and dumber rhetoric; those of us who can see that beneath it all, that the emperor is butt naked and ass backwards.

The redemptive act in times like these, isn't to attack or argue or try to badger people into changing their minds. It isn't to meet insult with insult or venom with venom or threat with threat. It’s isn’t to become as stone-hearted and fearful as they have become.

The redemptive act in the face of this kind of irrational fear is to center empathy: to live and fight and work and vote as a direct and unflinching response to that fear; to nullify it and render it helpless and show it for the paper tiger it is.

We who are clear-eyed and unafraid, need to create a courageous community, to embody a hopeful movement that can wake of the imaginations of people who’ve come to be motivated only by the mythical nightmares their minds have been filled with.

Because if we create a counter-movement to that fear, maybe one day the lights will come on for those around us, and the real bogeyman will vanish for good—and maybe then we'll all be able to get some sleep.