If Liberals Hate Him, Then Trump Must Be Doing Something Right

[Dill]

(05-12-2017, 01:57 PM)CageTheBengal Wrote: The blind leading the blind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/opinion/sunday/if-liberals-hate-him-then-trump-must-be-doing-something-right.html

That's an excellent article, Cage.  I took special note of the following:

For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Mr. Trump, whatever his blunders or foibles, the other side is always worse.

But the real heart of anti-anti-Trumpism is the delight in the frustration and anger of his opponents. Mr. Trump’s base is unlikely to hold him either to promises or tangible achievements, because conservative politics is now less about ideas or accomplishments than it is about making the right enemies cry out in anguish.

Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters don’t have to defend his specific actions as long as they make “liberal heads explode,” or as Sarah Palin put it so memorably, “It’s really funny to me to see the splodey heads keep sploding.” If liberals hate something, the argument goes, then it must be wonderful and worthy of aggressive defense. Each controversy reinforces the divisions and the distrust, and Mr. Trump counts on that.
 
For many in the conservative movement, this sort of anti-anti-Trumpism is the solution to the painful conundrum posed by the Trump presidency. With a vast majority of conservative voters and listeners solidly behind Mr. Trump, conservative critics of the president find themselves isolated and under siege. But, as Damon Linker noted, anti-anti-Trumpism “allows the right to indulge its hatred of liberals and liberalism while sidestepping the need for a reckoning with the disaster of the Trump administration itself.”

But they will have to deal with it at some point!

I have noted on other threads the tendency of Trumpsters to disconnect his behavior from any accountability, to treat criticism of his public behavior as mere name calling and "butthurt" rather than a justified concern all Americans should share about an impulsive, angry commander-in-chief who is "smarter than the generals."

This is also true of Trump defenders who claim they never voted for him, but still applaud the liberal confusion as to how someone with so little knowledge of government and history and so much contempt for statecraft could have made it to the White House and retain support through self-inflicted crisis after self-inflicted crisis. Still better than a Democrat and better than Hillary.
 
The Trump team recently threatened to use a tape of Hillary's concession speech to celebrate 6 months of the Trump presidency.

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/05/white-house-clinton-concession-call

I am curious--are there any Trump defenders out there who think it quite over the top if I find this monumentally mean, petty, immature and vindictive?  If I say I can recall no president (since Jackson, or maybe A. Johnson) inclined to allow such things actions to define his presidency, would that be hyperbole? 

For the Trump defenders who can't defend this such actions but still prefer Trump to Hillary, could you perhaps lay out the cost benefit ratio here? What is the value gained which makes up for the national shame and loss of credibility