No, I Won't Be Celebrating Jill Biden's Christmas Decorations

But Merry Christmas to All

I’m not now, nor have I ever been a “Trump supporter,” meaning, I didn’t vote for him. I didn’t support him. Like all of my former Democrat friends, I spent the years from 2016 onward angry and hopeless that he had won. But over the next four years, while he was in office, I would watch my former side, the people I always thought were the good guys, turn into monsters.

They dipped a toe into the forbidden land of mocking and ridicule that tasted good. It tasted so good they couldn’t give it up. They kept tearing into the flesh like hungry lions, begging for more. They had spent the last eight years under Obama being Good Liberals. Now, it was time to unleash hell. Now, they wanted to release all of that pent-up terribleness.

It never sat well with me, the mocking, the dehumanization, the need to attack Trump, his family, his staff, and his supporters. On and on it went. They slut-shamed Melania by cascading her modeling photos on Twitter. They said Kellyanne Conway looked old. They made fun of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup. They said Trump slept with his daughter.

How Trump sipped water, how he walked down a ramp, how he styled his hair, how he wore his ties, how he danced, how he smiled, if he laughed, his weight, his face, his past wives, his houses, his businesses, his work - there was no bottom and no end. The obsession continues two years after he left the White House.

It disgusted me enough that I had to find out what was true and what wasn’t. If I was being asked to stand with one group dehumanizing another, which has always led to crimes against humanity throughout history, then I had to know if it was justified. Was he the kind of existential threat that would justify my side betraying their values as decent human beings? Was he really a racist? Once I spent time in Trump World, much to my surprise, almost nothing was true.

This is not a story about Trump. It is a story about what happened to the Left when they built a utopian version of America they thought was permanent. They walled themselves off from the rest of the country, using politics as an excuse. It was never about politics. It was about fixing what they (we) believed was wrong with ourselves.

We fixed ourselves in therapy and by watching Oprah. We seemed to want to be perfect, raise perfect children, and make America perfect. That led to a kind of utopian ideology that infected every part of American culture. Trump was a shock because he led an army of Americans who weren’t inside the bubble and didn’t want to be.

There is nothing new about any of this. It is a pattern that repeats over and over again. Nazi Germany was a utopia. Utopias never last. They either collapse or fall into authoritarianism. But I know enough about mass hysteria, utopias, and systematic dehumanization to know what the Left did was wrong. And still is wrong. That is why I am speaking out, in case anyone doesn’t know.

The hysteria has taken them to a dark place. They wrote a version of Trump that doesn’t exist in real life. They depicted him as a frothing, angry Hitler type, cherry-picking the worst things he said and then magnifying them to suit whatever pathology they were chewing on for that day. But they have Trump all wrong.

Just as the Puritans needed the Devil’s influence to ensure their own purity of heart, so too do the Democrats, the Left, and the Never Trump Republicans need that version of Trump to point to and say, “That isn’t me. I’m better than that.”

It’s gotten so bad that it dwarfs anything Trump ever said or did, including making fun of the disabled reporter or John McCain, Chris Christie, or Little Marco. Nothing Trump could come close to what the Left has become while battling Trump.

It’s that famous Nietzsche quote, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

I used to think Trump was a monster. But now I see the monsters are the people who believe themselves better than Trump and his supporters. Fighting him has destroyed who they used to be and who they are. It has revealed an ugliness that you can’t unsee.

Among many, the worst example of this was their endless mocking of Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations, made famous by a leaked recording of her complaining about the media’s obsession with them. Trump tells the story to his supporters that Melania was bothered enough that she changed them up the next year to try to be more in keeping with what they wanted. But no, of course, that wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough.

Now, they lavish praise on Jill Biden’s Christmas and Joe Biden’s daughter’s wedding, to make sure everyone keeps paying for the crime of daring to want equal representation in government. Melania was never featured on the cover of a single fashion magazine, yet Jill Biden is everywhere. That is too “Mean Girls” for me.

They pretended it was because they thought Trump was a racist or a Nazi or a “fascist” and that to praise Melania somehow “normalized” Trump. No kindness could be offered ever. No benefit of the doubt was given. They were “bad,” and our side was “good.” That was that, and anything goes. How people I knew could go along with it shocks me to this day.

I got two emails yesterday from angry, frothing Democrats. It was Christmas Eve. They had so much hate in their heart they had no other choice but to attack. You’re a piece of sh*t, they said. One said he would prefer the country end than sharing it with Trump supporters. Even if I’ve seen anger and hatred coming from the Right, I’ve never seen anything like what has become of the Left.

I’m disgusted by my former side. I’m sorry for having contributed to it. That doesn’t make me a “Trump supporter,” although I’ve stopped taking the time to the point that out. The truth is, like so many others, I am politically homeless. I can’t stand what has happened to this country at the hands of the Left. They’ve destroyed almost everything I care about.

I still lean to the Left, policy-wise, but as George Orwell wrote in 1984, it shouldn’t be necessary to go along with totalitarianism because you support those policies. If that’s the bargain, no thanks. I don’t know what that makes me.

So if I’m not a Trump supporter, why do I write so sympathetically about Trump and his supporters? Because I hate it when people get things wrong. I have found people who support Trump or vote for Trump to be good, kind, thoughtful people that have been unfairly dehumanized, called “racists” and shut out of the New Left Order in a way that bothers me.

I have lost friends over this. My family is freaked out by it. But you must do what you feel is right in your heart, damn the torpedos. I have to hope that eventually, they will come to their senses and stop behaving like monsters, especially when they pretend to be the “good” side fighting the “bad” side. One can only hope.

When I woke up in this hotel in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, after driving through a few days of deadly winter weather, I noticed how everyone stuck together, looked out for one another on the road. People at gas stations said hello, relieved we’d all made it through. At breakfast today, on Christmas morning, so many smiling faces saying “Merry Christmas.” We didn’t know our political ideologies and it didn’t matter. We were just people who survived a terrible storm.

That brings us to the dreaded Christmas decorations. I’m sure Jill Biden’s Christmas decorations are perfectly fine. I would never condone spending bandwidth mocking them. But the same kindness was never afforded to Melania Trump. Her decorations were beautiful, just like she is beautiful. It was always a lie that it was anything else.

Joe Biden recently gave a speech about division in this country:

So my hope this Christmas season is that we take a few moments of quiet reflection and find that stillness in the heart of Christmas — that’s at the heart of Christmas, and look — really look at each other, not as Democrats or Republicans, not as members of “Team Red” or “Team Blue,” but as who we really are: fellow Americans.  Fellow human beings worthy of being treated with dignity and respect.

He called the division in this country poison. But I can tell you, as someone who has spent time on both sides now, that only one side is injecting our country with poison. It was there when Biden demonized Trump supporters as “semi-fascists” and “domestic extremists.” It was there when Kamala Harris said January 6th was like Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And it’s there every time a judge convicts a January 6th protester as an “insurrectionist” or traitor.

It’s there in the Twitter files, in every late-night comedy monologue. It is in almost every Tweet by a politician, nearly every movie made by Hollywood and will be the big ask from our government going forward: join us in our hatred of them, of Trump, or else.

They are the ones demanding that one side reject, dehumanize and marginalize another side. It is only moving in one direction. Until Biden sees that, he’ll never unite this country.

Merry Christmas, dear Readers. Thank you for your kind words and company while I drove through a bomb cyclone.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 10:30am.