"I Hate My Opponent and I Don't Want the Best for Them"

As Charlie Kirk's friends and allies mourn, Donald Trump makes an argument to Christian nationalists about the power of hatred

President Donald Trump takes the stage with Erika Kirk at the Memorial Service for Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, Sunday, September 21, 2025. Photo credit: Daniel Torok/Wikimedia Commons

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There have been numerous Presidents whose private moments were devoted to trashing others. Andrew Jackson called White abolitionists “wicked” and “incendiary.” More recently, Richard Nixon was famous for fulminating privately, and in the coarsest possible language, against activists and political opponents; created an enemies list, and illegally used the powers of his office to go after the people on it.

But I don’t think any president, before Donald J. Trump, has explicitly told millions of Americans that he hates them. And yet here we are. On Sunday, at Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk’s gargantuan memorial service, after Kirk’s widow spoke about forgiving assassin Tyler Robinson as Jesus commanded her to, Trump was like—no.

Kirk, Trump said, “was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them:

That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I am sorry, Erika. But now Erika can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent.

It was a truly shocking thing to say, even for Trump.

I find it hard to believe that, although I oppose everything he stands for and make that clear in public utterances nearly every day, that Donald Trump hates me. There’s the obvious fact that he doesn’t know me well enough to hate me. In addition, aside from being a liberal intellectual, a homosexual, a journalist, and a person who lives off the Social Security tit, I have led a relatively productive and blameless life.

So, what’s to hate? Maybe, as Trump watchers often say, I should take the President seriously—but not literally. Yet, if that is the case, if Trump does not literally hate me, why would he send this personal message to me and the growing majority of other Americans who oppose his agenda (between 52-60%, according to recent polling)?

There has been much (perhaps too much) conversation about what Trump “really means” when he says terrible, and often false, things about others. It’s an absurd thing to even think about, when you consider that nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is syntactically garbled, a random, weird and inappropriate thought, or an utterance laced with lies so obvious that members of his administration twist themselves into pretzels to explain what he was talking about and why. In April 2020, when Trump mused repeatedly during a press conference about treating COVID infections with very bright light and bleach injections, ideas that defied common sense much less medical recommendations, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany snapped at reporters the next day: “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”

Context does matter, of course, so here’s some context for Trump’s promotion of hate last Sunday. When Reverend Clementa Pinckney and eight other Black worshippers were murdered by White right wing extremist Dylann Roof in 2015, Obama closed his remarks with an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

One possibility is that Trump’s hatred is just a fleeting feeling. Because he is a person who is “authentically himself,” as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt put it yesterday, he needed to express it before he could move on to railing against “Antifa,” demonstrators in general, and the Democratic Party. Reminiscing about Election Day in 2024, he said with satisfaction: “They cheated like dogs, but we got them back, didn't we, huh? Got them back.”

But it is difficult to spin Trump’s unprecedented statement, at a memorial service no less, that he “hates” his opponent as anything but the reflection of a vicious person who really does hate a range of people he does not know. In fact, Trump has a long history of promoting hatred as a path to social change. On May 1, 1989, Trump took out ads in The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and New York Newsday railing against the Central Park Five, young Black men charged with a brutal assault and rape of a White professional woman and demanded their execution. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” he wrote in the ad, long before any trial had been held (the men were convicted, and then exonerated decades later.) Defending an ad that many saw as racist incitement, he said: “Of course I hate these people and let's all hate these people because maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."

Apparently, Trump had the right audience for his hatred last Sunday as well. As Tyler Prager pointed out in the New York Times, both hate and love coexist comfortably in White Christian nationalism. The following day,

Some conservatives on Monday expressed support for the seemingly conflicting messages from Mrs. Kirk and government officials like the president.

“It is our job to forgive, not the government’s,” Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator, wrote on social media. “Christians give grace; the government wields the sword (Romans 13). We turn the other cheek; the government punishes evil.”

Too often, Donald Trump’s extremism is simply written off as salesmanship, an artifact of his time in real estate, in which Trump had to fake it until he made it as a Manhattan player. In The Art of the Deal, a meandering 1989 bildungsroman ghosted by Tony Schwartz, Trump explained, about 25 years before he became a serious presidential candidate, his theory of “truthful hyperbole.”

