Trump Supporters: Maybe They’re Just Bad People

Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

The previous post looked at what is in my view the moral bankruptcy of Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure who have sold out the LGBT community out of sheer ego and perhaps narcissism by hitching their star to Donald Trump.  The immorality of Trump and the harm he and Mike Pence are doing to members of the LGBT community means nothing to them as long as their are on guest list along with other Trump sycophants who live for perks and perceived privileges that stroke their egos.  But White and Eure are hardly alone in their willingness to suck up to Trump displaying an attitude of what's in it for me and to hell with everyone else or the good of the country.  Columnist Michelle Goldberg makes this point in a recent column.  I've been involved in politics for decades not for what it might bring to me monetarily or in terms of status, but because I want to make a difference and I worry about the future of the country that my grandchildren will be living in.  My gay rights activism stems for wanting to make sure younger generations avoid the hell that so many of us older gays endured.  But for White, Eure and I suspect most Trump supporters, it is only about power and satiating overwhelming egos - the same motivations that drive Der Trumpenführer.  In today's America, supporting Trump requires rejecting true morality, decency and true Christian/gospel values (which I view as positive even if I reject the Christian label).  Here are column excerpts:

Seven years ago, a former aide to Ralph Reed — who also worked, briefly, for Paul Manafort — published a tawdry, shallow memoir that is also one of the more revealing political books I’ve ever read. Lisa Baron was a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, hard-partying Jew who nonetheless made a career advancing the fortunes of the Christian right. She opened her book with an anecdote about performing oral sex on a future member of the George W. Bush administration during the 2000 primary, which, she wrote, “perfectly summed up my groupie-like relationship to politics at that time — I wanted it, I worshiped it, and I went for it.”

It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige.

Baron’s book, “Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All,” is useful because it is a self-portrait of a cynical, fame-hungry narcissist, a common type but one underrepresented in the stories we tell about partisan combat. A person of limited self-awareness — she seemed to think readers would find her right-wing exploits plucky and cute — Baron became Reed’s communications director because she saw it as a steppingstone to her dream job, White House press secretary, a position she envisioned in mostly sartorial terms.

It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn't forget the enduring role of sheer vanity.

That brings us to Monday’s New York Times article about Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, headlined “How a Liberal Couple Became Two of N.Y.’s Biggest Trump Supporters.” The answer: ego.

This story, like Baron’s book, is arresting in its picture of shameless, unvarnished thirst. White and Eure mouth some talking points about disliking “identity politics” and valuing “authenticity.” Like a lot of Trump apologists, White insists the president isn’t racist because African-American employment figures have improved during his administration. But the lurid opportunism that’s driving him and his husband to embrace Trump is obvious. Such opportunism is far from rare; it’s just not often that we see it exhibited so starkly.

Trump is hardly the first politician to attract self-serving followers — White and Eure, after all, used to be Clintonites.

But Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won’t associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president’s orbit — the immoral and the amoral.

There are sincere nativists, like Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller, and people of almost incomprehensible insincerity.

As I keep stating, my Republican friends are running out of time to demonstrate that they are not among the ranks of the immoral and amoral.  The choice is between continued support for a pathological liar who endorses using tear gas- or worse - against women and small children and simple morality and decency. They cannot have it both ways.  And, I'm sorry, but wanting lower taxes does not justify embracing immorality.

A Portrait of Selfish, Privileged, White Gays

Bill White and Bryan Eure - selfish, self-centered gays who have betrayed the LGBT community.

I frequently lament privileged white gays who willingly throw the rest of the LGBT community under the bus in exchange for what they perceive as personal advantage and self-promotion, all the while believing that their wealth and whiteness will protect them from the discrimination and abuses others in the community regularly endure.  We have such white, privileged gays locally who support Republicans working to deprive LBGT Virginians of civil rights and non-discrimination protections.  These amoral individuals exist at the national level as well as illustrated by a piece in the New York Times that profile Trump supporters Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure who seem motivated not by principles but rather by what perks they can land and who will most kiss their asses.  What the Times article glosses over is the fact that White abruptly resigned from his job when confronted with a corruption investigation  (details his resignation are here and his $1 million settlement payment are here).    The latter link states at outset:

The former head of the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum has agreed to pay a $1 million settlement for his role in a massive state pension fund pay-to-play scandal. . . . "The state pension fund, which should be safeguarded for taxpayers, was instead served up to fixers, finders, and fund-raisers like Bill White, who used his access to fill his pockets," Cuomo said.  . . . Amid the probe, White last May suddenly quit his job with the Intrepid museum, which he had held since 1992.

