The USA Is Not Trump’s Country Club

Zoey O'Toole
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

Someone I consider a dear friend, whom I happen to know “walks the walk” when it comes to her deep Christian convictions, wrote a piece yesterday intended to clue her liberal friends into how she and her fellow conservatives view the current occupant of the White House. The piece compared the United States to an exclusive, “classy” country club that the president, while being a flawed human being, is trying his best to protect and improve.

Unfortunately for my friend, the piece fell utterly flat with her intended audience, the main reason being that her liberal friends know damned well that’s how conservatives see DJT, they just don’t happen to agree with it. My immediate response to her was “The country is not a country club, and he doesn’t have a clue what makes it great.” I decided to expand upon that response because I don’t believe the essential problem here is that liberals don’t understand their conservative friends’ viewpoint; it’s rather the other way around. If my friend believed that her piece was going to make any of her liberal friends feel warm and fuzzy about DJT, she was so far off the mark that it’s clear she doesn’t understand our viewpoint at all.

What is a country club? A country club is a place to go to escape your daily life. If it’s a “classy” one, it’s expensive and exclusive, with huge membership fees and significant membership restrictions. Country clubs are notoriously bigoted, known much more frequently for who is kept out than for who is allowed in: No Jews; no blacks; no women! Despite the fact that such exclusions are by definition anti-American (religion, race, and sex are classes protected by law), they are allowed to do this precisely because they are private clubs. The lawns are kept artificially perfect through “liberal” (see what I did there?) spraying of weedkillers like Roundup, and their members too are often kept artificially perfect through expensive spa treatments and plastic surgery. Members must pretend to a status and perfection that they know in their hearts is not sustainable; that’s why so many are so afraid of losing their membership privileges. They pat themselves on the back for having been “good” or “successful” (generally by exploiting the hell out of those less “successful) enough to be accepted and gaze out at the “riffraff” who have been excluded, sighing with relief because at least here they do not have to consort with them.

In short, country clubs are playgrounds for the very “elite” that the president’s devotees claim to despise.

I can assure you that not one of your liberal friends sees their beloved United States, as a country club, “classy” or otherwise. They view it as their home, a place where they should feel free to be themselves and not have to live up to some artificial idea of perfection, and a place where their friends are welcome. Do they want their home to be “classy”? Hell yeah, they do. There is no one who doesn’t think the neighborhood can’t do with some sprucing. But what conservatives apparently don’t understand is that your liberal friends’ definition of classy is completely different from DJT’s definition. You see, most of us don’t think that “class” can be found in golden thrones and insults hurled over Twitter. It doesn’t include mocking disabled reporters, cheating the people who’ve worked for you, inciting followers to violence, or persecuting the first African-American president over a make-believe issue with his birth certificate — and it certainly doesn’t include bigotry of any kind.

Now we know what liberals think class isn’t, but what is it? I suspect that even those of us liberals who aren’t Christian could agree on at least one individual who exemplified class in most of his dealings. That individual would be the man described in the four gospels: Jesus Christ was always himself, kind and thoughtful, when dealing with anyone from prostitutes and beggars to kings and Roman governors. In fact, the only people he ever lost patience with were those who wished to monetize his “club” — though I suspect that for Christ it was more like his home — the Temple. He exhibited tremendous grace under extreme pressure more than once. And he was inclusive; on this there can be no argument. When he exhorted his followers to “love thy neighbor,” Christ made it clear that he considered everyone his neighbor, no exceptions: not adulterous women, not Samaritans, not tax collectors, not thieves, and not lepers.

So, I’m hoping my conservative friends can see now why your liberal friends are so convinced that DJT is among the last people qualified to improve or “class up” the neighborhood. His idea of class is so far removed from our own that his presidency has the potential to destroy everything we love about our home in his efforts to turn it into a playground for the rich, unscrupulous, and bigoted.

And that’s why we resist.

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