I hate Donald Trump. I want to love Donald Trump. I need to love Donald Trump.

It is a goal of mine to love every living human being.* This hatred I feel is irrational, childish, a waste of emotional energy, pointless. Self-destructive. Unfair, even. And wrong. I don’t believe in the existence of bad people, any more than I believe in a bad snake or a bad asteroid. There are just damaged, malformed, or incomplete people who can cause severe damage to others and who need to be rendered as harmless as possible. And loved like everyone else.

My reasons are both altruistic and selfish. My fantasy-self (ever to be striven for, never to be remotely realized) is partly a Ghandi-Jesus-MLK world-wise, somewhat saddened saint who is incapable of lowering himself to hatred, and partly a world-wise, somewhat saddened George Sanders type who stands to one side observing all the atrocities of the modern world as he bemusedly consoles himself with another perfectly fashioned gin and tonic. Imagining that self is how I try to “be best.”

But knowing that my feelings are irrational, and beneath me, does not cause me to unfeel them. How can I unburden myself of this very real loathing? It’s so hard!

How can I love someone who has caused so much gratuitous pain and suffering for this country, and for the world? Someone who has happily collaborated with our enemies, someone who has separated small children from their mothers for the crime of not possessing the proper documents, someone who calls our own war dead “suckers and losers,” someone who…

But there I go again…missing the point. Missing my own point.

And this exercise is especially hard today, when one is stuck with oneself all day long. Do I immerse myself in “work”? Yes, like right now for example. And one click away, one partly-hidden screen behind this one, is Google News, or the New York Times,** or some other electronic bearer of Commander Bonespur’s latest lies, denials, reprisals, balls fumbled and china shops smashed. But once again, I digress. 

And why should I hate Donald Trump, anyway? He hasn’t made me suffer in any immediate way. (Not yet anyway. Knock wood and wash hands.) Lots of people do a lot of bad things to a lot of innocent people, but they don’t seem to affect me emotionally like Trump does, in such a personal, pervasive way.

If I have to give a reason, it would be something like this: There’s a bully in the playground.  He likes to hit the kid who is little or fat or stutters or uses big words or whose mother packs him a funny-smelling foreign kind of lunch. Other kids mostly pile on the same abuse at the same kids because they are scared of ending up on the wrong side of the bully’s wrath. You hate the bully but you console yourself by thinking about his future. He’s going to end up in jail, you tell yourself, or with a really dumb thankless job. He’s going to be the creep no woman wants to date, the obnoxious colleague who never gets invited to the party.

And then one day you wake up and the bully is fantastically wealthy, married to a supermodel 24 years his junior, is President of the United States of America, and is greeted by rabidly adoring fans wherever he goes. And all this, not in spite of, but because he is the playground bully. Oh, that hurts.

Not to mention the fact that the man is the author of a book that was on the NY Times’ bestseller list for 48 weeks—including 13 weeks as #1!  And he didn’t even write it! I actually wrote a novel myself, without help…and I can’t get even get the sleaziest low-rent literary agent interested in peddling it for me! As literature goes my novel may well be a load of armadillo poop but I’m quite confident that you’d find it at least as informative and much more entertaining than The Art of the Deal. ***

My god…does my hatred arise out of…envy? Well…that’s probably a part of it. But more importantly, what is my way out?

I have tried examining the positives. Like this: Trump never owned any slaves. On that score he’s superior to 2 out of the 4 whose enormous mugs are carved into Mt. Rushmore (Washington and Jefferson, of course). He hasn’t started any wars based on phony evidence. George W. Bush did, and has never admitted even the possibility of a mistake, yet I don’t hate him. Now, I think Bush is a smug idiot who needlessly caused the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and many thousands of innocent civilians, but I cannot say that I hate him. And I think the reason is that, unlike Trump, I believe that Bush does have a heart.

Maybe that’s my way out: the take-the-clinically-objective-approach approach. After reading Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary Trump’s account of her uncle Donald (it’s a real laugh riot), it’s painfully clear that I am directing all this negative emotional energy towards a human void, a sort of automaton programmed to behave in a meanspirited, selfish way, but which cannot itself actually feel any real pain or joy. From this point of view, hating the man is as senseless as hating a rabid dog. The only person the hatred hurts is me. Trump wins again!

But knowing that isn’t enough to change how I feel. I can tell myself that it is wrong and pointless to hate anyone, let alone a defective human being. But once he gets up on that podium and unleashes that greasy smile and starts talking about Democrats wanting to destroy our country, my hair and my blood pressure both shoot up.

Maybe you have an idea. Are you able to mentally, intellectually, spiritually rise above it all? What’s the trick? I’m willing to try just about anything.

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*That’s every living person. So don’t spring the Hitler trap on me.

**Or Fox News, which simply infuriates me even more

***No, I haven’t read it. But still.