On Wednesday night, Trevor Noah reviewed Trump’s Freudian nightmare of a rally in Phoenix, and, surprisingly, found himself envying the president’s most ardent supporters, not because they have any particular insight into the current mess we’re in but precisely because they don’t. After rolling highlights from Trump’s primal howl of a speech and the clashes between police and the protestors the rally attracted, Noah shows a clip of a Trump supporter named Julie Hoyler telling a reporter, “I’m not sure what the anger is all about.”
Noah, who knows all too well why people are mad, finds himself wishing he could be as cheerfully oblivious as Hoyler, because, in his words, she’s “living in a state of bliss.” But it’s useful here to remember Margaret Atwood’s line about ignoring things:
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Going to a Trump rally and not picking up on the fascism, racism, and hatred that are the president’s stock in trade might look blissful from the outside. But by now it must be a tremendous amount of work.
