Many years ago, I interviewed an actor who was on a show I liked. This actor would, a few years after our interview, post a lot of Trump-supportive content on his social media. Following Charlottesville with neo-Nazis marching, this actor made a number of posts sharing (false) claims that the Nazi-presence and rhetoric had been overblown or misrepresented. This made me very angry.
I said nothing (well, outside of private conversations, I said nothing). I didn't comment on it in the fan community. I ceased contact and would check in on this actor from time to time, if only as a study of how someone could be radicalized.
This actor eventually scrubbed his social media of all pro-Trump material while leaving behind a few pre-2015, Trump-mocking comments regarding Trump's business practices. Because this actor took down his Trump-support and ceased voicing any support of Trump at all, I'm not willing to name him in this post.
I should note: I don't believe that anyone had to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020 to make the minimum grade as a decent human being. People I respect voted third party or wrote in names because they didn't support Clinton, or because they believed in term limits when it came to Biden, or for other reasons entirely.
However, I believe that the act of voting for Donald Trump was and is evil.
I felt tremendous confusion when this actor expressed support for Trump's 2016 campaign of obvious racism, bigotry, white supremacy and white privilege. This actor had been so generous to me: a lengthy phone conversation, reviewing his quotes and offering clarifications and corrections, patient explanations of his process and work, indulgently sharing memories of times that were challenging and difficult.
He did all this for me, and I am a person of colour. I am an Asian man and I have a Muslim name (which is incredibly weird because my family has no Muslims and is Buddhist on one side and Mennonite on the other). Someone supporting a racist political party that encourages violence against anyone who isn't Caucasian -- that's not something I can ignore morally or in terms of personal safety.
Why did a Trump supporter do so much for an Asian man with a Muslim name? I had conversations with others and received a number of theories.
From my sister:
"You're not Asian enough for someone to be racist to you. Do you hear yourself on the phone? You sound white."
From my father:
"You're a banana, son. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside and people react to you like you're white. Also, as Chinese people go, you're very pale. You get white privilege."
From my niece:
"That actor might be nice to you, but he wouldn't ever want people of colour to have any more rights -- or actual rights -- and he wants to keep your lack of privilege where it is and his white privilege where it is and he'll always vote for whatever gives white people more power to be racist."
From an intern in the social justice office:
"The dude was nice to you because he wanted to answer fan questions about his work and not have to talk about it anymore. You were someone he could use."
This twisted me inside for a long time. Eventually, I simply had to bar it from my mind. But in recent days, I've had to think about it, and I've revisited the theories that my friends and family offered me. I have then rejected these theories. I know in my heart (if not for a fact) that they are all wrong.
I have decided that he was sincerely nice to me, a person of colour, in a genuine and heartfelt way and he voted for and supported a white supremacist bigot. Both are true.
Why did he vote for Donald Trump and minimize the presence of Nazis the way Informant, a former poster here, was constantly lying and claiming there where no neo-Nazis even when they were roaring, "You will not replace us"?
A vote for Trump could be, as Grizzlor put it, tribalism, but neo-Nazi denialism goes beyond that.
I'm prepared to suggest that this actor, like Kelsey Grammer, suffered something in his life that shook him and damaged him and his sense of right and wrong when it came to the specific sphere of politics. There are actually numerous areas in his life where he may have experienced something disturbing and traumatic for which he deserves, like any person, sympathy and understanding.
Without going into detail, there was a very early setback in his education that deprived him of credentials he needed in the field of acting (don't bother trying to look this up, you won't find it). This may have caused a sense of failure and may have made it harder than it should have been to build his career, although he did build it. There may have been distress with the mother of his children not being in his life or his children's lives. I don't know that these were life-altering traumas for him. They may have been merely setbacks, but they probably weren't non-serious issues.
And then there was this actor's biggest job. The pinnacle of his career. He'd acted in small roles and acted in medium-sized roles and acting had become his full time job. Then came a role that would bring him to his largest audience yet. This role, while potentially career-defining, also came with a sense of humiliation: the actor was hired to effectively replace and imitate a different performer.
The original performer in this role was a big name who had played the character for years, but suddenly left the role. This actor I interviewed was the successor and his new job involved mimicking the original performer's performance. (I guess this gives it away)
This job must have come with the constant sense of being second-chosen, second-best, least-wanted, least-remembered, least-respected. There was the sense that the highest amount of regard for his career was when he performed in the shadow of someone else, copying someone else's work rather than offering something uniquely his own. This is an extremely caustic and mocking interpretation, and it is absolutely not how I see this person or his life or his work.
I consider this actor to a more skillful, detailed, thoughtful and talented than his predecessor, and truly a master thespian. I was impressed by how the actor's work was not imitation, but tribute where mimicry of the previous performer was just one facet of a very complex performance. And this actor could have built a successful career beyond this big role. He had the talent and physical appeal to do so, but he decided to end his acting career a short time after this job due to the need to spend more time with his family.
He left acting and found success in a different field. As a result, his former acting career was then defined by this one part where people saw him as a stand-in for somebody else; a scab, a stand-in, a substitute.
I have never and will never see him as a substitute for anybody. But it is how many others viewed him and viewed his life and viewed his work. That had to have affected him, especially when he was told by cruel fans in public that his failure to live up to his predecessor was why the show was cancelled.
These are not easy experiences.
As Dr. Frasier Crane might say: someone who experiences a sense of disenfranchisement, abandonment -- and who is treated as a shabby substitute -- could experience dire feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, weakness, and frustration that he is viewed as a second-rate copy rather than someone with his own set of experiences and skills and approach to his profession and craft.
Someone might go through this and then in their politics feel a desire for control, dominance, privilege, elevation, superiority, vindication and obedience, and this might be reflected in their voting for and supporting fascist authoritarianism and entitlement.
Someone could experience all these things and cast that vote... but still retain the ability to dismiss race and ethnicity on a personal level (like when interacting with a fan) while making racist and white supremacist choices on a political level.
One does not negate the other. Being kind to me does not erase the fact that this person cast a ballot for racism, fascism and authoritarianism. At the same time, casting that ballot did not erase the fact that this person was extremely generous to me on a personal and psychological level and, in their kindness to me, was also being kind to every other fan of his work.
This person has ceased supporting Donald Trump publicly. This means that their politics today are now a private affair as they are no longer voicing any opinion of it at all and have removed their previous opinions from their platform. For this reason, I will not name this actor nor will I associate this person with the cause from which he severed his public (if not private) allegiance. I have said nothing about this online for the past seven years because I did not want to diminish this person's standing or what he had shared with fans.
As someone who has voted for different parties at different times, I can say that there are votes for parties that I regret casting. I have made votes that, upon reflection, I consider to have been acts of evil on my part. I wouldn't want to be defined by a vote that I now regret, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
These are important subjects to discuss, and I don't feel silence serves anyone. However, I make the request that if we talk about this more, we avoid using this person's name as search engine optimization can cause associations that this person clearly no longer wants to maintain... and as this person never committed any actual crimes (none that I'm aware of, anyway), he has the right to change, to chart a new course, and to move on.
