…self-identifies as a moral monster. Times past, I’ve read novels set in the UK in the interwar period, in which friendships are strained or ruptured altogether on the question of opposing or supporting/tolerating the rise of fascism. The past few years have given me a sharper appreciation of those literary conflicts.

Doing a quick survey of my friendships—the longest-standing of these goes back to the Kennedy administration—I can think offhand of just two individuals to whom I would not administer the cut direct were they to come out in support of Trump. It helps that they’d be vanishingly unlikely to do this: David Duke might as plausibly hold a fundraiser for the Southern Poverty Law Center. But anyone else? Fuck ’em, and fuck the principled abstention crowd as well.

I can understand how people might have blown off the 2016 election, or voted for the Sparkly Unicorns Farting Rainbows Party, since there was a widespread perception that the contest was in the bag for Team HRC. I can even (dimly) understand, without waxing too censorious, what might have motivated certain categories of Trump voters. Not all of ’em: some heard the dog whistles and thought “Right on! A racist, misogynistic sociopath is just what the country needs just now.” Nor am I disposed to forgive the “Let’s burn it all down for shits and giggles” crowd, or their only slightly less responsible “heighten the contradictions” counterparts.

Still, there are those who voted for Trump because they’d internalized the whole “hate Hillary” thing they’d been fed for twenty-five years. She was evil and corrupt, and Trump was the lesser of the perceived two evils. I’m guessing that some of these voters may have had second thoughts.

There were the people who believed that “we need a businessman in charge,” and the others who felt that “we need an outsider to shake things up.” Here again, I venture to hope that buyers’ remorse has set in with some of these.

That’s about as far as I’m prepared to extend my presumption of good intentions looking back. Anyone who, after the carnival of horrors and atrocities to which the rest of us have been the captive audience since the moment his tiny hand came off the Bible, is prepared to vote for the fiend’s return to office, thus proclaims himself a vicious sociopath, and well deserves all contumely, abuse and shunning that may come. I have one Facebook “friend”—she was my future ex-wife’s best friend in high school; today runs a tiny general store in rural Colorado—who is fervent in support of Trump. I heap abuse upon her, but she has for some reason yet to follow the sensible example of a couple of cousins and “unfriend” me.

As to the principled abstainers, I am censorious and bewildered, like the principals in those English novels of eighty years ago.

cordially,