71 million Americans
This is how many voted for Trump. What they said with their vote matters.
The New York Times, along with the Associated Press, has called the election in favor of Donald Trump. Despite the fact that Trump had been trotting out his usual election lies, expecting to lose, it appears (unless late vote-counting brings a surprise), he did not.
Trump was the worst presidential candidate in American history. He was provably a regular attendee of Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex parties. He was a serial rapist, and sexual assaulter. He was someone who paid off people when they had information damaging to him that he didn’t like. He defrauded New York out of tax money by lying about the value of his property. He was a 34-time convicted felon. one who has yet to be sentenced (and now, may never be).
Donald Trump did not campaign in the battleground states he won. He instead focused in areas hostile to him, saying hostile, controversial things. He said some of the most vile, disturbing, disgusting things a person could say. He made no secret about wanting to execute his enemies, crash the economy, and appoint cronies loyal to him in positions of power.
He also happened to be a 78-year-old demented fool who stumbled around when trying to enter a garbage truck.
None of that mattered to the 71 million people who voted for him. These were people who had their own particular habits and preferences, people who saw Republicans getting elected as a good thing- despite increasing chaos and corruption from that party. At the polls last night, on November 5th, I had a conversation with a Republican state rep in New Hampshire about transgender rights. Her beliefs, which one might take to be those of a bigot, were deeply-held and could not be changed with a single conversation. They came from somewhere else, possibly one of the many Republican think tanks who conceive of messages to pass down to the rest of the party.
Any amount of information about Trump should have been enough to be disqualifying. While Kamala Harris wasn’t perfect, and never will be, she at least promised to be a smart, capable, and intelligent leader as opposed to the stupid, chaotic, and awful leader Trump will surely be.
The 71 million Americans who voted for him are those whom information cannot touch. A multi-billion dollar news industry, who has been reporting on him for at least nine years, has not been able to reach those voters. They decided that journalism didn’t matter, that facts didn’t matter. They instead voted for someone for their own reasons, one part of which was selfishness. Another part of which was cowardice.
Cowardice by members of the news media brought us here. Many of them spent the last year sanewashing Trump’s comments. Some obeyed in advance, expecting a fascist Trump regime to rise. Those outlets, the New York Times in particular, struggled to report the truth about what a second Trump presidency might mean. Now, they face their own extinction at the hands of a man singularly enabled and willing to run his second presidency like a dictatorship, to abolish the Constitution, and to do anything he pleases.
Life for those Trump voters is going to get harder because of their vote. Voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, where Harris needed to win but likely hasn’t, have voted against their own interests. The rural voter who has spent a lifetime voting for the Republican Party has voted for the rule of law to be suspended, for decency and civility to go away. Some of those people, if Trump has his way, will end up in prison regardless of how much they supported him.
As the world’s climate crisis deepens, a president has risen to power refusing to do anything about it. Clean water and clean air will be harder to come by. Those changes won’t come at all at once. When they do come, Trump voters will have no one but themselves to blame for getting cancer after their municipal water contains carcinogens from massive industrial polluting. That is, if any municipalities have access to water at all, and it isn’t all being used to power AI computing nonsense so that search engines can hallucinate answers before a public that, it appears, doesn’t know any better.
Trump has promised to start a “mass deportation” plan to get people out of America whom he doesn’t like. Others, in light of his win, have begun getting passports (I count myself among them).
Concentration camps for transgender people is coming. That probably sounds like a hyperbolic statement with no basis in reality- especially to the 71 million Americans for whom information does not reach. Some of them may even celebrate putting transgender people in such camps where they will be starved, tortured, and put to death.
What the 71 million voters won’t like will be the economic depression that will surely follow such decisions, when implemented. A multitude of people will be removed from the economy, no longer working at a job, no longer spending money at a store, no longer paying rent or property tax. Food, normally picked by low-income migrants from other countries, could sit to rot instead of go to American people who are becoming increasingly food insecure.
This year’s 71 million Trump voters want one thing: they want the bubble that is their lives to not be disturbed by anything. If the news is too troublesome, they can turn it off. They want to be comforted by television shows featuring emergency responders. They want to read mystery and romance novels. They don’t want to have to remember the world outside them exists. They just want not to be bothered.
But they will be bothered when the economy collapses under Trump, as it will if even half of his plans come to fruition, when they can’t pay their mortgages any longer. Their lending bank will come to repossess their homes. Trump, at the head of the federal government, won’t be there for them.
Those who survive repossessions will find electricity and food become more difficult to purchase. The costs of everything will go up, including basic necessities like toilet paper. Landfills will no longer need to be well away from communities where people live. Garbage runoff into local water sources will become a concern; those who want fresh water will have to buy it from the water company.
Most of all, if Trump has his way, the news media that went out of their way to defend and excuse his actions will be decimated. That won’t matter much to the 71 million Americans who voted for him; the news media didn’t inform their choices about who to pick for president at a crucial moment in history.
But they might miss having accurate, timely information about their states and communities as reporters, already in a shrinking field with decreasing opportunities, look for other work- perhaps in other countries. No one will need to have a degree from a secondary educational institution any longer; people will need only to show up to work for a millionaire or billionaire, live in cramped, crowded apartments with seven to ten people paying rent together that no one person could afford while houses all around them remain vacant.
The 71 million people who voted for Trump might not care about that. But their children and grandchildren will, those who grow up under what has been promised to be a perpetual fascist regime. Future generations, those who bother themselves with any information at all, will see November 5, 2024 as an inflection point in which things could have gone the other way.
And they will not be able to forgive those who chose the wrong path, those who saw cruelty, hatred, bigotry, criminality, sociopathy, psychopathy, and declared they wanted those character traits leading their nation. For, in the end, a Trump win is unforgiveable.
Perhaps the 71 million Americans will be able to forgive themselves for what they have done. The rest of us, including myself, have to reckon with the notion that many of our neighbors and fellow countrymen are stone-blind fools who ignore, perhaps disdain, information about the world around them.
We have to come to terms with the notion that 71 million Americans believe the lives of women, migrants, transgender people, and other minority groups intrinsically do not matter. America cannot be called a free country any longer. Nor will the Trump voter be left alone; loyalty tests and internal purges are almost certainly coming.