You Voted for This
Donald Trump Didn’t Return to the White House Due to Flawed Democratic Messaging, but Because of the Sorry Moral Degeneration of the U.S. Electorate
In the U.S. presidential election held in November 2024, more than 77 million citizens - 49.8% of voters, to be exact - took a look at a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist who had attempted to launch a coup d'état to illegally cling to office and decided he would be a fine choice to once again represent them as their head of state.
In the intervening six months since Donald Trump reassumed the office of the presidency, how has that turned out for the country and the world?
On his first day in office, as he said he would, Trump pardoned nearly all of those in prison for their part in the 6 January 2021 coup attempt, including many who were sentenced to years in prison for violently attacking law enforcement officers. Dozens had prior convictions for crimes ranging from “rape, sexual abuse of a minor, domestic violence, manslaughter, production of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking.” Many would go on to re-offend.
As during his first chaotic term as president - when his administration kidnapped children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border - the canary in the coalmine for Trump’s malevolence has always been the administration's aggressive and often illegal efforts to purge the United States of immigrants, and its willingness to routinely and flagrantly lie and break the law in its desire to do so.
Recent reporting from the Texas Tribune showed conclusively that the administration knew that the vast majority of 238 Venezuelan immigrants it has sent to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) had not been convicted of any crimes in the United States even as Trump branded them as “rapists,” “savages” and “monsters.” Since returning to power, the regime continues to regularly ignore due process, which, in the case of one Austin teen, meant being kidnapped and deported despite having never seen a judge. In the case of former Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, this meant still being held in El Salvador months after a judge ordered the administration to bring him back to the United States and the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return. In Florida, troopers of Florida Highway Patrol have been given instructions not to wear their name tags during future ICE operations. The recent decision by Supreme Court effectively ending the Biden-era “humanitarian parole” programme for more than 500,000 people in no way lessens the fact that the Department of Homeland Security routinely lies by claiming that those in the United States under it were “illegal aliens,” when they in fact entered the country legally at the invitation of the U.S. government
To those in the regime’s crosshairs, the impact has been catastrophic.
For the parents of a 4 year old girl in Bakersfield, California - who entered the country legally under the CBP One programme - the notice that their legal status had been terminated means that their daughter, who suffers from short bowel syndrome, a condition that prevents her body from completely absorbing the nutrients of regular food, will almost certainly die within days after losing her specialized medical care. In Mississippi, it meant a Danish man - a husband and father of four - was seized at his final meeting with immigration services to formalize his naturalization and become an American citizen. On a drive to Houston for an emergency medical checkup, a 10 year old girl recovering from brain cancer - a U.S. citizen - was detained and removed to Mexico with her undocumented parents An 18 year-old high school student from Milford, Massachusetts was snatched off the street by ICE agents in an unmarked car on his way to Saturday volleyball practice. In Brooklyn, ICE agents in plain clothes and with no identification dragged a 30-year-old Venezuelan married father of two with temporary protected status off the street and spirited him away to Pennsylvania. In Miami, ICE agents dragged people showing up for their immigration hearings away from their wailing family members. San Juan’s Barrio Obrero, the heart of Puerto Rico's Dominican community, has been torn apart by ICE raids, with residents saying “it’s a city under siege.” Making a surprise visit to a federal immigration detention center in Eloy, Arizona, Rep. Yassamin Ansari said female detainees described “sickening” conditions, to her, including harassment, abuse, mistreatment and racist language used by detention officers.
And bit by bit, as it would inevitably do, the government taste for sadism and menace has begun to spill beyond the parameters of the“out of sight, out of mind” foreigners U.S. voters thought they could safely throw under the bus as ICE and other law enforcement entities have become ever more brazen in their willingness to use violence and intimidation against other, non-immigrant, citizens and even elected officials.
At an ICE facility housing migrants in Newark, New Jersey, a visit by members of New Jersey's congressional delegation and Newark mayor Ras Baraka ended with the officials being manhandled and detained by masked federal agents, with subsequent charges being filed and then dropped against Baraka but pursued against U.S. Congresswoman LaMonica McIver for allegedly “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” The acting United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey overseeing the prosecution, Alina Habba, is a former personal attorney for Trump who worked on his myriad of criminal and civil cases.
