The Devil made him say it

‘Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil."

That bit of wisdom is something I first read in college. It was written by Eric Hoffer, a San Francisco longshoreman turned philosopher. I haven’t thought of him since, but a reader sent me the quote as she contemplated Donald Trump. Hoffer had in mind Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany and so did she.

I think there is a devil running loose in our country. He is dressed like a Republican, but Donald Trump is a hater as earlier Republican candidates for president were not. I’ve said it before. He stands alone, fat with venom. His native tongue is belittling rhetoric. He took only a day or two to call Kamala Harris “garbage.” Trump can’t utter her name without calling her “Crooked Kamala.” We will hear it a thousand times if we choose to listen to his speeches which rally some Republicans but have begun to drive a few responsible ones off. He is an embarrassment to the Bushes and Mitt Romney and John McCain, and certainly to Liz and Dick Cheney

Our governor’s and senators’ silence is miraculously the voice of the devil as Eric Hoffer feared. The Devil doesn’t need words when he has disciples of hate of gays, immigrants, women seeking abortions, the disabled, the childless, as Trump and Vance do.

I may have found the root of Vance’s anti-abortion dyspepsia. His mother was still a teenager when he was conceived, her second child. She was a drug addict and married three times. He ended up largely raised by grandparents.

Vance is a staunch opponent of abortion — the key issue in 2024 — and he has been vocal in his disdain of women who have not given birth, saying in 2021, for example, he argued that the U.S. was being “run by a bunch of “childless cat ladies” who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to say that people who don’t have children “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

Just when you think Trump has exhausted his supply of hate, he speaks. His nephew has written of a White House meeting when Uncle Donald “suggested that people with disabilities “should just die.” He said explicitly that it would save relatives’ money.

The nephew recounts another incident that requires an expensive car few of us will ever own, a white Cadillac Eldorado convertible. One morning Trump found “a giant gash, at least two feet long [and] another, shorter gash next to it” in the convertible canvas roof. “‘Ni***rs,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look at what the ni***rs did,’”.

That is the voice of the devil of hate. Hoffner would have recognized it and said so. So would most of us. I wish Sens. Grassley and Ernst were as honest. They still have a chance. Ask them before you vote.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”