Theres No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter

[Grey Lemercier]

People voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes. They don’t deserve your empathy.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_good_trump_voter.html

Donald Trump ran a campaign of racist demagoguery against Muslim Americans, Hispanic immigrants, and black protesters. He indulged the worst instincts of the American psyche and winked to the stream of white nationalists and anti-Semites who backed his bid for the White House. Millions of Americans voted for this campaign, thus elevating white nationalism and white reaction to the Oval Office.

Understandably, critics of Trump have used this to condemn Trump voters, tying them to the likely consequences of their vote, blaming them for foisting Donald Trump on the country and the world. To this, there’s been a pushback. “Please understand what is happening here,” writes Michael Lerner in the New York Times in a column titled “Stop Shaming Trump Supporters.” “Many Trump supporters very legitimately feel that it is they who have been facing an unfair reality.” He continues: “The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans.”

On Twitter, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post gave his version of this argument. “The assumption that ‘Trump voter = racist’ is deeply corrosive to democracy. Also wrong,” he said, adding that there “is nothing more maddening—and counterproductive—to me than saying that Trump’s 59 million votes were all racist. Ridiculous.”

Meanwhile, more than 300 incidents of harassment or intimidation have been reported in the aftermath of Trump’s election, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. NBC News confirmed several, including incidents where vandals spray-painted slurs (“Heil Trump”) and swastikas on churches serving Hispanic or LGBT communities. At San Diego State University, a hijab-wearing Muslim student says she was confronted and robbed by two men who made comments about Trump, and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a Muslim student says a man approached her and threatened to set her on fire unless she removed her hijab. At the University of Pennsylvania, black members of the freshman class were added to a racist social media group, where students were threatened with lynchings.

snip


A White Nationalist Who Hates Jews Will Be Trump's Right-Hand Man In The White House

http://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2016/11/13/white-nationalist-who-hates-jews-will-be-trumps-right-hand-man-white-house/214419

President-elect Donald Trump’s first White House hire tells you everything you need to know about his commitment to his campaign’s bigoted message. Stephen Bannon, an anti-Semite who ran the white nationalist “alt-right” website Breitbart News before taking a leave of absence to become the Trump campaign CEO, will be Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor.

On November 13, Trump released a statement announcing Bannon’s hiring. The same statement noted that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus would become Trump’s chief of staff. While White House chief of staff is typically the most senior position in the White House, the press release named Bannon first and described the two as “equal partners” in the Trump administration.

Bannon has been a key figure in leveraging this bigotry to aid Trump’s rise to power. Bannon bragged during the Republican Convention to nominate Trump that Breitbart News had become home to the “alt-right” -- which is just a racist code word for white nationalists. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart News has featured racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and anti-LGBT rhetoric. The site recently made a “noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas -- all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right’” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Before he died, Andrew Breitbart himself reportedly called Bannon “the Leni Riefenstahl of the tea party movement.”

Bannon’s Breitbart News especially has come under fire for its rampant anti-Semitism. In May, contributor David Horowitz wrote a piece calling The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew.” In September, Breitbart News writer Matthew Tyrmand called Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum a “political revisionist” who was “on the warpath against the rising populist forces doing electoral damage to her establishment friends and allies across the world,” adding, “hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned.” In August, former Breitbart News writer Ben Shapiro accused the website of embracing “a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.” Bannon’s anti-Semitism goes deeper than just Breitbart. As CNN’s Jake Tapper noted on Twitter after today’s announcement, Bannon’s ex-wife swore in court that “he said he doesn’t like Jews” and didn’t want his children to go to school with Jews. Indeed, Esquire politics contributor Charles Pierce even compared Bannon with David Duke.

[Bear Creek]

1. Own It

All the supposed christians who voted for him. The people who just wanted different. The misogynists who hated Hillary because she is a woman. They need to own what they have done.

[Skittles]

23. hmmm

I am unsure they have the intellectual capability to realize what they are done

and when the results are in, they will follow their "leader" and blame someone else (usually anyone who wants America to move forward)

[LenaBaby61]

2. Yes ...

Own it tRump voters!

[handmade34]

3. "Please don't normalize this"

what is happening is antithetical to most everything I love about this Country...

