Voted For Trump Quotes

Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.

Yo mama so stupid, she watches Fox News and voted for Trump.

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Democracy's fatal flaw: There are more dumb people than smart people. Welcome to the new Dark Ages!

Resistance isn’t enough. If we want change, we have to get out the vote.

You can lead if you can serve. You can serve when you can love. You can love when you are graced. The truth is that God knows love will be needed in volumes, this is why he made his grace abundant. Leaders are lovers. Misleaders are haters!

dear old friends, dear old lovers, do you realize that when you voted for Trump, you voted against me—against the memory of the person I used to be in your lives?

Americans didn't vote for Republicans in 2016, they voted for the Trump Rebellion.

The commentator Peter Daou, who worked on my 2008 campaign, captured my feelings when he tweeted, “If Trump had won by 3 million votes, lost electoral college by 80K, and Russia had hacked RNC, Republicans would have shut down America.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

Saudi women who support the guardianship system - they sadly exist - are foot soldiers of the patriarchy in the same way that white American women voters who voted for Trump uphold white supremacy and its attendant misogyny. Both groups of women mistakenly believe their proximity to power in their respective countries will protect them from the worst ravages of patriarchy.

Most people who voted for Trump and Brexit didn’t reject the liberal package in its entirety –they lost faith mainly in its globalising part. They still believe in democracy, free markets, human rights and social responsibility, but they think these fine ideas can stop at the border.

Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side’s victory was another’s death. The old notion that politics was a trader’s game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted—a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage—and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.

But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked “Rural Development.” That’s not what has happened.

I don’t like what I don’t understand, and I just don’t get the human race. They do the weirdest fucking stuff. Dress their pets in little outfits. Lie that they walked on the moon. Vote for Donald Trump. None of that makes sense to me. (Tao on why he doesn't like humans)

Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.

But as those who do hold Trump to the standards of any other person have found out on Twitter and other social media outlets these Trump followers are a nasty fascistic lot. Dowd is lucky he didn’t get death threats like Kurt Eichenwald. Or maybe he did and refuses to acknowledge them. If you voted for Trump and continue to support him and you think you are better than these bigoted virulent trolls, you’re not. Your silence enables them just as it did in the racist campaign that Trump and Bannon ran. In fact, hiding behind a civilized veneer in your support of fascism I consider more dangerous. We’re past describing you as collaborators at this point. That lets you off the hook. You’re Russo-American oligarchical theocratic fascists.

There’s a very simple point about arithmetic—if you happen to be in a swing state, a state where the outcome is indefinite, and you don’t vote for, say, Clinton, that’s equivalent to voting for Trump. That’s arithmetic.

especially after her mother told her—proudly—that she voted for Donald Trump (oough).

All politics is but a theater, And all politicians merely actors; They read their lines and play their fleeting parts In pageants we the people judge by vote.

I will not be voting for Pinocchio.

Actually you’ve never voted in a primary except once in your entire life,” Bossie said, citing the record.

Though the Nones supported Clinton over Trump by a ratio of three to one, they stayed home on November 8, 2016, while the Evangelicals lined up to vote.

that she voted for Donald Trump (oough).

In short, if your average voter had five key issues in mind, scored each candidate on them, and weighted them in order of importance, it was easy to understand how perfectly reasonable and rational people might have voted for Donald Trump without being deplorable bigots.

But if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024, we must do everything we can to defeat him. If Trump is on the ballot, the 2024 presidential election will not just be about inflation, or budget deficits, or national security, or any of the many critical issues we Americans normally face. We will be voting on whether to preserve our republic. As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution.

So what’s the left’s motive here? The short-term motive is simple: use the illegals to portray Trump and the Republicans as racist or anti-Mexican and also anti-immigrant. The point is to alienate Trump and the GOP not from illegals, who can’t vote, but from legal immigrants and Mexican Americans, who can.

But too many of Trump’s core supporters do hold views that I find—there’s no other word for it—deplorable. And while I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters had fair and legitimate reasons for their choice, it is an uncomfortable and unavoidable fact that everyone who voted for Donald Trump—all 62,984,825 of them—made the decision to elect a man who bragged about sexual assault, attacked a federal judge for being Mexican and grieving Gold Star parents who were Muslim, and has a long and well-documented history of racial discrimination in his businesses. That doesn’t mean every Trump voter approved of those things, but at a minimum they accepted or overlooked them. And they did it without demanding the basics that Americans used to expect from all presidential candidates, from releasing tax returns to offering substantive policy proposals to upholding common standards of decency.

Capitalism, so called, is when free people accumulate capital of their own free will for use on freely determined projects. The fact of the matter is that most of these projects flop. Donald Trump, for example. Every property he touches seems to go to hell. “Fat Cat” would be the wrong epithet for Trump. If someone other than paroled former Enron accountants were keeping his books, he’d probably be shown to have a net worth less than that of your twenty-pound tabby who just shredded the drapes. What

While it did not break down the data by religious affiliation, an NPR analysis in December 2021 found that counties that voted heavily for Trump experienced COVID death rates nearly three times higher than those that voted heavily for Joe Biden32—a grim illustration of the dangers of making decisions based on a set of “alternative facts.

89% of Democrat to Deplorable voters agree or strongly agree with, "Fighting back against political correctness motivated me to vote in 2016.