Perhaps most telling is that this pair of opportunists only switched their allegiance to Trump after it was obvious Hillary Clinton was going to lose the 2016 presidential election.  Not surprisingly, they could care less about Trump's war on the LGBT community and his regime's efforts to allow Christofascists to discriminate at will and ignore state non-discrimination and public accommodation laws.  Here are highlights from the Times piece about these two who sound as amoral as trump himself:

In some ways, they are a typical political power couple seeking to “Make America Great Again.”

They are throwing a $5 million fund-raiser for President Trump this winter, and are quick to make it known that they have the president’s sons’ cellphone numbers on speed dial. They have poured more than $50,000 of their own money into supporting the president, who smiles in photos on the bookshelves of their home.

But Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, are not red state evangelicals or die-hard right-wingers. In fact, for years, they were key players among a cohort that Mr. Trump loathes: Manhattan’s liberal elite. . . . Mr. White and Mr. Eure used to back strident, anti-Trump Democrats, but now dine with Fox News anchors and plan rounds of golf at Mar-a-Lago.

The two men were not only longtime backers of left-wing causes, but firm supporters of Hillary Clinton who put their clout and cash behind her two White House bids. President Barack Obama was the guest of honor at a $39,500-a-plate truffle risotto fund-raiser dinner they hosted once in their Chelsea townhouse.

The couple say they have been condemned not just for hypocrisy, but for what has been seen as a betrayal of their own community, by backing a man who has scaled back L.G.B.T. protections.  They dismiss such concerns.

As they have risen in the Trump pantheon to attending cocktail parties with Trump acolytes, they’ve lost friends, the couple said, from liberal politicians they once lavished with campaign contributions to a former employee of Mr. White’s who sent excoriating Twitter messages.

Their former allies offer a succinct view on who Mr. Eure and Mr. White are now: craven turncoats.

“They ran to the other end of the spectrum and then walked off the ledge,” Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said. “This president is degrading our institutions. He is racist, he has no respect for women, he has no respect for minorities or for any community, including the L.G.B.T. community — it makes you wonder.”

The genesis of the couple’s reversal can be timed to about midnight on Nov. 8, 2016. Inside the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, at Ms. Clinton’s election night event, Mr. White stood watching the returns in an increasingly funereal atmosphere. He got in his Chevrolet Suburban and drove to the New York Hilton in Midtown, where Mr. Trump was celebrating his win. 

“I didn’t want to be part of that misery pie; I’m not a wallower in self-pity,” said Mr. White, who now runs Constellations Group, a strategic consultancy firm. “I really believe that once that decision is made, you have to get behind your president.”

Since 2016, the couple has made a gradual shift from life in the liberal enclaves of the Hamptons and Manhattan, where they had long flipped homes as a hobby, to Atlanta, where they recently purchased property.

They now split their time between New York and Georgia. In the South, they are closer to Mr. Eure’s parents and found that they can wear red pro-Trump hats in peace.

Chatting inside their latest project, in the Buckhead neighborhood, they described a litany of slights by Democrats as motivation for switching sides.

There was the time, earlier this year, at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar in Midtown Manhattan, when Mr. White spotted Chelsea Clinton across the dining room.  Offended that she failed to acknowledge him, Mr. White said, he whipped out his phone and dialed Donald Trump Jr. “He said, ‘Do you want me to come over? I’m at the office, do you want me to?’”

“Some people give their time and resources to causes and candidates for the right reasons, some don’t,” Mr. Merrill, Ms. Clinton’s spokesman, said. “No better indication of which case this is than to watch a guy decide to embrace Trump and all he stands for because he couldn’t get his picture taken one night.”

Since boarding the Trump Train, as they call it, for every morsel of recognition the Trumps have offered, the couple has responded with a feast — sometimes literally.

In my opinion, these guys make tawdry whores look virtuous.  They are, in my view, cut from the same cloth as Trump.  Moral and decent people cannot support and continue to claim to moral.  It is truly that simple. White and Eure have shown their true selves and after the days of Trump are past, I hope decent remember.