[KingCharlemagne]

4. I performed a ruthless Stalinesque purge of my FB

page. Even iced out a couple ex old flames who had gone over to the dark side.

Someone else will have to speak to those monsters, not I.

[flygal]

9. me too. Anyone posting those fake news memes is purged.

I don't need these haters to have my "friendship".

[workinclasszero]

5. The religious right backed the devil for raw political power

They own the 300 or so hate crimes that Herr Drumpf has brought even before his stormtroopers have fully occupied the white house.

There will be 4 full years of racial hate and discrimination coming starting at the White House on down.

[Vinca]

6. I wonder how the dim bulbs will react when they realize the Trumpenfuhrer's act

was just that: an act. Take tax relief, for example. The megawealthy will be getting a huge cut in taxes, but the average person will get about a 1% tax cut. That's almost as exciting as our increases in Social Security over the past few years. I don't know how my husband and I will spend that extra $4 a month windfall.

[Wounded Bear]

19. My rent has already gone up 23.

Yeah, that raise lasted a while.

[ProfessorGAC]

7. The Whole "You Have To Understand The Pain" Thing Leaves Me Cold

I heard the median income of WHITE Trump voters was $73k per year. These aren't people struggling every day to make ends meet. It's not a ton of money, but they aren't worrying about their next meal or paying the gas bill. (Or shouldn't be.)

The pain is far less than they claim and i'm not going out of my way to understand what appears to be a phantom pain.

[Grey Lemercier]

10. at 73K usd (adjusted for 2017 usd)

They would pay around 14,100 usd MORE in taxes under Bernies plan than Trumps, and if Single (I assume that original 73K was median household income) and made that much, well over 14K more as well

I posted an OP on this http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512610708

I absolutely know that if Sanders had beaten Hillary and run against Trump the tax issue would have destroyed Bernie

In fact, under his plan, you pay MORE taxes for having children, than if you are childless

[ProfessorGAC]

11. And?

This seems apropos of nothing.

[Grey Lemercier]

12. Oh, was just making a further point, as you are the first person that gave me an actual number,

income-wise (for average Trumpster) to work with for my main thesis of dealing with the "But Bernie would have won" crowd. I am not saying you are one of them, I was just sorta thinking out loud and then started typing. I am sorry if I hijacked my own OP, lol

[ProfessorGAC]

13. Now I Get It!

Thanks Grey.

The simplest argument to the "Bernie would have won crowd" (and i was rooting for him in the primaries) is to remind them that Hillary did win the popular vote.

[Grey Lemercier]

14. well, to play devils advocate, the election was not run to win

a plurality of nation wide votes. We will never know what would have happened if it was. The entire structural dynamics and machinations of the campaign would be played extremely differently if it was fighting for max votes. I actually DO beleive that if it was, Clinton would still have won, although in that case, 3rd and 4th parties TRULY do become potential spoilers.

One of the reasons so few people vote for them is that they have zero chance to gain even one state or even really tip a state.. But if it was straight popular vote nationwide, I could foresee a party (probaly now most likely on the left) using a truly nationwide call to attempt to punish the Dems by siphoning off enough votes to block them. This would be done in hopes of using the brute force of that block as a cudgel to beat the cente left controlling forces to adopt a much further left stance. It just would happen due to a loss of an election, like what just happened.

I am so much more in favour of increasing the House of Representatives size ( and thus the numbers of EV's to the states, especially the biggest ones. A 1000 seat House would be so so much better for the country as a whole on a multiplicity of levels, not just elections.

We have been stuck at 435 since 1913, when the population was only 97 million. If there were 1100 EVs to split up via the 50 states and DC, then you could easily fine tune it so the voters per EV was very close to equal across the board. As I always point out, right now ONE Wyoming EV vote is worth 3.62 CA EV's.

[ProfessorGAC]

15. I Like Your Idea on House Size

I think it's about time. It would take some money out of politics too, as it would be far more localized canvassing, which would cost less.

Probably time for the states to do it too. Illinois has the same size assembly my whole adult life and there is 40% more population.

[Grey Lemercier]

16. the small states (mostly Red) will fight it to the death

I hope for the future of the nation it gets done, but due to gerrymandering and Democratic midterm terminal apathy, lack of organisation at state level to ungerrymander, and the structural mechanics of the process, it will take a concerted effort not seen since WW2.

