Ever change your mind on anything or anyone? I bet you have. Do you know why I’d bet that way? Because you’re a human being, which makes you capable of all sorts of amazing things, especially the ability to learn new things and adapt to that knowledge. OK, maybe not ALL human beings have that skill – I’d tell Democrats to change their minds, but they shouldn’t work without tools – but those with an IQ larger than their hat size certainly can. This is why so many in the media seem to be confused by the idea that some people have changed their minds about Donald Trump.
Just after high school, my then-best friend met another friend in college who started hanging around our group. God, I hated that guy. It wasn’t jealousy; he was a jerk, and I had no interest in being around him. But he kept coming around the jerk, and eventually, I realized something: not that he wasn’t a jerk (we were all kinds of jerks), but that he was my kind of a jerk.
We became great friends once we got past that initial couple of months (and it was quite a while) of disliking each other. He was at my wedding, and I spoke to him more frequently than the other guy. Life is weird that way, isn’t it?
I remember that every time I see some “news” outlet reporting about what someone who endorses him now called Donald Trump in the past. People grow up, people change, and people see results they did not expect or even think possible and adapt to that reality. Again, by people, I mean people who aren’t committed, ideological, progressive leftist Democrats. While they are technically people, they are like stalkers who are convinced Taylor Swift is sending them secret messages to notice, let alone acknowledge, the failures of their beliefs or actions.
Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance wasn’t always a fan of Donald Trump’s. Vance, in the 2016 race when he was just a best-selling author and venture capitalist, said some really harsh things about Trump. So had I. So did just about everyone I know in politics, both famous and not. Why wouldn’t we have?
All anyone knew about Trump was what he said on the campaign trail, his TV show, and what we’d read in the newspapers for decades. His core philosophy didn’t seem very core, as he was on whatever side of whatever was happening at any given moment. He didn’t need to be consistent as he didn’t operate in the world of politics, just around the edges.
You’d see his pictures with Ronald Reagan and the Clintons. They took their picture with him for the same reason he took his picture with them: they were famous. Nothing was more profound than what rich and famous people do.
Then, Trump was elected President. In that job, he exceeded almost everyone’s expectations (I know Ann Coulter’s weren’t, but just about everyone else). That’s not to say Trump Derangement Syndrome didn’t have its casualties – some people never came around, no matter how many of their sworn life priorities Trump actually implemented. These Humpty Dumpties will spend forever shattering themselves into ever smaller pieces, unable to admit what is right in front of them.
Everyone else has opened their eyes.
That won’t, however, stop the left from trying to drive a wedge between people on the right over Trump. “Tucker Carlson Hails Trump as ‘Bravest Man’ in RNC Speech After Telling Staffer, ‘I Hate Him Passionately,’” screams one headline. Another reads, “Elon Musk Called Trump a ‘Stone-Cold Loser,’ According to NYT Report on Billionaire’s Rocky Relationship With Ex-President.” Now, both endorse him. What does that mean? (BTW, I know Tucker, and that’s just how he talks/texts. It’s how most people do; no one interesting is nuanced in texts. As for Musk, I don’t know him, though I would love to – hit me up, E – but I have read the Walter Isaacson book on him a couple of times and he changes his mind when new facts present themselves. It’s how he’s gotten to space and how he’ll get to Mars.)
Well, the negative quotes are from years ago, which means Tucker and Elon have had new information to digest, digested it and have come to different conclusions. Or, even though they still hold their prior beliefs, they’ve seen Joe Biden and the Democrats in action and recognize how much better Trump is by comparison. Either way, they’ve changed their opinion.
It’s a sign of intelligence to take in new facts and circumstances and adapt your thinking, it’s why no one on MSNBC has ever done it. OK, they have changed in that they’ve gone from “Trump is Hitler” to “Trump is Mecha-Hitler” to “Trump is Super-Mecha-Hitler,” but self-affirmation is not what I’m talking about.
Human beings, intelligent ones, admit when they’re wrong and learn from it. How stupid would you be if you held fast to everything you thought when you were 20? I’d be a dope-smoking moron, likely with a rotten liver, and would not have one of my best friends. If I stood fast to what I thought starting in mid-June 2015, I’d be my underpants cheering on Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and the rest of their Reich Cabinet of National Salvation in front of an LED screen pretending to be at the Republican convention on MSNBC. But I’m not. And you are not. Fewer and fewer people are, which only reinforces what I’ve been saying here.
This is why Democrats are scrambling to replace Biden. They have no other game, so they’re going to try to rerun the same one with someone else at the top of it. Maybe the media should focus a little bit more on the reality of that, not just the surface facts, rather than on how people thought differently about someone years ago than they do now.