You’ve seen the trucks with American flags flying on one side while a Trump 2024 flag flaps around on the other. You’ve seen the Red Hats and the Rallies, where people applaud the hate-filled language of their leader, who mocks the disabled, and whose patent distrust and disdain for immigrants is evident despite the dog-whistle language meant to cloak the hate behind it. You’ve heard the MAGA Candidate threaten his political opponents with prison time and, worse, the death penalty if necessary to dispatch those daring to question his authority. You’ve watched the former President Trump mug obsequiously for the camera with that smug smile backed by the phony victimhood speaking style. “They hate me!” Trump gaslights the world in quasi-religious fervor. “They are persecuting me, and they are persecuting you.”

Trump is the face of an American movement claiming to represent patriotism, but it is not. Instead, it is Hatriotism, a political strategy that thrives on vicious accusations against liberalism, the true foundation of democracy and the Republic, our laws, and our government. Yet according to Hatriots, these institutions are the enemy of the people. The conservative members of the Supreme Court, all of whom hate the rule of law if it contradicts their ideology and political alliance, just proved that.

Supreme Hate

The conservative Supreme Court demonstrated that it is a tool of the Hate Machine that was once the Republican Party. The SCOTUS granted Hatriotism full approval by granting immunity to Donald Trump, the man who disrespects our nation’s laws and resists their natural limits at every turn. Given that judgment by the six conservative members of the Supreme Court, there is now no limit to what hate will be allowed to do to anyone the GOP decides to punish, with Trump leading the way.

Russian collusion by imitation

Indeed, Hatriotism looks much like the power politics of regimes run by the vicious whims of authoritarians. Over in Russia, Vladimir Putin has ordered his perceived enemies extinguished at will. Some fall out of high windows while others face the silent death of poison. Do we think Trump will act any differently here in America? When it comes to international politics, Putin’s hate-filled paranoia deemed Ukraine part of Mother Russia. To prove it, he’s tried to beat his perceived child into submission.

Trump’s feverishly transactional style is no different. His admiration for dictators is apparent, as is his disdain for what he brands “shithole countries.” Hate is the political blood running through Trump’s veins.  

Daddy issues

History is also rife with the childishness of world leaders running around with parental bugs up their asses. Hate-filled despots and insecure wannabe kings all seem to have Mommy and Daddy issues driving their furious need for approval. President George W. Bush invaded Iraq to show his father that he could do what Daddy could not, which was to capture Saddam Hussein. The torture committed in Iraq under the son’s watch was the hate-filled byproduct of that compensatory need for approval.

The Trump Saga is driven by Daddy Issues too. That dynamic holds a far worse menace for us in America and abroad. A Washington Post story about the Trump Family history reveals the source of the insecurity on display in everything Trump does, “We know that many presidents have had daddy issues: dreaming of their absent fathers, chafing at their judgments or struggling under their legacies. When discussing his father in his memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump stresses the business savvy he gleaned from the late Fred C. Trump. “I learned about toughness in a very tough business, I learned about motivating people, and I learned about competence and efficiency.”

Tough to take

In Trump’s case, that pursuit of “toughness” is mostly about covering up his long line of grandiose mistakes. His many failed business ventures. His bankruptcies and fraud. His three failed marriages that succumbed to his infidelity. Now he’s a convicted felon hiding behind claims he’s never done anything wrong, all while hiding his vanity behind a prodigiously dyed blonde combover shading a face painted to disguise a complexion that without makeup resembles a pale grocery store tomato.

Faux Christians

Despite all this vacuous dishonesty, Trump refuses to confess any flaw, a trait that his Christian evangelical supporters seem to adore despite the call to repent of sins founding their tradition. Instead, they excuse Trump’s hateful attitudes by comparing him to the likes of King David, the genocidal despot whom God refused to honor at the end of his life because he had too much blood on his hands.

That murderous legacy already exists in the latter-day interpretation of the Second Amendment, a law split in half by conservatives on the Supreme Court so that hate can be armed in its battle with cultural progress and peace in America. The first half of the Second Amendment, the part about a “well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state,” has been hijacked by hate-filled anti-government soldiers of fortune that spend most of their time blasting cement-filled Home Depot buckets with ammunition hoping someday they’ll have an excuse to turn the slogan “How Doers Get More Done” into a full-blown takeover of the American government.

Hate on the march

Those were the same disturbingly small-minded militants of Hatriotism invading the Capitol on January 6, 2020. They waved American flags but also Confederate banners, proving their cause was nothing more than treason disguised as a righteous cause. They were called to arms and used sharpened flagpoles to thump and stab Capitol police, all while welcoming into their ranks the racists and anti-Semitics, the Bison Heads and suburban nutcases, many of whom wound up arrested and convicted for their crimes of obstructing governmental business and destroying government property.

That’s Hatriotism in a nutshell. It lacks the consciousness and conscience to realize it has the entire American Experiment wrong. That’s why Make American Great Again fits Hatriotism so well as a slogan. It calls the nation back to a time when prejudice was “normal,” and when bigoted forms of religion held sway everywhere from town hall meetings to public school systems. Hatriotism wants––indeed needs––to lurch backward in time because it is a form of hate that Americans embracing principles and conscience seek to leave behind.

Right now the haters seem to have the upper hand, but the Union fought slavery and bigotry in the past. We’ll do it again in the present to resist the deplorable, despicable nature of Hatriotism. That’s our only choice as Americans.