Neither does Vice President JD Vance.
Or Gov. Mike Braun.
Or Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith.
Or so many of the other MAGA minions running around the land.
Their lack of understanding is what prevented the president and his camp followers from being able to push their egregious gerrymandering plan through the Indiana Senate. It’s also the reason Trump’s public approval ratings, even in Republican-loving Indiana, are underwater and Braun’s are at levels previously achieved only by the common cold.
What these merchants of rage and division don’t understand is that most Americans, most Hoosiers—most of us—don’t want to spend all our lives angry. We don’t want to devote every second of every minute of every hour of every day ticked off about something.
And we’re beginning to tumble to the fact that keeping us so mad that we can’t think straight is all the Trumps, Vances, Brauns and Beckwiths have to offer.
Consider the president’s response to the horrific murder of actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner. Not long after the Reiners’ bodies were found, Trump posted:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
Now, there are many things one could say in criticism of the president’s post—that it was mean-spirited, narcissistic and beneath the dignity of his office, being at the top of the list—the thing that struck me when I saw it was that Trump was returning to a familiar pattern.
Normally, when a tragedy occurs, people look for ways to come together. We huddle to find comfort by sharing our grief. Even if we didn’t know or didn’t much like the person whose life came to an end, we still bow our heads in mourning, just in acknowledgment that we are all human and the curtain one day will close for each of us.
Trump, though, saw the Reiners’ deaths as another opportunity to incite anger. He saw one more chance to divide us—and he took it.
That’s the part of his act that is growing tired, even for the folks who were inclined to give him a second chance and return him to office.
He and Vance and Braun and Beckwith assume that we’re stupid—so stupid that we can’t absorb the fact that we live in a big and diverse country that is part of a big and diverse world. They think we just can’t stand the fact that there are people who don’t live, think or look the way they do.
But the fact is that most of us can accept that, even if they do live, think or look different from us, other people are just people, like us.
What’s more, we know that many of the things the president and his band of mini-Trumps do their best to keep us constantly riled up about are far less important than the things that tie us together.
Like the fact that we are all human.
Trump’s hardcore base will never abandon him, no matter how ugly or detached from reality he becomes.
But that base, by itself, isn’t enough to protect him. He needs the people who gave him that second chance in 2024 and he’s losing them across the country, turning Republican strongholds into battlegrounds and purple districts into blue ones.
He and his acolytes are losing those people because Trump and the members of his crowd think it’s cool to shout catcalls at a funeral.
They want us so angry that we can’t or won’t take the time to be sad or happy or even just glad to be alive with people we love.
More and more of us are coming to realize that’s just no way to live.
