Those Trump-Hating Wine Moms

By Bruce Bawer

My interest in politics began way before Trump. In fact it goes back at least to Election Day 1964. I had just turned eight. Somehow I had decided that I preferred Barry Goldwater to Lyndon Johnson. That evening I lay in bed and watched the election results on the tiny little TV set beside my bed. (Tiny little TV sets were a thing then.) It became obvious very early in the evening that LBJ would, as predicted, be winning by a landslide, and my mother yelled up to me from downstairs and told me that it was over and that it was time for me to turn off the TV and go to sleep already. But I couldn’t accept that LBJ had won. I kept watching. I guess I finally conked out with the TV on.

In 1968, I supported Nixon. With my friend Robert Wise (who is now a doctor), I took the subway into Manhattan from Queens, made my way to Nixon headquarters on Park Avenue, and came away with boxes full of buttons, brochures, and bumper stickers. Robert and I spent days walking around our neighborhood handing this paraphernalia out. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: ‘Death Wish’: A Timely American Classic)

Again, I don’t know where this enthusiasm came from. My parents certainly didn’t encourage it. On the contrary, I probably neglected to tell them that Robert and I were taking the subway into Manhattan, an activity that they would likely have forbidden.

It’s not that politics was at the center of my life. Far from it. I loved to write and read, and the books I liked to read were almost always works of fiction. I loved old movies, and would stay up till all hours to watch them on TV. I also loved to play the piano. But I was always aware of politics. At twelve I knew the names of every member of the U.S. Senate; today, on a good day, I could probably come up with the names of twenty of them.

During the summer of 1973, which our family spent at my uncle’s house beside an idyllic lake in South Carolina, I sat inside day after day glued to the TV, religiously following the Watergate hearings. In school I wrote an essay arguing passionately against the impeachment of President Nixon.

In short, I was an unusual kid. Throughout all my school years, most of my classmates were pretty much indifferent to politics. Which was the norm. And as I grew up, my interest in politics continued. And remained, I guess, freakish.

Over time my political opinions shifted, as is not uncommon, and different issues captured my attention. I became a professional writer, and for many years wrote almost exclusively about literature — but every now and then, and increasingly, I turned out an op-ed about some political topic. Eventually I started writing books about social and political issues. Naturally, I came to know other writers in New York and Washington who also wrote about political matters. But most of the people I’d grown up with in Queens remained almost totally indifferent to politics.

Then the World Wide Web — and social media — came along. And before long, everybody was a political expert. Today I can turn to Facebook and see people I grew up with posting fiery diatribes — or reposting inane memes — about Donald Trump, whom they invariably hate, and Joe Biden, who they invariably love.

This isn’t surprising. We’re talking here about urban and suburban college graduates, almost all of them white upper-middle-class females of a certain age. (For whatever reason, the old friends, neighbors, and classmates whom I’ve reconnected with on Facebook tend to be women.)

They’ve lived through several presidential administrations, going back to JFK (at least), but their knowledge of the political history of this entire era is virtually nil. Everything that they think they know about Trump and Biden obviously comes straight out of the legacy media. And their opinions, if you can call them that, are founded not on decades of reflection about actual facts, but on raw feelings brd on images they’ve seen on TV or computer screens.

And who has fed them those images? The New York Times. MSNBC. The View. The evening news programs on the broadcast networks. And, not unlikely, the insipid late-night talk shows — Kimmel, Colbert, whoever — on those same networks. And, oh yes, Saturday Night Live.

And they follow the social-media accounts of people like Cher and Bette Midler and Rob Reiner, whose moronic takes on current events they regard as gospel. Of course, every damn thing they’re consuming isn’t news — it’s narrative. Not that they realize that. All they know is that if they parrot that narrative, virtually all of their friends — members, naturally, of the exact same set of demographic categories to which they belong — will respond with approval.

So it is that, just in the last few days, even as some of the most loyal Biden apologists are admitting that his façade is crumbling and that Trump may not quite be Hitler after all, I’ve seen old acquaintances on Facebook reposting a meme which claims that Trump stands for — among much else — a “complete ban on abortion without exceptions,” a ban on contraceptives, a ban on trade unions, and a ban on school books that mention slavery.

Of course, they’re also still spreading the same old Trump hoaxes — the Russia-collusion hoax, the inject-bleach-into-your-arm hoax, the very-fine-people-on-both-sides hoax, and so on.