Raiding the Buona Forchetta restaurant in San Diego - their faces covered in a cowardly manner as usual - the delicate, fearful flowers of ICE “tossed two flash bangs” at a crowd that showed up to mock and jeer them. At 7am one Sunday morning, without contacting them beforehand, FBI agents arrived at the homes of Charlottesville-area public defenders who had represented men detained during a 22 April ICE raid inside the Albemarle County Courthouse in downtown Charlottesville, where agents again dressed plain clothes refused to show badges or arrest warrants and at least one hid behind a balaclava in possible contravention of Virginia law. One of the attorneys subject to the Sunday morning visit called that act a clear gambit “attempting to intimidate us.” Last week, U.S. Department of Homeland Security police stormed the office of Rep. Jerry Nadler, handcuffing a crying staffer as they lied and claimed the office was “harboring rioters.” The staff member was not arrested and not charged with any crime.
It has been a bitter wake-up call for the immigrant communities who thought they would somehow magically be spared from the blind rage of Trump and company. The Cuban-Americans who voted 58% for Trump are now apparently surprised to find themselves lumped in with Mexicans, Salvadorans, Haitians and other “mud people” that they thought the administration would differentiate them from. In the predominantly Venezuelan-American Miami suburb of Doral, 61% of voters opted for Trump last November. Now, as he works to kick many of their loved ones out of the country and derides them as Tren de Aragua-affiliated miscreants, half of Venezuelan-American residents of Florida who voted for Trump say “they now either regret their decision or have mixed feelings about it.” The first line of the political biographies of former Florida Senator and current Secretary of States Marco Rubio, Florida Senator Rick Scott and Miami-Dade Representatives Carlos A. Giménez, Mario Díaz-Balart and Maria Elvira Salazar should be how they willingly helped betray South Florida’s immigrant communities by endorsing Trump’s squalid return to power rather than fighting against it, helping to lead their constituents down the road of catastrophe.
Back in Washington, the exit of bleary-eyed intoxicant enthusiast Elon Musk from the Trump administration did not ameliorate the trail of death - yes, death - and destruction that the ignorant and bigoted South African and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrought the world over. The CEO of Tesla and the world’s richest man, Musk gave Donald Trump and Republican Party $290 million for the 2024 election cycle, thus becoming the largest individual donor during that election, and is the most visible of Trump’s coterie of terminally uncool but staggeringly arrogant oligarch boosters, who include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (who largely funded the political career of Vice President J.D. Vance) and the deeply weird South African Putin groupie and Craft Ventures co-founder David O. Sacks, who currently chairs Chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
One of Musk’s first targets was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), perhaps the most effective means of promoting U.S. “soft power” in existence. Musk’s actions - at Trump’s behest - helped kill people dependent on its foreign aid programmes. In northern Nigeria, 7 year-old Babagana Bukar Mohammed, who suffered from sickle cell disease, died during a medical emergency after the USAID-funded clinic he relied on closed due to DOGE’s actons. Also in Nigeria, the infant of Yagana Bulama starved to death after DOGE terminated a USAID programme providing a calorie-dense paste to treat severe acute malnutrition. In Haiti, where official estimates list more than 150,000 people living with HIV or AIDS (nonprofits believe the total to be far higher), at least five HIV clinics, including one serving 2,500 patients, have been forced to close in the wake of USAID funding cuts, with one doctor telling the Associated Press that, when speaking to his patients “it’s hard to explain to them, to tell them that they’re not going to find medication. It’s like a suicide.”
Though USAID was perhaps their most high profile target, DOGE, Musk and Trump sowed disaster virtually everywhere they turned. Their attack on the Department of Veterans Affairs has led to “unit closures, reduced hours of operation and exam backlogs” and “canceled contracts, hiring freezes, resignations [and] layoffs.” Their targeting of the National Park Service resulted in the terminating of some 2,500 full-time positions (13% of the total staff ) as well as the firing of 1,000 agency employees with probationary status in what advocacy organizations argue will lead to increased deaths in the nation’s parks. As John Morales, the meteorologist for NBC Miami pointed out, as the coastal United States heads into hurricane season, Central and South Florida National Weather Service offices are now roughly 20% to 40% understaffed, which will result in “degraded forecast accuracy.” At the National Institutes of Health, a potential breakthrough in using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers was derailed amid DOGE-mandated layoffs.