Those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome cannot see that for 63 million Americans, voting for Trump was an obviously rational decision.

If you spent your pandemic fighting masks, voting for Trump, or going on vacation, though? Those of us with the blood you caused on our hands actively wish you ill.

Trump won the votes of white women overall, 53 percent to Hillary’s 43 percent,

If you are white in America and feel you’ve been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it’s not because of Black people and immigrants. It’s because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are—disempowered, angry, and fearful.

The same people who wear shirts that read “fuck your feelings” and rail against “political correctness” seem to believe that there should be no social consequences for [voting for Trump]. I keep hearing calls for empathy and healing, civility and polite discourse. As if supporting a man who would fill his administration with white nationalists and misogynists is something to simply agree to disagree on. Absolutely not. You don’t get to vote for a person who brags about sexual assault and expect that the women in your life will just shrug their shoulders. You don’t get to play the victim when people unfriend you on Facebook, as if being disliked for supporting a bigot is somehow worse than the suffering that marginalized people will endure under Trump. And you certainly do not get to enjoy a performance by people of color and those in the LGBT community without remark or protest when you enact policies and stoke hatred that put those very people’s lives in danger. Being socially ostracized for supporting Trump is not an infringement of your rights, it’s a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid. I was recently accused by a writer of “vote shaming” – but there’s nothing wrong with being made to feel ashamed for doing something shameful.

Michelle Obama also was a fan of Hollywood’s hypocrisy. After Hillary lost, Michelle said “Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice.” 1 Michelle, does that mean you listened to your voice and voted for Hillary and against your husband when Hillary ran against him in the primary? Where was your voice on the day your daughter got a job with Harvey?

When it comes to taking care of old people, the government should help regular guys like Claude, but does it? Bullshit it does.” Says the man who probably voted for Donald Trump, Ralph thought.

Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathize with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey . . . or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time . . . or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion. I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the superrich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me. I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country? And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign. He called for a “revolution of tenderness.” What a phrase! He said, “We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.” He said that tenderness “means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.

every single one of America’s 493 wealthiest counties, almost all of them urban, voted for Hillary Clinton.43 The remaining 2623 counties, most of them suburban or small-town, went for Donald Trump.

[R]esitance is by nature reactive; it is not forward-looking. And anti-Trumpism is not a politics. My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize -- or even recognize -- the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump. The only adversary left is ourselves. And we have mastered the art of self-sabotage. At a time when we liberals need to speak in a way that convinces people from very different walks of life, in every part of the country, that they share a common destiny and need to stand together, our rhetoric encourages self-righteous narcissism. At a moment when political consciousness and strategizing need to be developed, we are expending our energies on symbolic drama over identity. At a time when it is crucial to direct our efforts into seizing institutional power by winning elections, we dissipate them in expressive movements indifferent to the effects they may have on the voting public. In an age when we need to educate young people to think of themselves as citizens with duties toward each other, we encourage them instead to descend into the rabbit hole of the self. The frustrating truth is that we have no political vision to offer the nation, and we are thinking and speaking and acting in ways guaranteed to prevent one from emerging.

When Donald Trump ran for president and talked about grabbing women by the pussy, and then was lauded by Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and called a man of God, and all the Christians of my youth on Facebook applauded him and voted for him, I knew my problem wasn’t with spirituality or the divine. It was with the systems and personalities who’d sought to gain control and power in Jesus’s name, amen.

However, Trump’s flaws must be weighed against the disturbing nature of the opposition arrayed against him—an army of corporate-funded left-wing activists who excused and encouraged violent riots across the country; technology oligarchs who made unprecedented efforts to normalize censorship; state and local officials who radically altered the way Americans vote in the middle of an election for partisan advantage; an ostensibly free press that credulously and willfully published fake news to damage the president; politicized federal law enforcement agencies that abused the federal government’s surveillance and investigative powers to smear Trump as a puppet of a foreign power; and an opposition party that coordinated all these smears and spent years trying to impeach and remove a duly elected president from office.

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump. So, I made an unexpected decision. I decided

Every one of us—Republican, Democrat, Independent—must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated. This is the cause of our time.

White women had a fundamental role in building this new, more combative Christian right. Their attitudes and political viewpoints came as a reaction to social change. It would seem that white evangelical women would’ve been deeply offended by Trump’s multiple marriages, documented and highly public infidelities, and, most famously, the Access Hollywood tape released in 2016 of a dialogue between television host Billy Bush and Donald Trump: Trump: You know I’m automatically attracted to be beautiful women—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything Bush: Whatever you want. Trump: Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything. Yet data show that a majority of white evangelical women voted for Trump. Moreover, the higher their church attendance, the more likely they were to vote for Trump…

Here is what needs to be understood in our bones: the spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of evidence. What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud by candidates who win millions of votes: free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as technology allows, demilitarize the police, prisons are no place for young people, refugees are welcome here, war makes us all less safe. The left-wing almost-wins of the past two years are not defeats. They are the first tremors of a profound idealogical realignment from which a progressive majority could well emerge

The year 2016—marked by the Brexit vote in Britain and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States—signified the moment when this tidal wave of disillusionment reached the core liberal states of Western Europe and North America.

