Five to six years ago, I was corresponding online, on a regular, frequent basis, with several strong conservatives.  We all advocated for policies like smaller central government; lower taxes; First, Second and Tenth Amendment freedoms; restrictions on abortion; strict control of our borders, including merit-based immigration; and many other standard conservative positions.

That was then.

Along came the 2016 presidential campaign, and the finalists were Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.  As expected, most conservatives, as described above, were enthusiastically supportive of Trump.  Unexpectedly, however, there was a significant proportion of conservatives, or those who claimed to be, who were not only opposed to Trump, but vehement "NeverTrumps."  "Anybody but Trump" was their mantra.  And they meant it.  Anybody. 

Why this is so is a mystery not yet fully explained.

In recent encounters (online) with some of them, I was amazed at their glee, caustically expressed, that Donald Trump had left the White House.  According to them, Trump was the devil.  He did nothing right.  He made everything worse.  He locked children in cages, then went golfing.  He was Islamophobic and xenophobic.  He was destroying the environment.  He was recklessly risking nuclear war with North Korea and Iran.  He was colluding with the Russians.  He sold much of our scarce uranium to the Russians (oh, wait — that was Hillary, but even so, Trump was bad).

There is so much more and so little room here.

And it all had to be true, because all the leftist "news" outlets were saying so.  They wouldn't lie.  They were unbiased, science-oriented, purveyors of fact, weren't they?

In my current, and brief, discussions with some of them, I gently broached the question: "Which of Hillary Clinton's policies — those that you previously railed against — would you have preferred?  Which of them would have been better than those of Trump, whose policies you formerly favored so long as he was not the one enacting them?"

I suspect that the answer is none (of the Clinton policies).  I cannot imagine that these friends and relatives suddenly turned on a dime and began favoring confiscation of weapons, censorship of conservative points of view, giving North Korea and Iran billions of dollars that would enhance their nuclear arsenals.  Open the borders?  Green New Deal?  Go soft on Andrew McCabe and company, but seek to imprison General Flynn?  Sell uranium to Russia?  Really?

If they did, if they actually reversed their core conservative positions, then that would explain their extreme hatred (there is no better word for it) of Trump.  If they did reverse, then perhaps the old science fiction movie Invasion of the Body-Snatchers might actually be true.  Maybe sinister forces from other planets have removed conservative humans and replaced them with lookalikes.  I mean, absurd as that is, give me a more rational explanation for their Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Perhaps the one person who has any chance of changing the minds of Trump-haters is Joe Biden himself.  Over the next few months, if he continues to cater to the extreme leftists who got him into power, his policies will begin to have obvious and disastrous effects.  If Kamala Harris becomes president, then catastrophe is sure to follow.  

Maybe (sarcasm) that is what the sinister aliens intend. 

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.