#respect to OP and to leah greenberg

[leupagus]

I've been sitting on this post because I think everyone here is making good points, but I have to say that I (respectfully!) disagree with the core premise that's at the heart of this argument, so I'm not quite sure how to engage without being belligerent. However, I think it's important to at least talk about why I disagree.

It's because, quite frankly, every Trump supporter does, in fact, want this. They want the cruelty; they want the destruction. We may see a handful of Trump supporters who express remorse for voting for him due to his policies hurting them, specifically, but the person that this post is talking about is mythical.

They don't exist; not anymore. We will never, ever get an apology or an admission that they were wrong because none of them will ever think they were wrong. They are no longer reachable and we can't keep pretending they are.

Yes, in 2016 there were a (small) number of people who were taken in by Trump's bombast and their own weird hate-boner for Hillary Clinton. Trump hid a lot of his worst ideas from the public in the lead-up to the 2016 election, plus there were a thousand and five think-pieces back then about how the presidency would bring out Trump's better qualities (looking at you, Maureen Dowd). There was reason to think that a lot of his talk was just talk.

But that's simply not the case now. We had four years of disaster under him, then another four years of Democrats thanklessly cleaning up (and improving the lives of every American in a hundred ways, but nobody believes me about that so I'll set it aside), all the while Trump was continually, constantly, relentlessly talking about what he'd do in his second term. His supporters heard him and liked what he promised — deportations, anti-blackness, transphobia, bigotry, sexism, antisemitism, forcing women back into second-class status, declaring war on everyone to make himself feel good, enriching his friends and himself. Everything Trump's doing now was promised during his campaign.

His voters in 2020 and 2024 were not ignorant, or misinformed, or led astray, or sold a false bill of goods. His voters want to hurt vulnerable people; they will destroy our country to do it and if they claim that this isn't what they wanted, they are lying. They are lying and they are fundamentally untrustworthy.

I don't feel the need to tell them "fuck you, we told you so," but for the rest of my life I will never tell a Trump voter "welcome in." They are not welcome. They have given up that privilege.