The single most accurate predictor of whether a person voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election was not religion, wealth, education, or even political party; it was believing the United States is and should be a Christian nation

A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon.

44 percent of college-educated white women and 54 percent of college-educated white men voted for Trump. Stop pretending you care about people of color or LGBTQ people or Muslims in your saccharine Facebook posts. Turning your profile pic into a rainbow for Pride Month doesn’t undo the fuckery you unleashed upon LGBTQ people when you voted for Trump. Being LGBTQ yourself doesn’t give you a free pass either." From "The Challenge of Staying Hopeful in the Age of Trump," The Advocate, April 28, 2017

The display, which was called 'Can Democracy Survive the Internet?' was dedicated to a 'global election management' company called Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica claimed to have gathered 5,000 data points on every American voter online: what you liked and what you shared on social media; how and where you shopped; who your friends were... They claimed to be able to take this imprint of your online self, use it to understand your deepest drives and desires, and then draw on that analysis to change your voting behaviour. The boast seemed to be backed up by success: Cambridge Analytica had worked on the victorious American presidential campaign of Donald Trump; it had also run successful campaigns for US Senator Ted Cruz (twice); and others all across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America.

So the Nixon White House laid out the path to electoral success by maximizing white grievance and suppressing the African American vote through a combination of manipulation, lies, and legal challenges. It was this road that the Republican Party took to the Trump White House.

He had developed a deep disdain of Donald Trump, whom he considered a con man, but he wasn’t impressed by Joe Biden. “When he was vice president, I went to lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.” Nonetheless, he says he would have voted for Biden in 2020, but he decided that going to the polls in California, where he was then registered, was a waste of time because it was not a contested state.

And I get angry. Because we've tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him. And not only did this country not elect Clinton, it elected a person who publicly supported sexual assault, a man one accused of rape by his daughter Ivanka's mother. I am angry with the Democratic Party for not knowing that there could have been and should have been a better candidate and angry that a better campaign -- a campaign that honored the journey, that included community in real and transformative ways -- was not launched. I am angry I didn't realize -- or accept on a cellular level -- how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are. I am angry at my own naiveté. Our own naiveté. There was a real and substantive difference between these two candidates and we didn't take that seriously enough.

The United States now has the highest level of income inequality in the industrialized world, a fact that some regard as “a threat to American democracy.”5 Meanwhile, the public’s revolt against globalization, which many blame for the loss of jobs and the hollowing out of the middle class, culminated in the British vote to exit the European Union and the election of political neophyte and outsider Donald Trump as US president in 2016. Trump’s ascendancy, in particular, represented a rebuke of the deeply entrenched political establishment that had dominated US politics for decades.

I find it sickening that these men can face their congregations and their families and their college campuses and feel OK with trusting Donald Trump with their voice and their vote and their country—and still somehow explain it away through the lens of the teachings of Christ. It boggles my mind.

If Hillary Clinton were to win the election, we’d be cast into a thousand years of darkness, according to these same folks who now swore that there was no reason for anxiety with President Trump. “Faith” among the faithful seemed to exist only insofar as it comported with their expectations. Listening to many who expressed this fear of a Clinton presidency, you would be led to believe that God was completely powerless unless we voted the “right” way. That is the nature of partisanship. Partisanship is the lifeblood of politics. And politics has swallowed at least the evangelical movement whole.

Members believed Trump should be impeached, but they feared a vote for impeachment would put them—and their families—in danger. We were now entering territory where the threat of violence was affecting how members voted, preventing them from voting to impeach the president who had already unleashed violence.

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

Donald Trump consciously stokes racist sentiment, and has given a rocket boost to the ‘alt-right’ fringe of neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But to write off all those who voted for him as bigoted will only make his job easier. It is also inaccurate. Millions who backed Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Did they suddenly become deplorable? A better explanation is that many kinds of Americans have long felt alienated from an establishment that has routinely sidelined their economic complaints. In 2008 America went for the outsider, an African-American with barely any experience in federal politics. Obama offered hope. In 2016 it went for another outsider with no background in any kind of politics. Trump channelled rage. To be clear: Trump poses a mortal threat to all America’s most precious qualities. But by giving a higher priority to the politics of ethnic identity than people’s common interests, the American left helped to create what it feared. The clash of economic interests is about relative trade-offs. Ethnic politics is a game of absolutes. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the overwhelming majority of non-college whites. By 2016, most of them had defected. Having branded their defection as racially motivated, liberals are signalling that they do not want them back.

Sanders was unequivocal. A Donald Trump presidency was too dangerous a concept for third-party politics or protest votes. Earlier in the day, he’d sent a message through the media that he didn’t want his supporters interrupting the convention—which they did anyway, booing whenever Clinton’s name was mentioned—or walking out of it altogether.

we rely upon the voting populace to determine if a candidate’s intellectual abilities “measure up,” an inherently flawed system, as the populace has access only to prepackaged presentations and observations of a candidate in debates and while he or she is giving speeches—hardly an adequate database for accurately gauging intellectual ability.