In the wake of the disastrous debate between Trump and Biden — and the presser at which Biden referred to Zelensky as Putin and Harris as Trump — they’ve also reposted a meme stating about Biden: “He’s old. He’s weird. He’s gaffe-prone, always has been. But he’s kind-hearted and smart. He surrounds himself with principled, good people. And he gets shit done.”

Remarkable! These, mind you, are people in their sixties. They lived through a time when Biden paid tribute to Senator Robert Byrd, a longtime KKK member, and gave tough speeches on crime that were widely condemned as racist.

They lived through a time when Biden had to drop a bid for the presidency because he’d plagiarized a highly autobiographical speech by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock. They lived through news reports exposing Biden as a shameless grifter. But did any of this make it onto their radar? No.

They also somehow missed the innumerable occasions on which Biden exploited his own family tragedies to win votes. More recently, they’ve even managed to miss all the details of the Biden crime family’s grasping, grotesque, and frankly treasonous profiteering in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere — or else they’ve decided that this is all a pack of MAGA lies. Yet when Biden goes on about his own utterly imaginary academic distinctions and professional accomplishments, and his fictitious involvement in the civil-rights movement, they buy it hook, line, and sinker.

As for Biden being “smart,” they’re plainly unaware of his decades-long reputation as the biggest dimbulb in the Senate. And the “principled, good people” around him? Who? The unprecedentedly incompetent Karin Jean-Pierre? The slothful and imbecilic Pete Buttigieg, who almost immediately after being sworn in took months of paternal leave to care for the two babies that he and his husband purchased from surrogate mothers? That cackling fool of a vice president, whose road to the top was paved with — oh, let’s not even go there.

Nor, although they’re relatively prosperous, do these highly opinionated yet minimally informed Facebook feminists seem to know the first thing about economics. One recently shared meme declared that the massive influx of “undocumented immigrants” into the U.S. is “a non issue.” Never mind that illegals are taking jobs from citizens: these are women who’ve been taught by their heroine, Hillary Clinton, that working-class American whites are deplorable and that non-white working-class illegals are victims, period.

They’re also apparently too well off to have noticed the huge difference between the Trump economy and the Biden economy. Either that, or they’ve decided to believe that the difference has nothing whatsoever to do with who’s been at the helm. As for the ample evidence of Biden’s precipitous mental decline, they’ve been shielded from almost all of it by the media they consume.

And the uneasy bits they have seen? Well, that’s why they’ve felt obliged to buy into the “He’s old. He’s weird. He’s gaffe-prone, always has been” meme. Even as many diehard black Democrats are shifting from Biden to Trump, these white women are holding firm. Nobody could ever be more ardently never-Trump, and nobody could ever grasp more fiercely at the feeblest excuses for Biden’s increasingly obvious falling-off. (READ MORE: Citizen Bawer: On Acquiring a Second Nationality)

What’s up with all this? At least part of the answer is that, for white urban and suburban women of a certain category — the kind who are known variously as wine moms, chardonnay moms, and soccer moms; who are delighted to learn that their kid’s teacher is transgender; who, in every encounter with a black person, strive desperately to make it clear that they’re not racists; and who rarely if ever, before the advent of the World Wide Web, gave a moment’s thought to politics — the Internet has turned politics into a wonderful opportunity for a kind of virtue signaling that serves the all-important cause of white upper-middle-class feminist bonding.

All of which would be innocent enough, except for the fact that these people actually vote, and the decisions they make when they pull those levers have absolutely nothing to do with what’s actually going on in the real world.

Trump Shooting Addendum

President Trump was shot at a rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooter was a young man named Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was taken out on the spot, and about whom we know little as of yet.

Watching the live coverage of this atrocity, I never suspected for a moment that the perpetrator might be one of these Trump-hating women I’m writing about — that’s not their style. Yes, fantasizing about the murder of Trump is a big part of their mental makeup. Think of the now-famous photo of Kathy Griffin, a wine-mom icon, proudly holding up what was meant to look like Trump’s bloody, decapitated head. But the ladies I’m talking about aren’t women of action — they’re all talk, all Facebook post. Thomas Matthew Crooks was a different creature entirely. Although it’s not unlikely that his determination to murder the former president had it roots in the same vile calumnies that underlie those wine moms’ own vicious Trump-hatred.

 

First published in the American Spectator