Who votes for Trump?

In my opinion, this is who votes for Donald Trump: 

1. Bad people.

2. Stupid people.

3. People who are inherently neither bad nor stupid but have been manipulated by lies, propaganda and misinformation into believing a false narrative and an alternate version of reality. 

Group 1 is simply bad people. We always knew they were out there somewhere, but the Trump presidency has uncovered millions of them who had been hiding under rocks. This group consists of racists, homophobes, xenophobes, misogynists, Nazis, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, election deniers, pathological liars, grifters, thieves, greedy money changers, dangerously crazy people and abusers of children, women and animals. This group, in my opinion, has always existed but has been invited into the open to foment hatred, violence and insurrection by Donald Trump and his regime.  

They either don’t know right from wrong or simply don’t care.

I don’t want to be friends with these people. I don’t want to try and reason with them or argue with them or show them the error of their ways. That’s a waste of time. I don’t want them to be members of my family, move in next door to me or have contact with my children. I won’t patronize their businesses and I won’t answer the door if they ring. 

This group, I believe, is so badly broken it cannot ever be fixed.      

Group 2 is people generously defined as the “poorly educated” who vote in elections without knowing anything about American history, the U.S. Constitution, the three branches of government or how American democracy works. Some of them are legitimately stupid, it’s true, having dropped out of high school with the I.Q. of table salt, but this group goes much deeper than that. It includes people who consistently vote against their own self-interest, either knowingly or otherwise, because they are obsessed with one particular issue at the exclusion of all others, and are influenced by the wrong set of so-called “facts.” 

These are people who voted against Hillary Clinton because of those pesky emails, or her perceived role in Benghazi, or her husband’s extramarital affairs, and not because of her domestic or foreign policy objectives. They were prepared to vote against Joe Biden because he was old or because his son committed a crime or because he spends his weekends at the beach, and not because of his infrastructure bill or his growing economy or his goal to reduce student debt. And they’ll vote against Kamala Harris because she laughs funny or is a woman or has Asian blood or failed to prosecute one bad guy in California or because of concepts her father taught students at Stanford, and not because she proposes a long list of policies and procedures that will benefit middle- and lower-class Americans and require the wealthy to pay their fair share.

Instead, in each case, these “low education” voters support a man who proposes to take away their health care, privatize their Medicare, cut their Social Security, eliminate critical government services, strip Americans of their basic rights, mass-deport millions of migrants who are productive workers for American businesses, pull out of NATO and abandon Ukraine to benefit Russia, reverse efforts to combat climate change and declare himself to be a dictator in the mold of Adolph Hitler. And that’s just off the top of my head.

One example of Group 2 voters is an organization of school teachers who banded together a few years ago to lobby against and ultimately defeat a bad piece of legislation. Then – in the very next election – they voted the same incumbent legislators right back into office so they could bring it all up again.        

This group is damaged, but might be fixable if its one-issue voting causes it to suffer greatly in other areas or it experiences some kind of epiphany … but I doubt that will happen, even in the best of times. I hope I’m wrong.     

And then there’s Group 3, which includes people who have the capacity to be good people with basic or better intelligence who simply lack the ability, the desire, the interest or the incentive to break free from the blanket of deceit that surrounds them and go out to find the truth. 

These people clearly lack the curiosity gene. They don’t go looking for information that could make their lives better, but are willing to accept the information that is fed to them which might be making it worse. They ignore the probability that what they think and do could be wrong while other people could be right. Or else they just don’t care. For them, it is what it is, and never what it could be.

I know some of these people and I don’t dislike them – not really – but I do question their judgment (or lack thereof), and it makes me angry that they seem to know right from wrong but take the wrong road anyway. I would be happy to sit down with these people and give them reasons why they should come over to my side, but I know I’ll never get the chance. They’d have to turn off network “news” and stop reading Facebook posts and social media rants, but mainly, I don’t think they want to hear what I have to say.

Group 3, you see, believes in the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The problem is, they don’t see anything broken, so there’s nothing there to be fixed. It will just stay broken, I guess.

Vote blue.