[There was plenty of money for Musk himself, though, and the State Department was planning to funnel $400 million to Musk’s business interests in the form of purchasing armored Tesla vehicles until public outcry forced them to back down. Likewise, the administration is preparing to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the controversial tech company Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, to help it spy on American citizens.]
Trump’s deranged economic policy - if it deserves to be elevated to the level of “policy” - meanwhile has draped cement blocks around the neck of an economy that this past October - only eight months ago - the Economist praised as “the envy of the world,” as the Bidden administration handily pulled it out from the biggest economic contraction ever recorded, largely but not solely as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. During last fall’s vote, though, lost in their delusions and ingesting a nonstop stream of conspiracy theories and incitement from platforms as diverse as Facebook, TikTok and Instagram and just their own plain small-minded spitefulness, a majority of Americans told pollsters the still “trusted” Trump’s handling of the economy over Biden’s. For their trust, the week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said the U.S. economy would grow a pathetic 1.5% in 2026 as a direct result of Trump’s economic and more specifically his tariff policies.
If the current Trump-endorsed budget passes, meanwhile, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, some 10.3 million will lose health coverage while an additional 7.6 million would go uninsured. Some 300,000 people could lose healthcare coverage in my native Pennsylvania alone. The bill will also increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade and 60% of the its tax cuts would go to the top 20% of income earners in the United States ,while more than a third would go to those making more than $460,000 per year, as per the Tax Policy Center. [Joe Biden, by contrast, had, unarguably, one of the most pro-working class, pro-labor records of any president in U.S. history.]
None of this should be a surprise. But when Trump survived an apparent July 2024 assassination attempt Pennsylvania by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks - an incident during which people died but the motives of which, even now, somewhat unbelievably, remain unknown - some in the press acted as if it miraculously cleansed him of culpability for the cruelty he had been party to and the hate he himself had fanned. [A May 2020 investigation by ABC News identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.] A good chunk of the U.S. media at the time bought into Trump’s self-mythologizing version of events, with the Washington Post’s art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott swooning about the image of a bloodied Trump raising his fist after that attack being “a powerful photograph that could change America forever” and the “critic at large" at The New York Times, Jason Farago, writing that Trump had become an “incarnation of defiance.” Shadi Hamid, who sits on the Washington Posts’s editorial board, went even further praising Trump’s “unusual level of self-awareness” after the attack and musing that it might lead him to govern “in a manner that is less authoritarian” Hamid made sure to simultaneously attack the highly popular Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, at the time viewed as a potential Vice Presidential choice for Kamala Harris, for holding “hardline pro-Israel views outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” which, to be clear, is a lie, as Shapiro - who called Benjamin Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time” - absolutely, positively does not. During a podcast appearance, Hamid also chuckled as he claimed that Trump was not “an existential threat to our democracy.”
But Trump was clear throughout the 2024 campaign that he intended to impose draconian tariffs. He was clear when he promised to deport 11 million people, as was the odious Stephen Miller - now White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy - who said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2024 that a Trump administration would seek to establish “large scale staging grounds” - concentration camps - “for removal flight” locales “where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to move those illegals home.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist now serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services and whose voice resembles a horse in its death throes trying to imitate human speech, told NPR the administration would recommend getting fluoride out of drinking water and it did just that. [When the Canadian city of Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its water in 2011, the need for intravenous antibiotic therapy by children to avoid death by infection rose 700%.] Kennedy has also falsely claimed that measles vaccine protection “wanes very quickly” and recently released a so-called “Make America Healthy Again” report on the causes of chronic disease in children that cited studies that did not in fact exist.
Likewise, as Trump picks fights with longtime U.S. allies such as Canada and Denmark, the pathetic Trump-Vance attempted ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during the latter’s February visit to the Oval Office should be no surprise coming from someone who has made his admiration of the Russian dictator clear and who praised Russian Putin’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy.”
And while all of this has been going on, where has been the attention of much of the nation’s elite media commentariat? Why, on Joe Biden, naturally.
