Dinner with Friends

We were sitting around a table when someone mentioned Trump. It wasn’t a political evening. Just dinner with friends, late enough that the plates had been pushed aside and nobody was in a hurry to leave. Someone had seen a clip of one of his speeches.

“I still don’t understand how anyone can vote for that man.”

A few people nodded. Someone laughed.

“At this point? After everything we’ve seen?”

“Apparently millions of people still think he’s the answer.”

“That’s the part I don’t get.”

There was some shaking of heads. Someone made a joke about people believing anything if you said it loudly enough. We laughed.

It wasn’t an angry conversation. That was almost the point. There wasn’t much to argue about. Trump was Trump. We knew what we thought of him.

And the people who voted for him? Well. Nobody actually called them idiots. There was no need to. The question already contained something close enough.

How could anyone look at this man, listen to him, watch the way he behaved, and still think: Yes. Him. What were they not seeing? Or what had happened to them that they could see it and no longer care? Those seemed to be roughly the available explanations.

I wasn’t standing outside the conversation. I understood it. I had probably said versions of the same thing myself. Then, for some reason, I said:

“I think I understand why they vote for him.”

That changed the room a little. Not dramatically. These were friends. But someone looked at me.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I hadn’t planned that far ahead. I thought about it.

“Because I think people believe he can actually get things done.”

“You mean they believe it.”

“Yes.”

I hesitated.

“Actually, no. That’s not quite what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I believe it too.”

That got a reaction.

“You think Trump can get things done?”

“Some things? Yes.”

I could hear how it sounded. But once I had said it, I couldn’t quite take it back.

If Trump announced that he was going to force something through, my first thought wasn’t necessarily: He’ll never manage that. I could imagine him managing it. Maybe at a cost I would consider unacceptable. Maybe by doing things I would strongly oppose. But that was different from thinking he couldn’t do it.

“My problem with Trump isn’t that I don’t think he can do it,” I said.

I stopped for a moment.

“My problem is that I think he can.”

Someone laughed.

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“It isn’t meant to be.”

I tried to explain. There were things Trump wanted that I didn’t want. There were things he called problems that I wouldn’t describe the same way. There were things he seemed willing to sacrifice that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice.

But there were also things that were problems regardless of who pointed at them. Things that didn’t work. Things that had been discussed for years. Things that people wanted somebody to deal with.

And maybe that was enough to see something I hadn’t seen before.

Someone could look at Trump and think: He’ll do it. Not: He’s a good man. Not: I agree with everything he says. Not even: I want everything he wants. Just: He’ll do it.

I looked around the table. A few minutes earlier, that person had been almost incomprehensible to me. Now I could imagine him.

“So you think Trump voters are right?”

“No.”

“Then what changed?”

I thought about that.

“I don’t think the people who vote for him are necessarily missing what we’re seeing.”

Nobody said anything. That was the part that felt strange.

Until then, the picture in my head had been simple. We saw Trump. His voters somehow didn’t. We saw what kind of man he was. They had failed to notice. We saw the aggression, the disregard for conventions, the willingness to push through resistance.

And then it occurred to me that perhaps they saw all of that too. Maybe they weren’t voting for him despite it. Maybe some of them were voting for him because of it.

I saw someone willing to break through things I thought should not be broken. They saw someone willing to break through things they thought had been standing in the way for too long. I saw the cost. They saw the force. Maybe they saw the cost too. Maybe they were willing to pay it.

I still thought they were making the wrong choice. Nothing about that had changed. But their choice no longer seemed inexplicable. It had reasons. They weren’t my reasons. I didn’t think they led to the right answer. But they were reasons.

And once I could see them, it became harder to explain millions of people by saying there was simply something wrong with them.

One of my friends had been quiet for a while. Then he said:

“You know what’s strange?”

“What?”

“That almost makes him more credible.”

Someone objected immediately.

“Credible?”

“Not truthful. That’s not what I mean.”

