The last column I wrote was about a lifelong Republican, Chuck Hardwick, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and is unsure how he will vote a year from now. I’d gotten to know Hardwick and concluded he was an interesting man with an open mind, and a good bellwether for how centrist Americans view the election.
I’ve never had much time for telephone interviews for the simple reason that you don’t know much about anybody until you look them in the eye. I’d spent time with Hardwick. The first requisite for understanding is an open mind. At least it was. Today, I’m not sure. At 78, Hardwick’s easy to stereotype as just another old white guy. That unhappy state of privileged irrelevance is of course compounded, in the same exercise in caricature, by a successful career in pharmaceuticals – that industry being uniformly evil.
Here were some readers’ comments on the column. Hardwick is “an oligarch, glad to have the world tilted in favor of the ultrarich.” He’s a man who “made big money in Big Pharma.” Like other “old white ex-big pharma executive men” who voted for Trump, Hardwick is among those who have “disqualified themselves as either too prejudiced, and/or too incompetent to judge who the next president should be.” In the same vein: “Anyone who can still be undecided on Trump is neither sane nor moderate.” Hardwick is a “plutocrat who is only interested in maintaining his power and his fortune.”
I could go on. To state the obvious, I disagree with Hardwick. I could never have voted for Trump and never would, whoever the Democratic candidate is. I think Trump is a disgrace. His quid pro quo abuse of power, set out on Wednesday by Ambassador Gordon Sondland, is grounds for impeachment. The Republican-controlled Senate will not agree. I fear for the republic if he is re-elected.
Still, I find the almost complete inability of opponents of Trump to grapple with who supports him and why to be deeply alarming. We are talking about tens of millions of such supporters. This failure, this abandonment of curiosity, this rampant intolerance, this blindness, increases the likelihood of Trump’s re-election.