Mostly, this was the fault of white, Rust Belt, out-of-work Democrats. They had voted twice for Barack Obama, but now they were being told that they were racists or white supremacists for voting for Trump and giving him an Electoral College edge. The contrarian liberal genius Michael Moore had been a lonely prophet who had seen it coming, but the Clinton team had ignored him, just as they had ignored their own patriarch, Bill Clinton, who sounded the same warning. In a live performance, Moore had teased voters in Wilmington, Ohio, months before the election, telling them that he knew what they were planning to do. And they laughed with him, like guilty children caught in the act by a bemused cousin. He knew they were going to vote for Trump. He didn’t like it, but at least he was one person who could not be fooled. People who had been overlooked, despised, stomped on, used, taken for granted. This was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear, but in the privacy of their polling booths, they had struck a blow. This

Ironically, throughout his flirtation with the Reform Party nomination, critics in the press openly speculated whether he was indeed a serious candidate for the presidency, or if he was really more interested in promoting a new book. Let me tell you this: Trump was dead serious about running in 2000—and a lot of people were dead serious about voting for him. About

What I found telling was what Trump and his team didn’t ask. They were about to lead a country that had been attacked by a foreign adversary, yet they had no questions about what the future Russian threat might be. Nor did they ask how the United States might prepare itself to meet that threat. Instead, with the four of us still in our seats—including two outgoing Obama appointees—the president-elect and his team shifted immediately into a strategy session about messaging on Russia. About how they could spin what we’d just told them. Speaking as if we weren’t there, Priebus began describing what a press statement about this meeting might look like. The Trump team—led by Priebus, with Pence, Spicer, and Trump jumping in—debated how to position these findings for maximum political advantage. They were keen to emphasize that there was no impact on the vote, meaning that the Russians hadn’t elected Trump. Clapper interjected to remind them of what he had said about sixty seconds earlier: the intelligence community did not analyze American politics, and we had not offered a view on that.

Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump.”35 Why should education have mattered so much? Two uninteresting explanations are that the highly educated happen to affiliate with a liberal political tribe, and that education may be a better long-term predictor of economic security than current income. A more interesting explanation is that education exposes people in young adulthood to other races and cultures in a way that makes it harder to demonize them. Most interesting of all is the likelihood that education, when it does what it is supposed to do, instills a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional demagoguery.

Polls are one of the most dishonest things,” President Trump said, reflecting on the matter later from his Mar-a-Lago home. “I have never seen dishonesty like this. They’re dishonest with polls. You know it’s suppression to keep people home. Do you know how many people didn’t vote because of that poll and Wisconsin? And probably other places too, that poll got so much publicity.

For instance, the victorious Brexit campaign in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the United States have both been routinely blamed on the clueless and emotional behaviour of undereducated voters, but you could make equally strong cases that the Remain campaign in Britain and Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the American presidency failed because of the clueless, hyper-rational behaviour of overeducated advisors, who threw away huge natural advantages. At one point we in Britain were even warned that ‘a vote to leave the EU might result in rising labour costs’ – by a highly astute businessman* who was so enraptured with models of economic efficiency that he was clearly unaware most voters would understand a ‘rise in labour costs’ as meaning a ‘pay rise’.

Make America Great Again”—ripped off from Ronald Reagan, and traced the decline of the country to the mid-1960s. Though he didn’t mention the Johnson era’s Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, or public subsidies for housing and health care, Trump’s dog whistle was just the right pitch to attract the support of white supremacists and nearly all-white crowds of thousands at his campaign rallies.

Hillary Clinton tried to dismiss her role in paying for the “dossier” by stating that it was simply “opposition research.”29 While it is true that political campaigns often use such research, what Clinton, Simpson, Fusion GPS, and Steele did was antithetical to any definition of “research.” In a column published by The Hill, Ned Ryan explained it this way: Opposition research is based on fact, from voting records, court records and public statements, to tax returns and business relationships. Fusion GPS’s dossier, on the other hand, was misinformation. It was not opposition research because it was not based on fact. Given Fusion GPS’s dependence on Russian gossip spread by Vladimir Putin’s spies, there is a good case to be made that Fusion GPS more deeply colluded with the Russians than anyone else.30

The trial, despite the subserviency of the court to the Nazi authorities, cast a great deal of suspicion on Goering and the Nazis, but it came too late to have any practical effect. For Hitler had lost no time in exploiting the Reichstag fire to the limit.   On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state,” the decree laid down that:      Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.   In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including “serious disturbances of the peace” by armed persons.8   Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat “official,” as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over.

And yet that performance has a method. Trump's artlessness, like Mark Antony's, is only apparent. Listen, for example, as he performs one of his favorite riffs. He begins by saying something critical of Mexicans and Chinese. Then he turns around and says, 'I love the Mexican and Chinese people, especially the rich ones who buy my apartments or stay at my hotels or play on my golf courses.' It's their leaders I criticize, he explains, but then in a millisecond he pulls the sting from the criticism: 'they are smarter and stronger than our leaders; they're beating us.' And then the payoff all this has been leading up to, the making explicit of what has been implied all along. 'If I can sell them condominiums, rent space to them in my building at my price, and outfox them in deals, I could certainly outmaneuver them when it came to trade negotiations and immigration.' (And besides, they love me.) Here is the real message, the message that makes sense of the disparate pieces of what looks like mere disjointed fumbling: I am Donald Trump; nobody owns me. I don't pander to you. I don't pretend to be nice and polite; I am rich and that's what you would like to be; I'm a winner; I beat people at their own game, and if you vote for me I will beat our adversaries; if you want wonky policy details, go with those losers who offer you ten-point plans; if you want to feel good about yourselves and your country, stick with me. So despite the lack of a formal center or an orderly presentation, Trump was always on point because the point was always the same. He couldn't get off message because the one message was all he had.

