Andrew Sullivan Is A Trump Supporter. He Just Doesn’t Know It

I don’t want to bury the lede, so I’ll stay up front that yes, content creator Andrew Sullivan is still alive because blogging ultimately did not kill him. But just as important, he is a Trump supporter, even if, as with most things related to politics, he doesn’t know it.

Recall Sullivan as a pioneer of online writing in the aughts and also as the middle-aged white man who choked up on national television while referring to President Obama as a “father figure.” Sullivan now writes on Substack — which, who knows, may ultimately kill him — and he was recently the featured guest on Mark Halperin’s Next Up podcast diagnosing the ails of the Democrat Party.

Here’s what he said, almost in full:

If a Democrat could say, “No, I support civil rights for all transgender people and their dignity and their equality and their humanity. And [at the same time] I think it’s unfair for boys to compete against girls in sports. … And the other thing is, leave children alone. Leave gay kids alone. Leave gender dysphoric kids alone. Help them in every way you can — psychologically, all the rest of it — but do not intervene medically, irreversibly.” Why can’t they say that? And why can’t they also say, ‘We are ending DEI. We don’t think this has helped; we think it has hurt.’ If a Democrat had a solid affordability agenda and a return to decency and an end to wokeness, he’d win, or she’d win.”

Someone please tell Sullivan that this is literally the profile of the average Trump voter and literally the Trump 2024 campaign platform and literally the domestic governing philosophy of Trump’s second term. Sullivan should be a natural supporter.

But, naturally, in that incredibly juvenile, prissy way so common among “independent” political commentators from his same era, Sullivan said what he finds most “disgusting” about Trump, presumably making the president unsupportable, is that he “introduced an indecency into our public culture that is new and hideous; the celebration of cruelty; the denigration of your opponents. … That kind of stuff, we’ve never heard from a president before.”

You know what else is hideous, cruel, and the denigration of your opponents? Shooting them in front of a live audience. For Sullivan, as is the case for all the outmoded commentators in his class, the superficial narrative is always that Trump is gratuitously wicked, vicious, and vengeful. They’re offended by everything he does without ever considering why he does it or what about it might actually appeal to voters.

Our brutal politics didn’t start with Trump. The once-dominant national news media excelled at it long before him. Just ask Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and every Republican of the last century. To a person the media called them racist. They said they were stupid. They mocked their religious convictions. They accused them of hating women and ethnic minorities. All the while Democrats were left untouched and able to keep their hands clean because the media were always rooting for them.

Trump and his supporters go through the same thing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Yeah, the president said things we’ve never heard from a president, and it was about damn time.

Let’s not forget how it started. The genesis of Trump’s much-discussed “bullying” was that he called out not Democrats but other Republicans for their weaknesses. He called the successor of the Bush dynasty “low energy.” He called his now-secretary of state “little.” He called his final remaining 2016 primary opponent “Lyin’ Ted.”

Oh, how that tickled the media. They loved every second of it. But then Trump became the nominee, and his target was a Democrat. Only then was the entirety of the media devoted to destroying him, doing to him what was done to every Republican before. That treatment continued into his first term, with the added bonus of a national intelligence operation by the media and our own government to convince the public that a foreign adversary had installed our president. Then the pandemic. Then the race riots. Then the lawfare. Then the assassination attempt.

But if only the Democrat Party, animated by racial resentment and an irrepressible need to crush the American middle class, would end “wokeness,” stop trying to trangenderize children, and come up with an “affordability agenda,” by golly, it would be a hit.

Why hasn’t anyone tried it before?!

Blogging won’t do anything to Andrew Sullivan that comes even close to what Democrats have done to this country.