5 Things Trump Supporters Get Wrong About Trump Opponents

Donald Trump is tearing the Republican Party apart. He’s not just doing so because he rejects both basic decency and traditional conservatism. He’s doing so because he’s spurred war between his followers and other conservatives.

On the one side, there are Trump supporters who claim that non-nationalist populist conservatives paint them with too broad a brush. That’s not unfair. There are many reasons people support Trump, some mediocre (he fights!), some downright gross (he’ll stand up for white people!).

By the same token, Trump supporters paint non-Trump supporters with far too broad a brush. Here are five myths too many Trump supporters seem to believe about those who oppose Trump’s candidacy:

We’re Establishment. You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Us. Seriously? It’s one thing to claim that those who backed Jeb! Bush or John Kasich for president represent the establishment, and therefore oppose Trump. But to claim that Ted Cruz supporters are establishment is simply opposed to reality. Cruz is the most hated Senator in modern history, a man who pushed a government shutdown to try to stop Obamacare, a man who called the Senate Majority Leader a liar on the floor of the chamber. Trump brags about donating to Democrats, pushes crony capitalism regularly, and

We’re Open Borders. The typical Trump supporter on Twitter seems to insist that those who oppose Trump do so because they’re open borders leftists. This is nonsense. Cruz has a far stronger record on the border; Trump’s a latecomer to the issue. For myself, I’ve long been in favor of a border fence or wall and heightened restrictions on immigration. That’s for cultural and safety reasons – lack of assimilation and fear of crime and terrorism – rather than economic ones. Trump is an economic populist; I’m not. That doesn’t mean I’m an open borders libertarian, and neither are most of those who oppose Trump.

We Did Nothing to Stop Obama. No, actually, Trump supporters largely did nothing to stop Obama. To take Trump’s own argument, Trump supporters are coming out for the first time, which means they did nothing to stop Obama’s election in 2008 and 2012. They actually agree with Obama on the role of government in the economy, as does Trump. And they’re ad hoc isolationists to boot, if they mirror Trump’s policy prescriptions. The GOP has failed, but those who oppose the GOP’s strategy of compromise and deception have found their home with Cruz, not Trump.

We’re Elitists. This accusation has been tossed around a good deal by Trump fans who accuse anti-Trump folks of looking down on blue collar workers. The idea is that we label all Trump supporters racists (not remotely true), or at the very least, angry rubes who deserve what they get. In reality, we who oppose Trump oppose his agenda, including his wrongheaded protectionism; we therefore oppose the ideas of his supporters, including the economic idiocy of trade barriers somehow creating jobs. That isn’t elitist. That’s because we defend the idea that government redistributionism, direct or indirect, violates freedom and quashes prosperity. That’s not globalism. That’s called Economics 101.

We’re Neocon Hawks. Many of those who oppose Trump and support Cruz believe that the war in Libya was wrongheaded, oppose the arming of the Syrian rebels because we can’t assure their identities, and generally look skeptically at nation-building as a whole. Trump supporters insist that we’re all-war-all-the-time McCain fans, but that’s false on its face.

Trump supporters paint a pretty unflattering picture of those who oppose Trump: we’re globalist shills, internationalist lackeys, running dogs for the elites. None of that is true. Before accusing Trump’s opponents of slandering Trump supporters, Trump supporters ought to take a hard look in the mirror.