'Owning the Libs' is Job #1. Why?

A friend posted a web piece by a guy who was sincerely trying to understand local acquaintances who were dedicated Trump voters.  This exchange resonated with me: 

"Why do you love Trump so much?", I asked a roofer I know.

“Because you hate him,” he said “nothing personal". 

 

I am trying to comprehend this.

 

My "uncle", Sanford Zalburg (actually my mother's cousin), was a remarkable man, and I've written about him several times.  His father died when he was quite young, and his step-father (who I knew only as a VERY old man) was apparently uninvolved, if not outright cold, to his step-son.  As soon as he was of age, he escaped that unhappy little Upstate New York home, eventually joined the Canadian army, and went off to WWII.  

 

A couple of years later, one morning, he found himself on Omaha Beach.

 

After the war, he ended up in Honolulu, married a local, flamboyant girl, and built an amazing career as a newspaperman, traveling the world and becoming a bit of a local character.  Every few years, he would swing thru Elmira, to visit my mother and uncle.  As a little boy, I remember him as very tall.

Here's a typical obit - there were several:

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2008/02/21/news/story15.html

In my 20's and 30's, I maintained a connection.  We exchanged many letters, and I visited him in Hawaii a few times, soaking up his conversation and his deep knowledge of the world.

Years later, his wife, the amazing Vivian, a lifelong smoker, died horribly from lung cancer.  He was devastated, wrote a book about her, her illness, and her death.  The book was so searingly painful that his editor said something along the lines of "no one will be able to read this."  I think I still have that manuscript (plus another unpublished novel of the Korean War) in a stack of his papers that I, somehow, ended up with.

But here's the story.  As Vivian was in the hospital, suffering and in her final days, she continued to smoke.  When, in frustration, my uncle asked her, "you know what this has done to you, why did you continue to smoke all these years?"

"Because my mother told me not to."