The President Who Hates the People

It is a curious thing, this country called the United States of America. A curious, thunderous, endlessly posturing thing. Like an old steam train fueled by the bones of slaves and the wages of the poor, always on the brink of derailment. It whistles liberty while dragging generations through the soot of imperial ambition. And now, once again, it finds itself in the hands of a conductor who openly and shamelessly confesses that he hates half the passengers.

“I hate them,” Donald Trump said on Thursday of Americans who support the Democratic Party. “I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”

Let us pause here. Let us take a moment in the cacophony, in the rising din of the American empire devouring itself, to mark this for what it is: a president of the United States of America declaring his hatred for tens of millions of his own people. Voters. Families. Veterans. Teachers. Children. Grandmothers. People. People who simply do not want him.

This is not political theater. It is not hyperbole. It is not just another day on Fox or Twitter or Truth Social or whatever fresh sinkhole has opened beneath our civic life. This is a man, an aspiring head of state, openly announcing that his leadership will be animated by a philosophy of vengeance. That power, to him, is not a duty or a burden; it is the spoils of a cultural war against the idea of coexistence. It is not governance. It is punishment.

And what does the media say?

Nothing.

A murmur here. A blink there. But mostly silence. The kind of silence that follows every drone strike, every police shooting, every roll call vote that sends millions into poverty. The hush of collusion. The hush of cowardice. The hush of profit.

No major network cut into programming. No editorial boards called for disqualification. No liberal news anchors clutched their pearls on air. Not even the faux outrage machine found time to cover a president confessing to hating half the country.

This is not silence. This is complicity. This is the American press, the institutional white-gloved stenographers of empire, once again refusing to draw a line between fascism and farce. They have not merely normalized the abnormal; they have rendered it invisible. And by doing so, they leave those of us who still believe in some tender, radical idea of democracy dangerously alone.

Last week, in my essay “Redemption as Rebellion,” I wrote: “To organize is to love the people. Not as they are imagined in platforms and polls, but as they are: angry, afraid, uneven, and beautiful.” I still believe this. I believe that real political work begins with love: not the gauzy, corporate love of campaign slogans, but the gritty, bruised, unrelenting love of shared struggle. The kind of love that shows up at eviction court. That stands on the picket line. That makes sandwiches at midnight for a protest the next morning.

But how do we speak of love when the loudest voice in the land is preaching hate?

Trump’s hatred is not just personal. It is programmatic. It is the fuel for a movement that sees public schools as indoctrination camps, diversity as a threat, and elections as suggestions. It is the mood music for a country teetering on the edge of authoritarianism; not through tanks and coups, but through boredom and neglect. Through millions tuning out. Through institutions shrugging. Through a press that reports poll numbers like sports scores and refuses to ask: What does it mean for a president to hate the people?

What happens to a nation when the man who holds the nuclear codes now openly despises half of it? What happens when that hatred is not scandal, but strategy?

We know what happens. History has shown us.

This is not politics. This is prelude.

The answer cannot come from the ballot box alone. It cannot come from the courts, or from a 3-minute CNN segment squeezed between ads for pharmaceuticals. It must come from us. From the street. From the union hall. From the community center and the food pantry and the prisoner letter-writing circle. From the slow, hard, necessary work of building something kinder. Braver. Truer.

The opposite of hate is not civility. It is not centrism. It is not “both sides.” The opposite of hate is love; a love so radical it dares to organize. A love that refuses to hate even as we are hated. A love that redeems by rebelling.

Trump may hate the people.

But we who refuse to bow must love them harder.