Who hates me

As a slightly public figure who routinely criticizes Donald Trump, writes about his racism, sexism, narcissism, and complete incompetence, has participated in a successful lawsuit against him, and uses Twitter to make my feeling known to both Trump and anyone else who will listen, I receive my fair share of angry retorts from his supporters.

They usually come in the form of tweets, though occasionally someone will respond to a blog post or send me an email. Just recently someone left me a voicemail.

Still deciding if I should share this recording with you.

The odd thing about Donald Trump supporters who respond to me is that they all have so much in common. Almost universal synchrony in four specific areas:

• They make fun of my last name, which is always so disappointing to me. I was sitting on a bench outside the principal’s office in fifth grade when a kid made fun of my last name for the first time. Do these Trump supporters really believe that poking fun at me about my last name is original or funny or clever in any way? Or that an insult about my last name, after more than four decades on this planet, has any impact on me at all? Or that it even makes sense to insult someone about something unrelated to who they are or what they believe? Or most importantly, something they have no control over at all?

I don’t make fun of Donald Trump, for example, for raising such stupid children because parents have no control over the IQ of their offspring. Sometimes your kid is just an idiot, so I’d never make fun of Trump for his children’s stupidity.

Not his fault.

The saddest thing about making fun of my last name is that I always know funnier, more clever, more stinging insults than the ones routinely lobbed at me. Just once, I’d love to hear someone make fun of my name in a new and interesting way, but the Trump supporters have thus far been unoriginal, bland, and boring in this regard.

• Every single one of them were somehow absent from school on the day that homophones were taught, because almost without fail, they use the wrong form of your/you’re, its/it’s, there/their, and to/too. It’s remarkable how consistent they are in their misspelling.
• None of them can punctuate and capitalize properly. Perhaps this is why they are drawn to Donald Trump in the first place. He has proven himself unable to spell, capitalize, or punctuate properly, either, so maybe they are just thrilled to find someone as grammatically challenged as they are.
• Despite their conservative, right-wing, oftentimes strongly held religious beliefs, they swear constantly and say some of the most vile, disgusting things I’ve ever heard. Most of these comments are made via Twitter, of course, which affords them a certain degree of anonymity, so perhaps my critics are simply cowards and trolls who are afraid to speak like this in real life but will do so while cowering behind their inane Twitter handles.

None of my critics have a blue checkmark verifying their identity, of course.

Trump has also publicly cursed more than any President in US history (including twice on Twitter this week), so perhaps they are drawn to his vulgarity and seek to emulate it whenever possible.

The most astounding thing about these critics is that they think I read their responses. I never read my Twitter mentions, and when a scathing email lands in my inbox, it usually takes me a sentence or two to identify its nature and mark it as spam. Sometimes I get multi-paragraph responses to something I’ve written, but as soon as I identify it as something vile or stupid, I stop reading and delete.

I have much better ways to spend my time.

Sadly, it appears that they do not.

Not surprising.