And then Trump delivered one final importunement to the crowd. “Go to bed!” he told them. “Go to bed right now! Get up and vote!” On Election Day, Trump’s forecasting model indicated that he probably wouldn’t make it. Some of his advisers said his odds of victory were 30 percent; others went as high as 40 percent. At least one adviser said, “It will take a miracle for us to win.” And then the world turned upside down.

The Republicans already lost virtually the entire black vote (scoring just 4 percent and 6 percent of black voters the last two elections). Now, by pushing toward the nomination a candidate whose brilliant plan to “make America great again” is to build a giant wall to keep out Mexican rapists, they’re headed the same route with Hispanics. That’s a steep fall for a party that won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote as recently as 2004. Trump

The expectation of the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media was inconsistent with the prior trend, over fifty years, of African Americans giving 11 to 16 percent of their vote to Republican and Independent candidates in presidential elections. Among recent presidents, only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Al Gore in 2000, and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 have received 90 percent or more of the black vote. Hillary Clinton received 88 percent of the African American vote. Stop the Steal, Inc. I

Our group has come together for one purpose,” Shoshana said. “We demand comprehensive action to ensure that Facebook cannot be weaponized to undermine the vote and with it American democracy.” We decided that instead of making broad, lofty demands, we would focus first on quickly actionable points,8 especially given the tight timeline and Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior. We distilled them down to three demands of Facebook: to enforce its own policies and remove posts inciting violence; to ban ads that seek to delegitimize election results; and to take measures to prevent disinformation and misinformation about the election results. It was a sign of the times that within twenty-four hours, Facebook acted on all of them. It never admitted it, though. Instead, it attacked our members. In those months, much of what Rappler had discovered about Facebook and social media based on our own data and research, as well as many of our suspicions, was slowly being confirmed by reporters, whistleblowers, and even the companies themselves.

Ordinary voters are beginning to sense that the democratic mechanism no longer empowers them. The world is changing all around, and they don’t understand how or why. Power is shifting away from them, but they are unsure where it has gone. In Britain voters imagine that power might have shifted to the EU, so they vote for Brexit. In the USA voters imagine that ‘the establishment’ monopolizes all the power, so they support anti-establishment candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The sad truth is that nobody knows where all the power has gone.

Especially important are the political implications of the idea that the new possibilities opened by a certain act are part of its content - this is the reason why, to the consternation of many of my friends (who, of course, are no longer my friends), I claimed apropos the US 2016 presidential elections that Trump's victory would be better than Clinton's for the future of progressive forces. Trump is highly dubious, of course, but his election may open possibilities and move the liberal-Left pole to a new more radical position. I was surprised to learn that David Lynch adopted the same position: in an interview in June 2018, Lynch (who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary) said that Trump 'could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.' While Trump may not be doing a good job himself, Lynch thinks, he is opening up a space where other outsiders might. 'Our so-called leaders can't take the country forward, can't get anything done. Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this.

Perot went on to create the Reform Party three years later and became its presidential nominee for the 1996 election. Running against Clinton and Bob Dole, Perot still managed to pull in 8.4 percent of the popular vote. Although Perot’s vote totals had fallen in four years, the 1996 results were still dramatic for a third-party presidential candidate. Despite being mocked at times by the mainstream media for his political naïveté, Perot had managed to tap into a developing undercurrent of political distrust and disgust of career politicians by voters. Joining

Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side. A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan. Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail—Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes. The Trump phenomenon was also about a political and media taboo: class. When the liberal arts grads who mostly populate the media think about class, we tend to think in terms of the heroic worker, or whatever Marx-inspired cliché they taught us in college. Because of this, most pundits scoff at class, because when they look at Trump crowds, they don’t see Norma Rae or Matewan. Instead, they see Married with Children, a bunch of tacky mall-goers who gobble up crap movies and, incidentally, hate the noble political press. Our take on Trump voters was closer to Orwell than Marx: “In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much.” Beyond the utility that calling everything racism had for both party establishments, it was good for that other sector, the news media.

Former acting Director and former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell has served six presidents—three from each party—and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. He has kept his politics to himself throughout his thirty-three year intelligence career, until now. He takes a dim view of the entire Russian constellation of “coincidences” that surrounds Donald Trump. We may recall the U.S. intelligence community’s observation that “coincidences take a lot of planning.” The Trump coincidences seemed to bear the hallmarks of the sword and the shield of the FSB.