The evil bastards, the truly wicked, most base forces of humanity are all alligned in the US now to steamroll any positive cultural, economic, political and morally humanising mass traction efforts. I have never been more pessimistic in my mid to long term event horizon outlook.

The world needs a series of positive black swan events to right the ship of life. We are so atomised at the present, so manipulated, so controlled by a thousand different puppet strings that I fear we are entering the gaping maw of a global technotronic dark age, a planetary wide plantation of neo serfdom, debt slavery, and true corporate fascism, with perpetual empiric wars and ever-splintering, increasingly violent intranational strife as the soundtrack.

[ProfessorGAC]

17. You Can Bet Your Home On That!

The aproportional Senate was meant to the address that, or course, but there would be no convincing them of that.

[Grey Lemercier]

20. The Republicans have gamed the system at almost every level

literally. The only thing that seems to excite the 70 million plus ( should be 100 million if people would wake up enough to actually vote) potential Dem voters is a quadrennial POTUS election with a rockstar candidate like Obama. We live in the created age of artificial hyper entertainment.

Meanwhile, down in the sewers of quotidian, less glam poltical levels, a combined force of bible banging loons, small town bosses, and a newly minted form (but always historically present) of overt white nationalism do the heavy lifting and heavy rigging needed to maintain and entrench systemic control. All this is funded and overseen by a series of rapacious RW billionaires (the Mercers are the shiny new evil there, surplanting the Kochs by far in nefariousness) who sit back and laugh, get planetary-controlling rich, and plot the next phase of enslavement for the masses.

[jmg257]

8. We should pity them...We could never believe more then 60million people

would vote for the clown. Tells ya how bright so much of the country is.

Wonder if they'll have any empathy for us now?

[Initech]

18. Nope. Look at Twitter and Youtube. They're going full Nazi.

[Grey Lemercier]

21. its a nonstop shitshow of raw hate

[Initech]

22. Yeah I saw one guy on Youtube yesterday who was like:

"Yeah we want to annihilate the left and make sure they don't exist anymore.":

I replied: "It's that kind of thinking that got Donald Trump compared to Hitler in the early stages of the campaign."

[maryellen99]

24. I really think Trump won the election the night of the Dallas Police shootings

[Grey Lemercier]

25. I think there is a lot of truth to that

[maryellen99]

26. Especially when they found out that the shooter was black and hated white people nt

[Grey Lemercier]

27. and was tied to BLM

Funny how everything Soros touches is co-opted and ends up involved indirectly or directly or is tagged (even if falsely) with dodgy shit that discredits and impedes the goals that said "movement" started out to do. He fucked up OWS bad.

[guillaumeb]

28. How many Trump voters will be won over by being called names?

Undoubtedly some racists voted for Trump because he called out to them, but some is not a majority, much less all.

And 41% of voters did not vote at all. There is an enthusiasm gap among voters and the Democratic Party leaders are fools if they do not recognize and address this gap.

[Grey Lemercier]

30. I would ask how many non voters, PoC, etc etc, can finally be awoken to do

something to stop this freighttrain of racialist nationalism, xenophobia and hate from blowing thru every possible braking point.

[guillaumeb]

31. An excellent question.

What I would first ask is if those non-voters really feel that the Democratic Party has pushed for policies that really benefit working people.

My feeling is that there is an enthusiasm gap because many voters recognize that free trade as it is currently defined has, in the words of H. Ross Perot, hollowed out the country. Millions of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to low wage countries, and the products produced there come back into this country to be sold at WalMart and other places.

[The Polack MSgt]

29. Self deluded apologists apologise - are delusional

On Twitter, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post gave his version of this argument. “The assumption that ‘Trump voter = racist’ is deeply corrosive to democracy. Also wrong,” he said, adding that there “is nothing more maddening—and counterproductive—to me than saying that Trump’s 59 million votes were all racist. Ridiculous.”

This would be true if "Ridiculous" was synonymous with "accurate"

All of them wanted Trump in office - Knowing what he said and what he was. Nothing they can claim Post Hoc changes the fact that they are racist shit heads who voted for a racist shit head

[treestar]

32. Their trying to dodge the labels racist, sexists, homophobic

is pathetic. Yes, they are. Why don't they just admit it?