I Hate Him

Being a Personal Inventory of Forty Years of Accumulating Loathing Toward a Man I Have Never Met, From a 1988 Casino Floor to the Cult That Worships Him Now

I hate him. I hate a man I have never met. I have never shaken his hand, never breathed his air, never stood in a room with him, and yet the hatred I feel is not abstract, not theoretical, not the cool civic disapproval of a citizen displeased with a public figure. It is personal. It is cellular. It has the warm specific weight of a hatred earned in a kitchen, between roommates, across years of small accumulated betrayals, except I have not accumulated anything with him because I have never met him, and this is the part that does not parse, the part that no philosophy I was raised on has equipment to handle. You are not supposed to hate strangers like this. The wiring was not designed for it. He has rewritten the wiring.

I had a friend, in 1988, who was seventeen years old, working as a waitress in one of the restaurants inside his casino, the kind of straightforward serving job a high school kid takes for the summer hours and the tips, bringing plates of food to tables, refilling water glasses, the ordinary small theater of restaurant work. He came through. He saw her. He made comments. Nothing happened, in the legal sense, in the actionable sense, in the sense that would later support a deposition or a settlement. It was just the comments, the lingering, the unmistakable register of a forty-something man making a teenage girl uncomfortable while she was trying to do her job and could not leave because leaving was not a thing waitresses got to do. She remembers it the way people remember small intrusions that stay with them, a creepy encounter that did not escalate but did not need to escalate to be filed permanently in the cabinet of things that happened. He owned the building. She was seventeen. He could not be bothered to behave like a person, even briefly, even as a courtesy to the staff of his own casino, and the pattern that would later be documented in court filings, in deposition transcripts, in the muffled testimony of a hundred women, was already operational on the floor of his own restaurant, and somewhere a manager saw it and looked away, because looking away was the job, and the job has remained the same ever since.

Through the 80s, through the 90s, the ads. The face. The font. That stupid signature, scrawled like a child’s idea of what important men’s signatures look like. He was sold to us, drip by drip, as a type: the successful businessman, the self-made mogul, the genius of the deal. None of it was true. The money was inherited. The businesses were collapsing in real time on the front pages of the same newspapers that were also running glossy puff pieces about his lifestyle. Reporters knew. Editors knew. The information was available. It was simply not priced in. The country preferred the story.

His casino paid fines. Real fines, federal fines, for money laundering, for Russian money laundering, the laundering of money belonging to the precise kind of men whose money requires laundering. This was reported. This was a matter of public record. A normal country would have asked some questions. A serious country would have followed the thread. Our country read the headline, filed it under “the rich are different,” and went back to watching him fire people on television.

The crimes piled up the way snow piles up, accumulating with the indifferent regularity of weather. Stiffed contractors. Sham University. Sham charity. Tax fraud so brazen the Times could publish a Pulitzer-winning investigation about it and have it generate roughly the cultural impact of a medium-sized weather report. The hush money. The pussy-grabbing tape, which would have ended the career of any normal politician inside ninety minutes, and which ended his career for approximately eleven days before the polling recovered. None of it stuck. None of it cost him anything. The accountability mechanisms of a great republic, calibrated over two and a half centuries to handle ordinary corruption, simply could not get a grip on him; he was the wrong texture, the wrong shape, and he kept slipping through.

And then, against all reason, against the entire history of how political careers are supposed to end, he became president. The first time was an electoral college accident, a black swan the country could pretend was a fluke if it squinted hard enough and held very still. The second time was deliberate. The country looked at the wreckage of the first term, the body count of the pandemic mismanagement, the children stolen from their parents at the border, the coup attempt staged on live television, and the country chose him again. Knowing. With full information. With every receipt available.

And the second term has been worse. Not marginally worse, not a slight uptick in awfulness, but worse on a scale that has rearranged the international order, that has made allies of enemies and enemies of allies, that has tipped countries into recession that had nothing to do with him and were simply standing too close, that has emboldened every tinpot strongman from Manila to Moscow because the global referee has retired from the field and gone to play golf. The damage is no longer national. It is planetary. He is breaking things that took eighty years to build, and they will not be rebuilt in our lifetimes, and the people who built them are mostly dead, and the manuals are missing.

And when you say any of this, when you describe what you are watching with the plain words available to a literate adult, the response from the right is always the same three letters: TDS. Trump Derangement Syndrome. The smirking little acronym, deployed as a shield, as a punchline, as a thought-terminating cliché so effective that grown men with mortgages and 401ks now use it the way medieval peasants used the sign of the cross, to ward off the thing they cannot afford to look at directly. You hate him? TDS. You can list, in order, the documented felonies? TDS. Can you name the children? TDS. The acronym is the whole argument. The acronym is the only argument. It is not a rebuttal; it is a refusal, the verbal equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and humming, except they have branded the humming and put it on a hat. The hypocrisy of it is what finally undoes me, because these are the same people who built an entire political identity around hating Hillary Clinton with a fervor that bordered on the medical, who hated Obama so hard they questioned the country he was born in, who hated Biden so hard they printed flags about it and flew the flags from their trucks, and at no point did anyone suggest they had a syndrome. Their hatred was patriotism. Ours is pathology. The asymmetry is not accidental. The asymmetry is the point. They are permitted the full human range of political fury. We are permitted nothing, because the act of describing what he is doing, accurately, in real time, is itself the symptom they have decided to diagnose.

And he still has worshippers. This is the part that breaks me. This is the part where the hatred becomes something larger than him, a hatred that spills over onto the country itself, that I have to actively manage not to direct at strangers in checkout lines, at relatives at Thanksgiving, at the broad smiling faces in the rally footage who cannot be this stupid, who cannot have arrived at this devotion through any process resembling thought. They worship him. They worship him. They stand in the cold for him. They sell their houses for him. They estrange their children for him.

They contort themselves into theological positions of such surreal flexibility that watching it feels like watching contortionists in a circus, except the contortionists are your aunt, your coworker, the man who used to fix your car, and the act they are performing is the slow public abandonment of every principle they once claimed to hold, executed with the cheerful determination of people who do not realize they are being filmed. They bend. They keep bending. There is no position so absurd that they will not arrange themselves into it on his behalf. Yesterday’s heresy is today’s catechism. Yesterday’s red line is today’s punchline. The thing he said last week that they would have impeached a Democrat for saying is, this week, the new orthodoxy, and they will defend it with the fervor of converts, and next week, when he says the opposite, they will defend that with equal fervor, and they will not notice the contradiction, because noticing the contradiction was never part of the deal.

I hate him. I hate that I hate him. I hate what hating him has done to my interior life, the real estate he occupies in my head rent-free, the dreams I have had about him, the times I have woken up angry at a man I have never met about a thing he did the day before to people I will never know. I hate that he has colonized me, that some non-trivial percentage of my finite waking attention has been permanently leased to the contemplation of his ongoing damage, and I will not get that attention back, none of us will get any of it back, and when he is finally, finally gone, the silence he leaves will not be peace. It will be the long, slow accounting of everything he took.

And even then, even with the silence, even with the ledger finally open, I will still hate him.