By Brae Canlen
The recriminations were swift, against Biden, Harris, and the Democrats. He should have stepped down sooner. She ran a lousy campaign. They should have given us a better candidate.
True or false, these are not the reasons why Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States. As of late Thursday, more than 72 million people voted for him. I’m pretty sure that most of them knew – they knew – he was not a good man. And they didn’t care.
It would be easy to demonize these people, and let’s face it, some of them are wackos (Proud Boys, QAnon, Oath Keepers, etc.). But when I looked at all those red states on the election map Tuesday night, after the polls had closed, I tried to think of the average people who lived there. The parents who had 2.5 kids, pay a monthly $2,209 mortgage payment, and carry a credit card balance of $6,642.
When I was a journalist, writing for a trade magazine, I traveled across those red states, spending time with lumberyard and hardware store owners, some of them third
generation family businesses. They were everything Donald Trump is not: principled, warm-hearted, altruistic.
But even when times were good, they worried about the wolf at the door. He had paid one or two visits in the past. Politically, they took no chances. The keynote speakers at
our yearly summits were a Rogues Gallery of Fox News pundits. The year I left, Tucker Carlson was the headliner.
I can’t demonize those Trump voters. The way they see it, they’re looking after their own interests and protecting what’s theirs. It’s a selfish, uninformed point of view, but this is America, where you can be both those things and still vote.
My own mother, God rest her soul, was a Trump supporter. I could not persuade her otherwise. She excused his behavior by calling him a “rascal.” I miss my mom, but I
take comfort in the fact that this election cycle, he did not get her vote.
Took a trip to the Grand Canyon thru Havasu, Oatman, on the way to Williams. Pretty rural and then some. Trump country and then some. People who live in areas of nowhere. Something to ask why? And yet, for where they are, Trump’s policies will do nothing at their level.
Republican voters looking after their own interests could have chosen Nikki Haley. She was a perfectly acceptable Republican candidate.
The author captures the moment quite accurately. My error in thinking was to dismiss the concerns of Trump people as being overly focused on the increased costs of bacon and potato chips because I am somewhat insulated from the harsh economic realities facing of working class people.
Trump also masterfully manipulated voters on cultural issues, that is, what Nancy Pelosi called “Guns, God and gays” in her interview with the New York Times.
The Democratic Party needs to stop being led around by the nose by the left wing of the party and the Progressives as well intentioned as they may be. The electorate is not aligned with those views at all right now
Yes indeed, these good hearted people chose Trump because for the last 40 years, the neoliberal, corporate, arrogantly well educated (and bubbled) Republicans and Democrats served themselves while they ignored these families’ needs, nay, their plight, as they lost sight of the “American Dream” and saw their current family stability wither. There was NAFTA, 2 unnecessary wars, loss of homes in the 2008 recession, growing out of pocket costs for health care and often no or long waits for care, no or expensive child care, high rents, expensive basic foods and a blunt massive (somewhat unnecessary) shutdown and “do it on your own pandemic.”
This is what it looks like on the ground in a failing democracy: renting not owning a home, no jobs or no job satisfaction, no savings, no better future.
The root cause of all this is the country’s obscene income/wealth inequality….
In the 1950’s the CIA popularized the Gini Index (named after an Italian economist to describe the distribution of something among a population, where “0” means everyone has an equal amount and “1” indicates it it all concentrated in one person/unit’s/country’s hands) as a measure of a country’s stability. The CIA determined an index over 40 portended civic unrest. For years the USA hovered ar an unpleasant 35 (close to Mexico) and far above the Scandinavian countries (e.g. Sweden is at 30 in 2024). Obama with his tax on stock transactions and the ACA was the only President since the 1960’s to lower our Gini. Since then especially with the Republican minimization of estate (“death”) taxes and promotion of corporate monopolies and the Trump tax cut, the USA Gini Index is now 42. Three Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population. Both American families and American government are being starved and the very rich have unprecedented raw power. The rich own the Supreme Court. Wealthy billionaires threw unprecedented gobs of money at Trump. As for Dems – under “neoliberalism” Clinton with NAFTA and Obama with failure to protect homes in the 2008-9 recession (itself the result of Republican and neoliberal deregulation) destroyed, alienated and ripped the heart out of middle America and the less wealthy. For the last 40 years, and on an accelerating basis, we have been watching massive wealth inequality playing out in real time, starving people, families and the government, NOW producing civic dysfunction and disorder whose engine is wealth inequality.
So disgust with the old rulers runs high, people leaped to the voice of radical grievance. Unfortunately the regime they chose is very likely to make matters worse, not better.
Well written. I’m tired of people demonizing Trump voters. Many did want an alternative Republican. I wonder how many “never trumpers” voted for him in the end, considering the lack of choice.
This was mostly a culture war, and most of the country wasn’t buying what Democrats were selling. And beyond that Kamala and Biden were unable to communicate much in the way of tangible policy benefits to electing them, other than maybe abortion access, which still isn’t very relevant to 80% of voters. Her biggest appeal to the electorate was that she isn’t Trump. That is never a winning strategy.
Again. There was an alternative Republican. Her name
was Nikki Haley.