He searched for the word.

“Believable, maybe.”

That didn’t sound much better.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you look at him and you believe that this is actually him.”

We sat with that for a moment. Then I knew what he meant.

Trump says he will fight. And he fights. He says he will push. And he pushes. He says he won’t let people stop him. And he doesn’t behave much like someone who expects to be stopped.

That doesn’t tell you whether what he is doing will work. It doesn’t tell you whether the consequences will be the ones he promises. It doesn’t tell you whether what he says is true. But on this particular level, there is very little ambiguity. The person and the promise fit.

There is something almost brutally simple about that.

Someone across the table shook her head.

“So what? We’re supposed to become like him?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

She continued.

“If you actually believe in tolerance and democracy and treating people with respect, what are you supposed to do with someone like that?”

Nobody answered immediately.

And then something from earlier in the evening came back to me. The laughter. The shaking of heads. How could anyone vote for that man?

We hadn’t been talking about Trump anymore. Not only Trump. We had been talking about millions of people we had never met. And somehow we had known what was wrong with them.

They hadn’t understood. They had been fooled. They were too angry to think clearly. Or they simply didn’t care. There hadn’t been much room for anything else.

I thought about the conversation we had just had. Maybe they did understand. Maybe they hadn’t been fooled. Maybe they weren’t stupid. Maybe they had looked at some of the same things we had looked at and made a choice we hated.

That didn’t make the choice right. But it made our earlier certainty look different.

Especially because we were the people talking about tolerance. Respect. Openness. Listening. And apparently some people became rather difficult to respect as soon as they disagreed with us about something important enough.

Trump didn’t have that particular problem. He wasn’t promising to be especially gentle with his opponents. He wasn’t asking us to admire his openness. He wasn’t talking about tolerance while rolling his eyes at people who disagreed with him. On that level, he had made himself a much easier promise to keep.

We had chosen the harder one. If we said that people deserved respect, then presumably that included people whose decisions we thought were terrible. If we said that different voices mattered, then listening couldn’t only mean listening until someone said something we didn’t want to hear.

But that didn’t mean agreeing with everyone. It couldn’t. It didn’t mean leaving every question open forever. It didn’t mean never drawing a line.

At some point a government still had to govern. Decisions had to be made. Things had to happen.

Perhaps that was part of the promise too. Not tolerance instead of action. Not openness instead of decisions. To act without giving up the things we claimed mattered. That was harder. But we were the ones who had claimed it could be done.

Someone took a sip of wine.

“Fine,” he said. “But his solutions are still terrible.”

There was something almost relieving about hearing that.

“Yes.”

“You can’t just smash through institutions because they slow you down.”

“No.”

“You can’t ignore rights because they’re inconvenient.”

“No.”

“You can’t just force some simple answer onto every complicated problem.”

“No.”

“So there you go.”

For a moment, there we were again. Safe ground.

Then someone asked:

“So what would you do?”

There were answers. Of course there were. You would have to respect the institutions. You would have to bring people together. You would have to protect rights. You would have to understand the problem properly before acting. You would need something that could last. All reasonable things.

The conversation went on for a while. Then the question came back.

“Yes. But what would you actually do?”

Someone explained why there wasn’t a simple answer. Someone else pointed out that democracies were supposed to take competing interests seriously. Another person said these things took time. Nobody was saying anything absurd. That was what made it difficult.

After a while, I noticed something. We had a lot of reasons why his answer was wrong. We had a lot of reasons why our answer would have to be better. We didn’t actually have the answer.

I tried to imagine how this conversation sounded from the other side. Not from Trump’s side. From the side of someone who had voted for him.

Suppose there was a problem you cared about. Maybe you had watched people talk about it for years. And now there was a man saying: I have a plan. You might think the plan was crude. You might think it would damage things that mattered. You might even think it would fail. But there it was.

And opposite him were people saying: “You can’t do that.”

“Fine. What’s your plan?”