Not lying, exactly, truthful hyperbole was never to be taken literally. Statements so outlandish as to be untruthful, Trump argued, were a way to motivate a consumer audience through “an innocent form of exaggeration” that ““play[s] to people’s fantasies,” people who “may not always think big themselves.”

It is also the case, Trump cautions in The Art of the Deal, that truthful hyperbole is not lying because it contains its own checks and balances. “If you don’t deliver on the goods,” he warns, “people will catch on.” But catch on to what? That you are lying of course.

But here’s the question: was Trump’s statement that anyone who is not part of his movement is his enemy, and thus a proper object of hatred, a lie? I don’t think so. I think he truly believes it. Simultaneously, however, Trump’s command to the faithful fits the definition of truthful hyperbole: it asks an audience inspired by Charlie Kirk’s slick combination of bigotry, reason, and xenophobic patriotism to think big.

And the big thought from Donald Trump is this: You may be Christian—but don’t be a sucker. Hate is more powerful than love. Look at me—why, hatred made me President.

Think what it could do for you.

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What I’m reading:

• Podcast listeners may recall that some months back, co-host Neil J. Young recommended Claire Hoffman’s Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) as his viral pick of the week. Well—it’s amazing, both about McPherson herself, why Los Angeles was the perfect stage for Pentecostalism (at the time, a fringe evangelical practice) to burst onto the national stage, and how McPherson deftly used media and theater to bring populism into the 20th century. If you are still on the fence about whether to buy it, read Neil’s review in The Revealer (September 4, 2025).

Daughter Roberta Semple , Aimee Semple McPherson, and secretary Rheba Crawford at a parade in Los Angeles, January 8 1935. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons

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What I’m watching:

• Black Rabbit (Netflix, 2025), a limited series set in New York’s cutthroat downtown restaurant scene. It stars Jude Law and Jason Bateman (who you will remember from Ozark) as Jake and Vince Friedkin, two brothers trying to escape the clutches of the Russian mob. As I understand it, the fictional Black Rabbit restaurant is based on the trendy Spotted Pig, while the series itself drafs off the popularity of FX’s The Bear (2022- ). In truth, I am not that interested in restaurant culture, and stopped watching The Bear after season 1—which is why the easy segue into a tense crime drama by episode 2 hooked me for the next six.

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Short takes:

• Secretary of HSS Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s war on vaccines has a consistent theme other than its reliance on conspiracy theories, fake science, and social fear of autism: shaming women. “According to the misnamed Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, the only women who get hepatitis B are filthy degenerates,” Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon, in other words drug addicted and promiscuous. If you want to know how stupid this is, as well as sexist: babies also contract Hep B topically from infected people who are not their mothers. In addition, “It’s women who would be expected to give up pouring a child a bowl of cereal in favor of making bread from scratch,” Marcotte writes. “It’s women who would be tasked with staying home with kids who have measles. And if those children were to die, women would be blamed for supposedly not feeding them enough homegrown organic foods.” (September 22, 2025)

• Although the Trump administration denies that we are in an inflation economy, the numbers at the grocery store do not lie: sales of Hamburger Helper, a food stretching product first created in the stagflation 1970s are up 14.5% this year. “And it’s not just Hamburger Helper,” Julie Creswell writes at the New York Times. “Sales of foods commonly purchased by consumers when financial times get tough are on the rise, according to industry analysts. Purchases of rice are up 7.5 percent this year. Distressed shoppers are also buying more cans of tuna, salmon and sardines. Sales of beans and boxes of macaroni and cheese are also strong, based on data from the research firm Circana.” (September 20, 2025)

• According to Colbert I. King at The Washington Post, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was a model of integrity in her testimony before House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week. King lambasts the Republican majority on the committee for their bad manners, and highlights how unserious the GOP is about governing. For example, batshit crazy Nancy Mace (R, SC 01) used her time to obsess about gender. in response to Mace asking what a woman is, Bowser answered: “I’m a woman. Are you a woman?” As King asks: “This is the conversation that a member of the Oversight Committee wanted to have with the duly elected leader of America’s capital city?” (September 19, 2025)