Leftists for Trump
Yes, there were some… among them friends and former colleagues of mine. Some still might have Trump’s back — I don’t know because I haven’t canvassed them all. (Maybe I don’t want to know.) Yes, Adam Walinsky — the former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy — caused a big public uproar back in 2016 by declaring he would vote for Trump out of understandable disgust with the Democratic Party embrace of the permanent war state. Yes, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was asked by President-elect Trump to join his anti-vax campaign and last summer he spoke at an anti-shutdown rally in Berlin that included white nationalist extremists. (But Bobby Jr. also denounced Trump as a “bully” during the 2020 presidential race and made clear he was going to vote Democratic.) Glenn Greenwald, who came to prominence as a columnist for Salon (the independent online publication I founded in 1995), announced he was forced out of The Intercept last year for his critical coverage of Hunter Biden and became a favorite guest of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Oliver Stone, while denouncing Trump as a raging narcissist, has also embraced Vladimir Putin and the Trumpian attack on “cancel culture.” Longtime critics of the deep state like Peter Dale Scott — a mentor as well as a friend — welcomed Trump’s skeptical view of the military-industrial complex (which the president hypocritically further enriched and empowered), his withdrawal of troops from the Middle East, and his refusal to be badgered by the national security state and the mainstream media into another Cold War with Russia.
People (especially thoughtful, open-minded people) aren’t just one thing. We should allow for complexity — yes, even when it comes to opinions of tyrants like Trump who are “clear and present” dangers to democracy (at least for a few more days). And just because we sided with the likes of David Frum and John Brennan in our furious resistance against Trump, doesn’t prevent us from resuming our attacks on these men as the former apparatchiks of — and continuing apologists for — U.S. terror.
The American Left has been politically marginalized for so long that sometimes our leaders and intellectuals lose their balance and join arms with sketchy characters or populist movements. We should criticize these people when they lose their way, but we should also remember that in most respects they are still our friends and allies. I trust these left-wing mavericks more than Liz Cheney or Bill Kristol or any of the other neocon warmongers that CNN and MSNBC now embrace.