No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest. In

Some have argued that capitalism promotes democracy, because of common norms of transparency, rule of law, and free competition—for markets, for ideas, for votes. In some idealized world, capitalism may enhance democracy, but in the history of the West, democracy has expanded by limiting the power of capitalists. When that project fails, dark forces are often unleashed. In the twentieth century, capitalism coexisted nicely with dictatorships, which conveniently create friendly business climates and repress independent worker organizations. Western capitalists have enriched and propped up third-world despots who crush local democracy. Hitler had a nice understanding with German corporations and bankers, who thrived until the unfortunate miscalculation of World War II. Communist China works hand in glove with its capitalist business partners to destroy free trade unions and to preserve the political monopoly of the Party. Vladimir Putin presides over a rigged brand of capitalism and governs in harmony with kleptocrats. When push comes to shove, the story that capitalism and democracy are natural complements is a myth. Corporations are happy to make a separate peace with dictators—and short of that, to narrow the domain of civic deliberation even in democracies. After Trump’s election, we saw corporations standing up for immigrants and saluting the happy rainbow of identity politics, but lining up to back Trump’s program of gutting taxes and regulation. Some individual executives belatedly broke with Trump over his racist comments, but not a single large company has resisted the broad right-wing assault on democracy that began long before Trump, and all have been happy with the dismantling of regulation. If democracy is revived, the movement will come from empowered citizens, not from corporations.

I could see from the start of the election that for many people Trump’s personal style was annoying to the point of painful. I also knew the public would have a full year to get used to his personality. And I knew that the longer they experienced it, the less outrageous it would seem—at least for some portion of the public. Others would harden their resistance. But the latter group was never going to vote for Trump anyway. The people who mattered were the ones who disliked his style but didn’t yet have a final opinion about his politics. That group was going to get used to Trump’s personality over time.

When President Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, film critic Pauline Kael famously said in disbelief, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”14 Her statement has come to symbolize the insulation of the liberal elite, living in a bubble and hearing only the opinions of fellow liberals. It has become known as “Pauline Kael Syndrome” and its most virulent strain has been discovered in late 2016, complete with paranoid delusions of Russian hacking. Liberals

Nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren” can dissuade me from voting for Trump, a woman told Ashley Parker of the New York Times. So imagine how you would feel if every time you turned on NBC, you saw my reporting on this figure you love—this figure you think will lift you up, save your job, make your country great again. Imagine how you’d feel if every night and all day this little blond-haired girl was shining a critical light on your beloved figure. Who is she to question his plans? Double-check his statements? Follow up on his promises? You would hate me. And people do.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

This act of whistleblowing was not like other acts of whistleblowing. Historically, whistleblowers reveal abuse of power that is surprising and shocking to the public. The Trump-Ukraine story was shocking but in no way surprising: it was in character, and in keeping with a pattern of actions. The incident that the whistleblower chose to report was not the worst thing that Trump had done. Installing his daughter and her husband in the White House was worse. Inciting violence was worse. Unleashing war on immigrants was worse. Enabling murderous dictators the world over was worse. The two realities of Trump’s America—democratic and autocratic—collided daily in the impeachment hearings. In one reality, Congress was following due process to investigate and potentially remove from office a president who had abused power. In the other reality, the proceedings were a challenge to Trump’s legitimate autocratic power. The realities clashed but still did not overlap: to any participant or viewer on one side of the divide, anything the other side said only reaffirmed their reality. The realities were also asymmetrical: an autocratic attempt is a crisis, but the logic and language of impeachment proceedings is the logic and language of normal politics, of vote counting and procedure. If it had succeeded in removing Trump from office, it would have constituted a triumph of institutions over the autocratic attempt. It did not. The impeachment proceedings became merely a part of the historical record, a record of only a small part of the abuse that is Trumpism.

Republicans are far more likely to walk in to a polling boot than democrats and democrats are far more likely to use mail-in ballots. So what could very well happen on in election night, you’re sitting there moderating show, it appears that Trump is winning in Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida. People say it, oh my goodness trump is ahead and then in ten a clock in a night Trump announces, “I won the election and by the way my attorney general has told me there is massive fraud with the mail in ballots, and we got a stop counting those ballots. Thank you America , I won, have a good night!” And then the mail in-ballots keep coming in and Trumps lead disappears and Biden becomes the leader. And then you have a massive chaos and conspiracy theory and that is the nightmare I’m worried about.

I don’t think that authoritarianism rises out of economic conditions. I think that there are complicated, difficult, and, in some cases, incredibly oppressive economic and social conditions that give rise to all sorts of things. The question is whether or not authoritarianism will rise. And authoritarianism rises because you get a talented demagogue who uses the constant grievances that are always there and channels them into a simple solution: I will take care of you, I will be your protector. All of these things in politics that vex you and that you worry about and that we’ve been fighting about for so long, you will no longer have to worry about them, you will no longer have to think about them, they will be settled. You will not have to vote again. The people who annoy you and who make you uncomfortable and who disagree with you will disappear.

National Reserve (The Sonnet) Every nation has its Netanyahu, Somewhere they're called Trump, Somewhere they are Recep Erdoğan, Somewhere they are Meloni or Modi, Somewhere they're called Imran Khan. Thus Christ becomes a vessel of hate, Koran is used to peddle division. Saffron substitutes the color of blood, Discrimination becomes the new tradition. Somewhere they cut Islam from curriculum, Somewhere they convert museum into mosque, Somewhere they erase black history - it's all part-n-parcel of the same nationalist muck. Rip the mask of a nationalist patriot, You'll find dormant a homicidal maniac. Nationalism has no religion or ethnicity, Only appearance changes, not the nut. Beware of these nutjobs of nationalism, selling you the jungle wrapped in tradition! If you don't vote them off their throne asap, they'll turn a free nation into reservation.

