Do you now feel sufficiently distanced and absolved from “agreeing with people on the left here”?
I admire the grounded approach that you take towards life and achievement, though I don’t think pragmatism versus intellectualism is what defines “the right” from “the left”. I say pragmatism versus intellectualism instead of “facts” versus “ideas”, because I think the right follows ideas based on fact, and I think the left follows ideas based on fact. The difference is in scope - how far ahead you’re trying to look and plan for. Among both leftists and rightists there are internal squabbles about who is grounded and who is in the clouds. Right here in this thread you accuse SM of not being happy for what he has as a rightist enjoying executive power in the US (and Canada - he’s Canadian, right? Well, and nearly the entire western developed world) - as his sin of being an ideologue in spite of the practicalities for which he lacks gratitude. Just the same on the left, you have reformists trying to pragmatically move how things are one step up at a time in the direction they want to head, versus revolutionaries who are trying to scout ahead to where such stairs are actually leading, suggesting it’s not heading in the right direction afterall and suggesting a better staircase to climb instead without sufficiently considering the practicalities of how to successfully get there.
What I’m trying to do, rather bizarrely, is to not run as far as I can up a staircase and shout about a promised utopia at the top, but to rather ungracefully stretch myself between an appropriate grounded happiness with how things are and somewhere up the staircase that I’ve scouted and deemed the best to climb, as far up as I reach. I look ridiculous half reaching for the ground as best I can and half stretching up into the clouds. As such, I’m going to lack your earthly pride and dignity, but for a leftist I am trying to hold onto all there is to be grateful about rightism as well as look as far beyond it as I can without (hopefully) disappearing up my own arse. To flawlessly follow up on such a vain hope, I’ll draw upon the not so ancient piece of history, “The Incredibles”, by casting myself more like Elastigirl than a Mr. Incredible… 
Syndrome is my enemy too, but no, that doesn’t mean we’re married :-"
From here, I see Trump as a fool who puts no work into it at all, such that I feel far too much pity to even be able to look at him - and yet I also don’t see evidence of the proud jingoism of many presidents before him, which was also clearly present in his competitor in the last US general election. You too easily attribute it all to a heroic figurehead, and perhaps I too easily attribute it to his lack of competence to seriously even consider wargames - and the direction was probably where everything was headed anyway (perhaps the best argument ever in favour of the Republican desire to incessantly elect the biggest idiots in power to best mock the state and thereby justify dismantling it). Abductive reasoning should not so easily be accepted on either of our parts - even as a journalist, I cannot believe that you’re so close to politics to have secretly been witness to an accidental break in his Trumpfoolery. But that’s probably more words than I’ve wasted on the subject than I’ve ever written and now I feel like I need a shower.
So to sum up, I may not be intellectually grandiose, but I am very tall - and as someone who likes to think they have at least the tip of their toe on the ground, I can confirm that it’s not such a bad thing to have the odd thing in common with the view I get to enjoy from up here. Give yourself a break from all this rationalisation of being so sharply distinct from a group that hurt you in the past.
Just tryin’a talk about a thing.