That there’s a difference between supporting and incessantly defending.

I know plenty of people who have voted for Trump, many more than once. Some support him simply because he’s a Republican and they’ve always been Republicans. My fathers side of the family are mostly Republican, and I don’t think he, until the day he died, ever voted anything other than Republican.

And to add to that, the reality is that when you look at certain issues, Trump when looking specifically at the executive branch, actually had some real success (think Supreme Court, abortion, tax cuts).

So I think there is a class of voters who supports Trump because he is the Republican candidate, and without Trump and his base they don’t see a realistic path to what they believe are policies that would be in the best interest of the country.

One of my very best friends probably falls into this category. He has told me that he personally dislikes Trump, and all that comes with Trump, but still has voted for him because, even with the baggage (at least at that time) felt Trump and Republican control of the executive branch was better than the alternative. Also anecdotally, my wife’s great Aunt, voted for Biden, the first time she voted for a Democrat for president, in her more than 90 years on this earth, because she was so disgusted with Trumps first term (after voting for him initially). In some ways, I think she exemplifies why it will be difficult for Trump to actually win again.

And then there are a group that I think support Trump simply because they like what he says, what he does, and what he represents. He doesn’t care about decency, he doesn’t try to be politically correct, and possibly most importantly he gets under the skin of liberals. And if you’ve decided that liberals are the enemy, if you constantly attempt to dehumanize them, you can see how that might be appealing.

But, after all this rambling, back to my original point. Defending Trump, sometimes with a creepy level of devotion, with a seemingly complete inability to consider that he may actually just be a scumbag who found a perfect fit for scumbags in politics, who can’t comprehend that he may, in fact, be a criminal, goes far beyond mere support. While I may disagree, I can at least respect someone with the guts to say, “yeah, he’s probably a POS, but he’s my POS.” The level of devotion, the seemingly pathologic need to defend (or deflect from) every word and action of Trump is, on the other hand, downright disturbing, at least to me.