While it has been clear that right and wrong is nonexistent, I can't say that the concept of 'right or wrong' isn't needed. Because of ignorance, we still need authorities to set up rules and say 'vandalism is wrong, killing is wrong, et cetera.' People ask, "So, vandalism isn't wrong? Killing isn't wrong?" I answer, "Uneducated people say that vandalism is wrong. More educated people say that vandalism destroys the things that many people have spent their lives making. Uneducated people say that killing is wrong. More educated people say that killing takes away the only thing that matters which is lives." The more educated people are, the freer they will be, and the words 'right or wrong' won't be needed anymore. There was a bomb again in Brussels yesterday. I laughed. In the past, we had tyrannies because people didn't know what they could do and what they couldn't do. Now, we have democracy. Do we deserve democracy? Do we deserve freedom? No, we don't deserve freedom. We certainly don't deserve democracy. People are still voting for Donald Trump. And people still bomb other people. And socioeconomic gap is still high. Ignorance is still prevalent, so, if you ask me, "Do we deserve democracy? Do we deserve freedom? Do we deserve the world without authority, the world of truth, the world of peace?" I answer, "No, we don't." So, when you hear your president shouting 'Peace!', your government speaking 'Freedom!', ask them 'Are you educated?' Someone asks, "So, instead of 'right or wrong', you will now set up the rules about what we can do and we can't do?" I answer, "No. When will you understand? I stand for the world without authority, the world of truth, the world of peace. OK, forget the truth, forget my book, forget my paper. Let me expand science for you. You will let your fellow humans who are more educated than you set up the rules for you. When all the people are finally educated, please come back and reread my book and my paper, and when you finally understand them, please live in the world of no authority, the world of truth, the world of peace. Me? I probably have been gone by then." There is, however, a problem with how many educated people there are in the world. In my paper, I prove that right and wrong is nonexistent by showing that everything that exists is not wrong and is not right because everything that exists is the result of the thing(s) that happened before it and everything that exists can’t be right because future doesn’t exist. I wrote that terrorism is caused by capitalism (democracy) and capitalism (democracy) is caused by death. This paper was rejected. When educated people fail, there goes all your hope in the world.

Fine people on both sides? I was disgusted. Here was the same man I’d gone on television to defend when I believed it was appropriate. While I hadn’t been a supporter at the start of his campaign, he’d eventually convinced me he could be an effective president. Trump had proved to be a disrupter of the status quo during the primary and general election. Especially when he began to talk about issues of concern to black Americans. Dems have taken your votes for granted! Black unemployment is the highest it’s ever been! Neighborhoods in Chicago are unsafe! All things I completely agreed with. But now he was saying, 'I’m going to change all that!' He mentioned it at every rally, even though he was getting shut down by the leaders of the African American community. And what amazed me most was that he was saying these things to white people and definitely not winning any points there either. I’d defended Trump on more than one occasion and truly believed he could make a tangible difference in the black community. (And still do.) I’d lost relationships with family members, friends, and women I had romantic interest in, all because I thought advocating for some of his positions had a higher purpose. But now the president of the United States had just given a group whose sole purpose and history have been based on hate and the elimination of blacks and Jews moral equivalence with the genuine counterprotesters. My grandfather was born and raised in Helena, Arkansas, where the KKK sought to kill him and other family members. You can imagine this issue was very personal to me. In Chicago, the day before Trump’s press conference, my grandfather and I had had a long conversation about Charlottesville, and his words to me were fresh in my mind. So, yeah, I was hurt. Angry. Frustrated. Sad.

We have a civil rights photo collection in our house, a big, beautiful coffee table book with images so vivid they cause jaws to drop. When my daughters and their friends pick it up to look at the young Black boys and girls in the middle of a dangerous struggle, I remind them that our eyes are trained to look at the Black faces and their determination as they walk to school. But I tell them also to look at the white faces in the background: the young, jeering faces shouting slurs and throwing things. “All of those folks are now around your granddad’s age,” I tell my daughters. They’re still with us, and those people now walk around, every day, living with what they did, and either trying to rectify it in their brains, through penance, or voting for Donald Trump and passing that hatred down to their children’s children. That is this country. Them. We cannot afford to pretend they don’t live among us.

Even if one were to agree with progressive Christians that racial inequities should be the Church’s greatest concern, no other race-based injustice can compare to what is being done under the auspices of “reproductive rights,” something Professor Carl Trueman ably highlighted in First Things. “Police actions in 2018 accounted for the deaths of fewer than three hundred African Americans, while in the same year abortions of African-American babies accounted for more than 117,000 of the same,” he pointed out. “One would think this extreme difference (390 to one) would make abortion the centerpiece of Christian critiques of racism.”67 The only reason it wouldn’t is if those drawing such equivalencies do not, deep down, see those 117,000 babies as equally human as the 300 adults. Prior, French, Keller, and both Moores have taken to the pages of the most elite media outlets in the world to incessantly disparage average Christians who felt it was worth voting for Donald Trump for a chance to dismantle the most wicked practice this nation has ever known. Let’s be clear, no one cast a ballot for Trump because he committed adultery or because he bragged in 2005 about grabbing women’s private parts. Nor was the legal protection of adultery or lechery a feature of the Trump campaign’s platform. In contrast, Clinton and Biden did promise voters that electing them would allow the butchery to continue. They did make it a part of their platforms, and a significant number of voters cast ballots for them based on those promises. Given this, which vote is more morally compromising for the Christian—the one that places power in the hands of those who promise to allow the innocent to be put to death or the one that vests power in those who promise to make a way to rescue the innocent? Which group of Christians do these celebrated evangelical leaders accuse of defaming the name of Christ with an untoward interest in political power, and which do they excuse and even promote?

