What Trumpers Share with the OJ Simpson Jurors

A thirst for vengeance amid the breakdown of civic duties

What’s consciousness? Does God exist? What’s going on in quantum mechanics? These are some mysteries of the ages, and now we must add to those the political enigma of how Donald Trump’s followers could be so irresponsible.

At least, the softball-throwing corporate media often lead us to think that Trumpism is inexplicable. “Why do they keep voting for Trump?” the news anchors ask. ‘Don’t they see he’s bad for the country, and that he’s “temperamentally unfit” to be president?’ Somehow, rich elites like these news anchors can afford to speak only in such euphemistic understatements. They avoid getting to the bottom of issues for fear of upsetting the social systems in which they thrive. Doing so would be “inappropriate,” to use some more of their upper-class jargon.

There are lots of reasons Trump has die-hard supporters. For decades, Republican politicians have been conning their constituents as these politicians have promised to take radical action in sabotaging the government, burning down the liberal social order, and imposing Christendom, only to compromise with Democrats once they’re in office, as the democratic system requires. The libertarian and Evangelical wings of the GOP want a radical overhaul of the government not to fix the country’s problems, but to further rig the institutions to what they think is their advantage.

Libertarians are Ayn Randian, (anti-)social Darwinians who don’t want to pay the government to sustain the social contract with their tax dollars. Capitalism should overtake democracy and the rest of society, these economic Darwinians say, and the winners and losers in the competition should be permitted to go their separate ways, into the good life or to an early grave. Essentially, Western social progress is supposed to have stopped with the European pioneers who allegedly tamed the Americas with nothing but their personal grit.

Not to be outdone in the lack of humanistic fellow-feeling, Evangelical “Christians” view life as a battle between absolute good and evil. You’re either saved by Jesus or you’re an unrepentant sinner, and in the latter case, you’ll end up in hellfire for eternity. Again, why waste government money supporting the lower class if that includes lazy non-Christians whom God is just going to smite upon their deaths?

Why do they support Trump, then? Obviously because Trump’s reckless enough to impose radical changes to the US government. He wouldn’t do so as any kind of statesman or ideologue since Trump has no interest in governing, which is to say that he couldn’t possibly care about solving social problems. He’s a malignant narcissist who isn’t psychologically capable of entertaining any motive other than his self-aggrandisement.

Consequently, Trump must please his cultists to maintain their adoration. If they demand this or that vandalism or anarchic outburst, he’s much more liable to comply than the average politician because Trump’s a mentally compromised outsider who doesn’t care about American institutions. On the contrary, he’s been flouting those institutions for decades in business, issuing a series of frivolous lawsuits and going bankrupt repeatedly, with no concern for the norms of decency or civility.

So, if you want to understand the Trumper’s mindset, look no further than that of the OJ Simpson jurors who admitted that they voted to acquit Simpson for murder in 1995 not because they were thinking critically about the facts, or doing their civil duty, but solely as payback for the Las Angeles cops’ beating of Rodney King, which had sparked riots in 1992.

The jurors viewed themselves as radicals who were beholden to a higher law, and who saw the institutions of the deep state as rigged against them. And here was their chance to send a message, as Simpson’s lawyer Jonnie Cochran told them in his closing argument: “Your verdict in this case will go far beyond the walls of [the courtroom]…Your verdict talks about justice in America, and it talks about the police and whether they’re above the law.”

Of course, African Americans who feel so aggrieved have a history on their side. Certainly, the institutions of slavery and the later systemic racial discrimination disenfranchised them. They weren’t even viewed as full humans, so their fight for civil rights, guided by what they saw as a higher morality than the imperialism that American traditions stood for was hardly reckless.

Technically, as the Whites who viewed the Simpson trial saw it, these jurors betrayed their oath since they failed to do their civic duty, to think rationally about the facts of the case. Reason sees no connection between the American history of slavery or the beating of Rodney King and the punishment of other police officers who had nothing to do with those things. Thus, reason didn’t license the use of the trial for the sending of a political message. That message was as illogical as the Old Testament God’s supposed wrath against descendants for their distant ancestors’ misdeeds.

Still, at least there’s some rationale for African Americans’ grudge against police departments.

