For nigh on two years now, people have been making the argument that not all Trump voters are racist, misogynistic bigots. This could be true; after all, there are people who voted for Barack Obama twice, but then switched to Donald Trump. The idea of this makes most of us scratch our heads because Obama was everything Trump isn’t. President Obama is dignified, classy, smart, experienced, accepting of all people. Trump is bigoted to his core, narcissistic, incompetent, impulsive, undignified, unpresidential. Therefore, how could people who voted enthusiastically for Barack Obama vote for Donald Trump? I still don’t know the answer to that question. What I do know is this: It’s time to stop making excuses for Trump voters and start shaming them, because that is what they deserve.
Even if someone who voted for Donald Trump isn’t personally a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, or an Islamophobe, they certainly are tolerant of those various bigotries and then some. They were able to look at the Access Hollywood tape, Trump’s call to ban all Muslims from the nation, his kicking off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, his promise (and current attempts to carry out that promise) to round up hundreds of thousands of people and kick them out of the nation, his five-year-long crusade to delegitimize the first Black president – all of it – and still vote for him. They were able to realize just what a Trump Administration and all of its disgusting white supremacist glory would do to every American who is not a straight, white, Christian man and still pull the lever for him. These voters are selfish people who took an unconscionably callous position when it comes to the fate of millions of Americans. They knew he’d do things like stacking the courts – lifetime appointments, by the way – with conspiracy theorists, racists, misogynists, and birthers, and they still voted for Trump.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
Trump voters watched the same campaign the rest of us did, and they saw the abhorrent behavior, the unending stream of bigotry, the dangerous flirtation with authoritarian figures around the world, the clear unfitness, and they voted for him anyway. These are not good people. It’s time to stop making excuses for the people who voted for the most bigoted, ignorant, dangerous president in modern history. We have literal Nazis working in the White House because of these people. We have, in Jeff Sessions, a man who was deemed too racist in 1986 to be a federal judge as Attorney General. We have birthers on the federal bench. That’s all their fault.
There are no good people who are Trump voters. It’s time we recognized a hard truth: There’s no such thing as a good person who supports Donald Trump. Stop excusing them and start shaming them. It’s up to us to recognize the ills in the American populous – starting with the absolute imbeciles who voted for Donald Trump.
Featured image via Daily Kos