Who are these people?
This the first question I asked after the midterms, which were such a gargantuan repudiation of the Republican Party that GOP congressman are still stumbling around dazed and in shock.
That night, between my sensations of relief and my embrace of cautious optimism, I focused on the voters who had voted for Trump, abruptly decided that MAGA was horrific, and thus emboldened, joined the blue tsunami.
Seriously, who are these people?
I’m certainly grateful that these voters have rediscovered standards of decency and thought twice about adopting fascism, but I can’t be the only one wondering what the hell they have been doing for the last decade.
Do we really need to see any more clips of a thrice-Trump voter who asks for sympathy because he’s been “fooled” or “betrayed”? There was no mystery in 2024. These paragons of patriotism are basically saying, “Trump can endanger the entire Western world and unleash misery just for laughs, but I draw the line at paying a few bucks more for Burger King.”
Just two years ago, millions of the same voters who rejected the GOP listened to an angry, rambling old man threaten to send armed thugs into the street, impose crushing tariffs that would destroy the economy, and install raving lunatics into positions of power. And they said, “Yes, let’s kill woke!”
But now they are all like, “Look at me! I just voted for a gay senator!”
Of course, it’s not that “the voters who put Trump in office suddenly care much about our democracy or our institutions.” Their sudden embrace of liberalism is fueled less by “high ideals and more by high gas prices, tariff-fueled inflation, the successful messaging to connect the economic woes of the average American to the corruption of the first family, an ill-conceived, poorly executed, and unpopular war, and a couldn’t be worse if he tried campaign season that ended with the president discussing algae in front of the Reflecting Pool.”
Many of the voters who abandoned Trump once “thrilled at hearing him make explicit the implicit conservative value of hurting the most vulnerable people.” They also “mistook the brutal liberties that Trump has always taken for himself for ones that they would be able to enjoy themselves by supporting him.” In essence, Trump inspired them “to be their worst and smallest and cruelest selves,” and to “live as he lives—in the indulgent certainty that even their puniest comfort or fleeting amusement or flash of childish anger was more important than anything or anyone else in the world, and then to behave accordingly.”
Two years from now, many of these voters will again vote for a Republican. That is a guarantee.
And I will again ask, who the hell are these guys?