Washington and New York’s elite press corps worked itself into a lather about Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, a book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson that cast a glance back at the slowly-then-suddenly decline of an 82-year-old man now diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer who is no longer president and will never be again. Carlos Lozada of the New York Times, born to a family of fabulous wealth in Peru before going on to Princeton, asked gravely on 20 May of Biden’s health “what did the Democrats know and when did they know it?” The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, born to great privilege in New York City and who has repeatedly advocated against any responsibility for a government to provide medical care for its most vulnerable citizens because it might “depress innovation,” inveighed the same day that “the Biden cover-up demands deep soul-searching,” while the paper’s editorial page (again, on the same day) lectured “If Biden was too frail for his job, voters should have been informed.” The same day the Trump administration - in defiance of a federal court order - deported immigrants from Myanmar and Vietnam to war-torn South Sudan. Not to be outdone, former New Republic editor Brian Beutler pouted that “Democrats are terrified to utter the word impeachment,” apparently forgetting the Democrats impeached Trump not once but twice during his first term when they had the majority in Congress and Trump’s Republican cult let him skate. Bloomberg’s Adrian Wooldridge opined that “the liberal elite (leading Dems, professors, business people) need to acknowledge their responsibility for the current disaster.”
Yeah. No, people.
As someone who actually comes from the benighted “white working-class” that ostensibly provides so much of Trump’s support - and who held a variety of blue collar jobs (house painter, nighttime security guard at factory, box packer at a manufacturer) before entering journalism - changing the channel to focus on Joe Biden as he fades into the sunset rather than on the reckless self-destructiveness of the U.S. electorate is too easy an answer by half.
In full knowledge of how awful and unfit he was, white Americans voted for Trump 57% to 42%. My own demographic - white men - were even worse, voting 60% for Trump. More than half of men under 30 supported Trump, with white men under 30 voting for him 6 times out of 10.
Having decided that being white and having someone in office who would relentlessly attack those deemed not sufficiently “like us” was more important than being human, the Trump voters are now reaping the whirlwind. In Pennsylvania, DOGE’s targeting of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers led to the closure of 300 campsites around Raystown Lake, devastating local businesses in surrounding Huntingdon County, which voted 75.96% for Trump in the 2024 election. In that same election, 78% of farming-dependent counties in the United States (including my home county of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, which boasts more than 4,600 farms) voted for Trump, apparently never bothering to think through the impact the shuttering of USAID, which bought about $2 billion of products from farmers every year, or the administration’s cancelation of billions in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, would have on them. In an industry where 95% of producers are white, it was apparently well and good to endorse Trump’s relentless attacks against immigrants, African-Americans, LGBTQ people and others until the bill came due at home. Perhaps there is no better poster boy for the Trump voter than American Soybean Association President Caleb Ragland, who voted for Trump three times, looks like he never missed a meal in his life and has over the last several months taken to the airwaves to whine about the results of his own political decisions, saying that farmers like himself are “dependent on trade” and “want to make sure that our voice is heard.”
Hell no. With your eyes wide open, you freely voted for a more lawless, poorer, sicker nation. You broke it, you bought it. If you were happy to vote to exist in a living hell, you’re going to have to deal with the heat being turned up until you are disciplined enough to behave more responsibly. This auto-immolation that can’t be solved with better Democratic messaging or better Democratic candidates. It is a moral and ethical failure on the part of the American electorate, who must make penance to make the country whole once more. The average Trump voter needs to live with the consequences of their own actions for a while to perhaps develop the capacity to feel empathy for their neighbors who may not look like them, speak like them or whose backgrounds may be different than them, and realize that their own pain and struggles are not unique and even less so some kind of quasi-religious stations of the cross to be invoked to excuse them for endorsing and supporting the inexcusable and the unthinkable.
You want to talk about “original sin?” The original sin was not Biden not getting out of the presidential race fast enough, it was the failure of U.S. institutions to move with sufficient urgency and speed to put Donald Trump in jail for the rest of his life for his crimes against the United States, its constitution and its citizens and then the failure of those very citizens to realize that such a character should never, ever be returned to office even if it meant - horror of horrors - voting for a supremely qualified black woman for president.
In closing, though I try to retain the belief that people can change and human (as well as political) redemption is possible, I am still not convinced that those who put Trump back in his current position of power have gotten it through their thick skulls the gravity of what they have done, and until they do it is hard to envision a way forward with them. Despite their bizarre romanticization in elite media circles, as a working-class product of Pennsylvania myself, I can tell you that the U.S electorate willingly brought this on themselves, they own it and to quote Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, “I’ve met the man in the street and he’s a cunt.”