The big newspapers wrote an endless series of ethnographic portraits of Trump supporters in small town diners to help their readers understand, but they came off instead as tone deaf.
Academics delved deep into the post-election data, making analyses that tried to sound definitive, but often rested on sketchy correlations and questionable assumptions.
And, of course, opinion writers and strategists—like yours truly—made unprovable assertions based on their best reasoned arguments, but ultimately mostly preached to their respective choirs.
In other words, an electorally significant portion of Trump supporters weren’t voting out of active cruelty.
Rather, it was passive indifference to cruelty in the name of thumbing their nose at the system.
Whatever Trump may have represented to a variety of different voters then, and whatever their motivations for casting ballots for him may have been, the person and president Trump is could not be clearer now.
Maybe the right Democrat just hasn’t said the right words to make it okay to cast a vote against Trump. »
