“Hating people is like burning down your house to get rid of a rat.” — Henry  Emerson Fosdick.

It is fashionable in much of our world to hate our President, Donald Trump. It is also easy. Donald Trump works hard to be hateful, and he is good at it.

But there are good reasons to think about hating anyone, let alone the President. Hating him strikes me as its kind of virus, spreading easily and digitally, destructive and damaging. It seems to me to be corrosive, harmful to the haters more than the subject.

I see a lot of people slipping over into the dark side when it comes to Trump-hating, not realizing perhaps, that they are doing much more damage to themselves and the country than to him.

It’s so easy to forget looking in the mirror and understanding how we are all complicit in his rise to power.

Besides, hating Trump is not working out for people.

Trump haters are angry and distracted; many have trouble sleeping and are becoming joyless and depressed. Shrinks say this is becoming a severe national mental health problem.

Any good psychologist will warn people about hate.

One reason we hate, they say, is because we fear things that are different from us. That is one reason why the people who love Trump so much hate people like me, and perhaps like you. And the more people hate us, the better for him.

It doesn’t seem productive to me to be like them. What’s the point?

Shedding hatred is liberating, morally correct, and psychologically healthy. The lasting movements in the world were all led by empathetic souls, not haters.

Nobody, except perhaps the President himself, can show me how hatred solves any problem or does any good. He did, after all, get to be President. And we do live in a democracy. We can’t always win.

Mostly, hatred is a soul eater.

I have learned this the hard way, I’ve done some first-rate hating myself. It didn’t work for me. A German philosopher wrote that hate must make a person productive in some way; otherwise, one might as well love.

A Washington, D.C. clinical psychologist named Dana Harron got my attention when she told Psychology Today that the things people hate about others are often the things that they fear within themselves.

I concede that this has been true of me.

There are bits and pieces of Trump I see in me – the self-hatred, the fear, his obsession with what others think, his rage – I’ve felt all of them, perhaps that is why he struck such a deep chord in me when he first started campaigning in 2016.

In my years of therapy, I learned to be aware of hatred, and it’s destructive impact on the psyche.

When Trump won, I recognized the danger I was in from hating him and moved in another direction. I believe that hatred kills one from the inside; hatred builds up in the mind, body, and soul.  I feel lighter, freer, more productive.

I know that I am more likely to hate someone who is somewhat like me. I understand that what I hate is often something in me. Why else would I pay so much attention to it? When I feel hatred rising, I stop and take a good look at me.

I believe it is true that to face the most hateful things about Donald Trump; I need to acknowledge and face the most hateful and difficult things about myself. To do anything else can be false, self-serving, and hypocritical.

It is also one of the biggest reasons the people who love him hate us and revere him.

Hatred is unhealthy. It takes up too much space, destroys the spirit, the soul, and the heart.

It makes us unavailable for love, good works, or fulfillment. It doesn’t feel right.

There are many good things to do other than hate, and many of them would do more to sniff out Trumpism than any nasty or pointless sparring on Twitter or stewing over the news.

If I hate anyone, I hate hypocrites. And the President is a hypocrite. I had work to do.

The irony is that we live in an age of hypocrisy. President Trump condemns hypocrisy in others, yet he personifies the hypocrite, even though it does little to damage him among his followers.  It does cause people who are not his followers to hate him.

“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under cover of all other vices except this one,” wrote the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt. “Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

Hypocrisy works both ways, though, to judge the hypocrisy in others, I have to also see it in myself. We conjured him up out of our arrogance and indifference.

Dana Harron has a good idea about hating. She suggests thinking about people like Donald Trump as a figure on a movie screen onto which we project unwanted parts of the self. The idea is, “I’m not terrible,  you are.”

It is uncomfortable to turn the tables on ourselves and try to understand  Trumpism rather than hate the leader. Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause. He didn’t create the divisions in our country; they created him. In a sense, hatred is the father of polarism, and indeed of the demagogue.

When you hate President Trump, you simply enable his movement, his tactics, his power, and his prospects. He understands hatred; he uses it to his advantage.  He needs it. If he were not offensive and controversial every day, he would turn into dust and blow away.

There were good reasons many people voted for him, and he has accomplished some remarkable things.

Hatred blinds us from understanding the whole truth. That isn’t to suggest that he is blameless.

But we aren’t either. It’s just too easy to look at the world in that way.

Donald Trump does not need to be hated by others; he will – he is – eating himself up.

