Trump supporters won’t hear it from Fox, so they need to hear it from the rest of us

I might have completely lost my mind when I wrote this Sunday’s column on talking to Trump supporters about why they need, finally, to dump him. It probably strikes most of my readers as a futile exercise and an experience they wish to avoid.

I write from the blue state of Maryland, where Joe Biden beat Trump by more than a million votes. These days, my contact with Trump supporters mainly comes from my mail — people who write to me at The Sun to profanely express their displeasure with any of my columns that might reference the man they voted for twice. (I received one such email as I was in the middle of writing this blog post.) But that’s all I get — displeasure with my words and few of theirs; they never explain their devotion to Trump. 

So, aside from what I gather from polling data and media interviews in diners, I still don’t understand how so many Americans made such a horrible human being president in the first place, and I quickly remind myself that Hillary Clinton outdistanced Trump by nearly 3 million votes.

And Joe Biden’s popular margin in 2020 was more than twice that.

Now, two years after his sound defeat, Trump continues the Big Lie that the election was stolen. Despite that, he is still considered the likely Republican nominee in 2024, still raising millions of dollars for his next campaign. While there’s evidence that his influence is fading, Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party and Republicans in Washington and the states look to his endorsements or fear his wrath.

So why now take up conversations with Trump supporters?

It’s because of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.

This isn’t about policy disagreements — how to handle immigration issues, whether to give millionaires more tax breaks, whether to accelerate development of renewable energy sources over drilling for more fossil fuels, or how to handle Putin.

Jan. 6 was an attack on American democracy, and Trump was the first president to encourage resistance (ultimately violent) to the “peaceful transfer of power.” 

The fact that FOX News ignores that reality should not prevent its viewers from understanding the gravity of what Trump did. He lit the fuse for the attack on the Capitol and did nothing to stop it.

That’s profoundly serious business — a crime against the United States, really — and anyone who continues to support Trump at this point owns some complicity in his obscene attack on the Constitution, and they need to hear that.

Don’t know what to say?

Read my column for some suggested responses to Trump supporters.

Better yet, do what Rep. Liz Cheney advised in her opening statement as the House select committee hearings got underway Thursday night: Read the ruling of the federal judge who found that Trump likely committed multiple felonies. “Every American should read what this federal judge has written,” Cheney said. Here’s a link to that ruling.