In the case of the Trump cult, the message-sending is much more Orwellian and grotesque. To be sure, if Trump’s followers were mostly poor, they could have an economic case against America’s neoliberal institutions that would compare with the Simpson jurors’ grudge against American law enforcement. Trump’s supporters could then argue that they need an outsider to reform America’s plutocratic state of capitalism. Of course, that was supposed to have been Bernie Sanders’s message.

But Trump doesn’t appeal especially to the lower class. Trump’s “voters are better off economically compared with most Americans,” so it’s only a “myth” that he had working-class support. “During the [2016] primaries,” says the Washington Post, “Trump supporters were mostly affluent people.”

In the 2020 election, there was a split between rural and urban voters, but “rural” doesn’t mean impoverished. It means that Trump’s voters weren’t generally highly educated professionals, not that they had nothing to lose so they might as well have radicalized themselves with Fox News vitriol and Trump’s pathological salesmanship.

No, whereas a genuine institutional conspiracy against African Americans motivated the Simpson jury’s vengeance against the establishment, what motivates Trumpers are the toxic ideologies of libertarianism and right-wing Americanized Christianity. Those ideologies are unhinged, divorced utterly from the facts.

Neoclassical economics lends no scientific support to the libertarian’s antisocial ethos (because that kind of economics has always been grossly pseudoscientific), nor does a critical approach to the history behind the Bible’s narratives support the Evangelical’s literalistic, inerrantist readings or the unholy marriage between a supposedly Jesus-centered religion and America’s consumerist dreams of material rewards.

Nevertheless, the rationale is the same. Trumpers want revenge against the American establishment for crimes that make sense only if you’ve been radicalized not by real historical events, but by deranged ideologies and conspiracy theories. Trump’s enemies are supposedly guilty of a thousand crimes, as dictated by rural White people’s uninformed, anti-intellectual prejudices.

Aside from that, Trumpers are alarmed by how political correctness has resulted in “woke” extremes of egalitarianism, in the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. Even if Democratic politicians typically con their progressive voters and govern from the center, just as Republican politicians did on the right, Fox News cries havoc in response to this tempest in a teapot. So, Joe Biden is viewed as a “radical” left-winger, a woke socialist, just as the centrist Barack Obama was when he was president.

Each side may stereotype the other in attempting to capture the public narrative, but there’s no need to reach for such caricatures when explaining Trumpism.

Trump calls his enemies “radicals,” whereas Trumpian authoritarianism is arguably the most radical widespread departure from American norms in the country’s entire history. Progressives have historically been “radical” in awarding civil rights, in applying the Enlightenment values that informed the Constitution, and in undoing relics of medievalism such as slavery and patriarchy. But they were patriotic in seeing the forest beyond just the trees.

The libertarian’s social Darwinism and the Evangelical’s archaic lunacy are thoroughly un-American because they’re anti-modern. Sure, classic liberals promoted capitalism, but that was by way of overturning medieval feudalism. Those liberals wanted to liberate the lower class, to create a middle class of entrepreneurs and of labourers who had the right to earn private property, as opposed to being slaves or serfs. There’s nothing liberal about Ayn Rand’s effective denigration of the modern social contract that recognizes everyone’s human rights.

In any case, the reason classic liberalism led to “socialism” or to Keynesian, progressive protections of “big government” is that we all saw what happens when capitalism is left to its devices. Far from regulating itself like a well-oiled machine, as the neoliberal economists attempted to sell it, pure capitalism is perfectly self-destructive, leading to the Great Depression or to something like Russia’s kleptocracy. Capitalism spurs innovation and creates wealth, but it also creates misery for the majority because there’s no profit to be made in charity, and only a minority can ever win a competitive economic race.

Why, then, do Trumpers keep supporting Trump, even after the January 6 insurrection, and after four years of Trump’s clownish antics in office? We could just as well ask why the jurors acquitted OJ Simpson even though he was probably guilty of murder. The answer is the same in both cases: they wanted irrational revenge.

Critical thinking and the facts have nothing to do with it. There are terribly aggrieved parties, and they want to destroy or at least humiliate their perceived enemies. The iconic Trump is their perfect instrument, in this case, as they exploit his manifest personality disorders by flattering him with their attention, and even by comparing him to Christ.

The Trump cult isn’t mainly a political movement; instead, it’s an outbreak of crazy resentment. And Democratic euphemisms and platitudes are as likely to cure that resentment as White folks’ outrage at the Simpson verdict ended African Americans’ resentment against their country’s tradition of betraying its humanist principles.

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