Pastor Max Lucado of San Antonio, Texas, said in an editorial for the Washington Post in February 2016 that he was “chagrined” by Trump’s antics. He ridiculed a war hero. He made a mockery of a reporter’s menstrual cycle. He made fun of a disabled reporter. He referred to a former first lady, Barbara Bush, as “mommy” and belittled Jeb Bush for bringing her on the campaign trail. He routinely calls people “stupid” and “dummy.” One writer catalogued 64 occasions that he called someone “loser.” These were not off-line, backstage, overheard, not-to-be-repeated comments. They were publicly and intentionally tweeted, recorded and presented.18 Lucado went on to question how Christians could support a man doing these things as a candidate for president, much less as someone who repeatedly attempted to capture evangelical audiences by portraying himself as similarly committed to Christian values. He continued, “If a public personality calls on Christ one day and calls someone a ‘bimbo’ the next, is something not awry? And to do so, not once, but repeatedly, unrepentantly and unapologetically? We stand against bullying in schools. Shouldn’t we do the same in presidential politics?” Rolling Stone reported on several evangelical leaders pushing against a Trump nomination, including North Carolina radio host and evangelical Dr. Michael Brown, who wrote an open letter to Jerry Falwell Jr., blasting his endorsement of Donald Trump. Brown wrote, “As an evangelical follower of Jesus, the contrast is between putting nationalism first or the kingdom of God first. From my vantage point, you and other evangelicals seem to have put nationalism first, and that is what deeply concerns me.”19 John Stemberger, president and general counsel for Florida Family Action, lamented to CNN, “The really puzzling thing is that Donald Trump defies every stereotype of a candidate you would typically expect Christians to vote for.” He wondered, “Should evangelical Christians choose to elect a man I believe would be the most immoral and ungodly person ever to be president of the United States?”20 A

It would be grotesque to compare what has happened to workers in the West to what has happened to the Native peoples of the Americas, who have survived a genocide and more than a century of persecution. But while I researched this book, I spent some time in the Rust Belt. A few weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I went to Cleveland to try to get the vote out to stop Donald Trump from being elected. One afternoon I walked down a street in the southwest of the city where a third of the houses had been demolished by the authorities, a third were abandoned, and third still had people living in them, cowering, with steel guards on their windows. I knocked on a door, and a woman answered who, from looking at her, I would have guessed was fifty-five. She began to rage—how terrified she was of her neighbors, how the kids in the area “have got to go,” how she was desperate for anyone who would make things better, how there wasn’t even a grocery store anywhere nearby any more and she had to take three buses just to get food. She mentioned in passing that she was thirty-seven years old, which took me aback. And then she said something that stayed with me long after the election. She described what the area was like when her grandparents lived there, and you could work in a factory and have a middle-class life—and she made a verbal slip. She meant to say “when I was young.” What she actually said was “when I was alive.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

Months later, Time magazine would run its now infamous article bragging about how it had been done. Without irony or shame, the magazine reported that “[t]here was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” creating “an extraordinary shadow effort” by a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” to oppose Trump.112 Corporate CEOs, organized labor, left-wing activists, and Democrats all worked together in secret to secure a Biden victory. For Trump, these groups represented a powerful Washington and Democratic establishment that saw an unremarkable career politician like Biden as merely a vessel for protecting their self-interests. Accordingly, when Trump was asked whom he blames for the rigging of the 2020 election, he quickly responded, “Least of all Biden.” Time would, of course, disingenuously frame this effort as an attempt to “oppose Trump’s assault on democracy,” even as Time reporter Molly Ball noted this shadow campaign “touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding.” The funding enabled the country’s sudden rush to mail-in balloting, which Ball described as “a revolution in how people vote.”113 The funding from Democratic donors to public election administrators was revolutionary. The Democrats’ network of nonprofit activist groups embedded into the nation’s electoral structure through generous grants from Democratic donors. They helped accomplish the Democrats’ vote-by-mail strategy from the inside of the election process. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were paying the National Football League’s referee staff and conducting all of their support operations. No one would feel confident in games won by the Cowboys in such a scenario. Ball also reported that this shadowy cabal “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.” And yet, Time magazine made this characterization months after it was revealed that the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s corrupt deal-making with Chinese and other foreign officials—deals that alleged direct involvement from Joe Biden, resulting in the reporting’s being overtly censored by social media—was substantially true. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would eventually tell Congress that censoring the New York Post and locking it out of its Twitter account over the story was “a mistake.” And the Hunter Biden story was hardly the only egregious mistake, to say nothing of the media’s willful dishonesty, in the 2020 election. Republicans read the Time article with horror and as an admission of guilt. It confirmed many voters’ suspicions that the election wasn’t entirely fair. Trump knew the article helped his case, calling it “the only good article I’ve read in Time magazine in a long time—that was actually just a piece of the truth because it was much deeper than that.