“We have to protect our values.”

“Yes. What’s your plan?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I know. What’s your plan?”

“Thought so. You don’t have one. Then it doesn’t help me that you’re the good guys.”

Nobody at our table had said that. For a moment, I wished somebody had. Because I didn’t have a particularly good response.

If we thought Trump’s way was too crude, then ours had to be less crude. If we thought his way destroyed things worth protecting, then ours had to protect them. If we thought his way produced consequences we weren’t willing to accept, then ours had to avoid them. But somewhere in all of that, the thing still had to work.

That was the uncomfortable part. The standards we had chosen did not excuse us from solving the problem. They were part of the problem we had chosen to solve.

Trump could say: They can’t do it. I can.

We could spend the next hour explaining why his way was unacceptable.

Then someone could ask: Can you do it another way? And eventually there was nowhere left to go.

“So how?”

Nobody answered. For a while, nobody said anything at all.

Then someone smiled.

“You know, I’m not sure we should be asking that question.”

“Why?”

“Because we don’t have an answer.”

A few people laughed. He shrugged.

“I’m serious. You’re basically making Trump’s argument for him.”

That was annoyingly difficult to dismiss. If this were a debate, admitting that you didn’t know what to do was probably not a brilliant move. If this were a campaign, it might be worse.

You were supposed to walk onto the stage knowing. Of course you had a plan. You had to have a plan. Because if you didn’t have a plan, why were you standing there claiming that your plan was better? Therefore you had a plan. Obviously. The fact that nobody at the table seemed able to say what it was felt like an unnecessary technical detail.

Someone laughed.

“So what do we say?”

“I suppose we say we have one.”

“What is it?”

“We don’t say that part.”

That got a bigger laugh.

It was a surprisingly attractive strategy. We could be completely confident. We could explain that the situation was complex. We could say that serious people were working on it. We could point out, correctly, that Trump’s answer was unacceptable. And perhaps, if we did all of that with sufficient conviction, nobody would notice that the original question was still sitting on the table.

“So we don’t know.”

There was a pause.

“Not yet.”

Another pause.

“Should we really say that?”

There it was again. Not the political problem this time. The other problem. Could we afford to admit that we didn’t know? Wouldn’t that make us look weak? Wouldn’t Trump use it? Wouldn’t his voters? Probably.

The strange thing was that none of this produced an answer. We didn’t know what to do. That was already true. Saying it out loud didn’t make it more true. And refusing to say it didn’t make it less true. It only gave us one additional problem: Now we had to pretend.

I thought about the beginning of the evening. About the people we had found so easy to dismiss. About tolerance and respect. About Trump saying what he would do and then behaving exactly like someone who intended to do it. And now about us, sitting around a table, considering whether perhaps the most convincing thing would be to claim certainty we didn’t have.

That didn’t seem like much of an improvement.

“So we say we don’t know?”

“I think we say we don’t know yet.”

“Even if they use that against us?”

I thought about it.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise we still don’t know. We just can’t talk about it.”

Nobody said anything.

“And that helps how?”

“It doesn’t.”

Someone laughed.

“Excellent plan.”

We laughed too. Then the table went quiet again.

There was no sudden answer. Nothing had appeared on the table while we were talking. Nobody had changed sides.

I still thought voting for Trump was the wrong choice. I still thought many of his answers were the wrong answers. But rejecting his answer was not an answer of our own. And claiming to know what we didn’t know would only give us the appearance of the thing we had been asking for all evening.

The harder task remained.

If we wanted openness, it had to survive disagreement. If we wanted tolerance, it had to survive the existence of things we would not tolerate. If we wanted democracy, it still had to be able to decide. If we wanted a more humane way of acting, it still had to act. And if we claimed there was a better way, eventually it had to become more than a claim.

Someone looked around the table.

“So we really don’t know?”

“Not yet.”

Nobody seemed particularly happy about that. But for the first time that evening, nobody was pretending otherwise.