He is the most self-destructive political figure I have ever seen.

These past few weeks, he could so quickly have sealed up his re-election by calming and leading the country. All he had to do was nothing, visit the sick and the dying, and send our National Grandpa, Dr.Tony Fauci, out to speak on his behalf.

He couldn’t do it, he had to be an asshole, every night for two and a half hours, during which he managed to wipe out all the gains he earned since his impeachment, and frighten and confuse – and almost killed – his vulnerable citizens looking for guidance and inspiration.

They got none of either.

When you use that energy to do something different, something possible,  you can do just what Andrew Cuomo is doing; you can help create an alternative movement that promotes and supports people.

Hatred seems not to go as far as truth and compassion.

Every time I support a refugee child or an older person in assisted care, I am supporting and enabling a different kind of ideology, a different kind of movement. That is my politics and the politics of the people who support this work.

We don’t hate the President, that has never once come up in our good work.

Why not create our own thing, and make it better and more reflective of what it is that people need?

Governor Cuomo, in some ways an unlikely savior, is showing us a different way. He has put hatred and anger aside and has focused on doing good. He’s got an 87 percent trust rating when it comes to the coronavirus, three times the trust rate for President Trump.

That is significant.

So his idea works better than hatred.

Rather than hating President Trump – at least in public – he is creating an alternative to him. And his popularity is soaring. People who hate Trump and think they are hurting him by raging on Twitter or while watching the news all day might want to do some deeper thinking – about themselves, not him.

A week ago, I wrote a post calling for most of us to open up again. The piece got a lot of response, almost none of it in agreement with me. For once, I was ahead of the curve.

I noticed a curious thing. While almost everyone writing to me disagreed with my idea of opening up, and many talked of the great suffering in New York City and Boston, not one showed any empathy at all for the people suffering in rural America.

The protesters from the country marching around state houses were repeatedly dismissed as gun-toting Trump trolls.

No one thought their suffering mattered or was comparable with cities like New York.

We haven’t learned much from Hilary Clinton’s “deplorable” comment, even though many believe it paved the way for Trump to come to power.

It is uncomfortable to think about Trump Hatred because to do it means asking difficult questions about ourselves.

“Your current writings are hard for me to read, I often squirm,” wrote Kim from New Jersey. “That is because I need to read them. I need to face my own bias, my own closed mind.”

 Why have we been so indifferent to the suffering and destruction in rural America, the drumbeat that elected Trump and keeps him in power?

Why have we permitted the economists to support the destruction of family farming, for many years the soul of the country and a source of great support for the Democratic Party?

Why did we do nothing to stop the opioid epidemic which has touched the lives of 75 percent of all the farmers in America, according to polling by the Department Of Agriculture?

Why did we support one trade pact after another that hollowed out half of our country, destroyed farms, communities, Main Streets, and took almost all of the good jobs and futures away?

Why did we break our promises to the rural people whose jobs went to China and Mexico in the name of globalism?

And why have we maintained and crippled a rural health care system that has closed hundreds of rural hospitals, and left communities with no doctors?

Why don’t we care that the life-expectancy of rural people is sharply declining, and suicide is one of the main reasons?

“We used to have callings,” an old farmer told me, “now we have part-time jobs if we’re lucky.”

People make a right and just case for helping stop urban poverty and violence – think of Chicago. But what kind of a system acknowledges suffering in one half of the country, but not in the other?

People in the country who rail about elitists have something going for them – they are right.

An African-American activist wrote to say she didn’t care about country people; they have never cared about her people. So I guess the plan is to do unto others…Not exactly uplifting.

Demagogues come when the government breaks its promises to people, not because people are stupid.

If Trump fails these people once more, they will not turn to progressives in the Democratic Party for help; they will go out in search of another Trump, that one may be worse than this one.

Globalism enriched one city after another and bankrupted one small town and village after another. That’s how we got so divided.

If I hated Donald Trump, the last place I’d go to is Twitter. I would support candidates who will finally listen to these left behind people and tend to their helplessness and despair, something they have promised and failed to do for generations now.

Why should the people who love Trump believe people like candidates or me from a political party that has screwed them again and again? How many Democratic Presidential Candidates talked during the debates about rural poverty,  or no bandwidth, or joblessness, shortening life spans, or the collapse of health care?

Hating Donald Trump has already proven to be a fruitless waste of time and energy – and bad news for heart health.

He is the most hated President in American history, and also the most loved.

Maybe it makes sense to try something else.