Disappointed, but Not Surprised in Trump’s Re-Election

“Disappointed, but not surprised” is the most common sentiment I have heard from most of my progressive friends. It’s not like I don’t know any person who voted for Trump, but I picked a side in this very polarized climate and wrote two days before the election about how much I hoped Kamala Harris would win. I also said I was relatively optimistic about her chances, but acknowledged it was not a prediction that would age well, given the past two election cycles where Trump’s chances were underestimated and possibly could again.

It did not age well, and the election was a landslide. As much as I empathize with Trump supporters and preach empathy over and over again to reach over the aisle and listen instead of cast people out, to try to understand instead of thought police, I am still a coastal elite. My whole life, I have lived in or near major cities of New York, Atlanta, and Baltimore.

But as much as I try to understand Trump supporters, of which are growing more numerous and more diverse, I am not one. I live in a liberal space where I sure do suspect that some people who are more quiet in conversations about politics did actually vote for Trump. I know people who have confided in me personally that they are voting Trump but that they wouldn’t say so because they didn’t want to be made into the enemy of the room (and with the promise that I would never tell anyone they would vote for Trump). And so, I always did have a nagging feeling that the polls were underestimating Trump again based on my gut and anecdotal evidence, a feeling I pushed aside given how wrong my gut and the vibes were in the 2022 midterm elections, but those elections did not have Trump on the ballot. This did.

The reality is that I and most of my progressive friends live in these bubbles where conservative voices are not necessarily always silenced, but where every incentive exists to ensure Trump voters and conservatives self-silence for fear of censure or just not to lose social standing. We would be lying to say these incentives do not exist in our elite, liberal circles and bubbles, and that someone who openly wore a “Make America Great Again” cap or screamed “I love Trump!” isn’t considered a terrible person.

This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon in circles on the left, but it most certainly has accelerated in many of our circles in recent years. Even a relatively liberal person without the most progressive view, like “Israel has a right to defend itself” can feel turned into the enemy in the room, and there can be a lot of self-filtering to ensure you do not say the right thing. And I can completely see why someone feels alienated by these circles, especially as these unspoken codes of speech and politeness have come to dominate corporate and elite America, especially for someone who feels like those spaces will never have room for them or that they will always be the enemy in those spaces.

To me, the shy Trump voter is a very real thing for someone who lives in predominantly liberal places given how divisive of a figure he is and the social costs of judgment that come with publicly supporting him. No one likes to feel shouted down or judged for what they believe, and even someone like me who tries to understand and won’t publicly out my Trump supporter friends for their sakes has a lot of questions that can make the Trump voter feel on the defensive and like they have to justify their opinions. I fear that I, too, have lost touch and have become less responsive to the rest of the country, especially since I stopped defending Trump supporters after January 6th, 2021. I have listened to hundreds of New York Times politics podcasts in the past year and not a single one of them captured how much of this race would be a landslide.

There has been a lot of criticism of the left being too hostage to its most extreme progressive wing, including by sports media personality Stephen A. Smith. I think there’s some merit to this, and it scares me to say that I think so publicly because of the backlash this can engender among many people whose opinions I care about in liberal circles. But what was liberal or progressive on race, gender, or sexuality ten years ago is most certainly not what is most progressive now. The world has changed quite a lot, and this election shows not everyone has been ready for this change.

The blame game is ultimately not helpful, which is hypocritical for me to say because I am participating in it, even in this article. But losing to Trump for a second time, this time in a landslide doesn’t mean just one party of the Democratic Party is at fault. It means we are all at fault, so instead of just pointing the finger at one wing of the party or one particular issue. Very few Democrats, if any, were willing to speak up about Biden’s fitness as a candidate at all before his catastrophic debate. A million things could have gone differently, but with an unpopular incumbent in Joe Biden with very few people having positive perceptions of the economy, the odds were very much stacked against her, with post-COVID incumbents losing left and right (no pun intended) around the world.

. . .

My fellow liberals are going to hate me for saying this, but I believe part of the path back to victory starts with two people: Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. Both have been cast out of the left in recent years, Elon for his embrace of the right and full turn towards Trumpism and Joe Rogan in his controversy regarding COVID misinformation. Both Musk and Rogan obviously have tremendously influential platforms with Rogan having 14.5 million followers on Spotify and Musk owning X (formerly Twitter). If there was one mistake Kamala Harris made, I believe it was not going on Joe Rogan’s podcast in Austin on his terms.

Let it be known that before this day and age, both were relatively left-leaning and libertarian men. They both are champions of the late 2000s or early 2010s Internet culture that prioritized being able to say whatever you want. Musk can be criticized as an oligarch, but he supported Obama and both times, Hillary, and then Biden. Rogan is well-known for endorsing Bernie Sanders. And yet both these men turned to Trump in the past four years.

These men speak to a demographic Democrats struggled mightily with: young men. Our tendency to cast out figures we view as problematic like Rogan and Musk, I think, is in itself very problematic. I don’t think they should necessarily be given a pass for platforming COVID misinformation or conspiracy theories, but they should not be turned into the enemy for doing so. People say the wrong thing. They make mistakes. They don’t want to constantly feel like they have to grovel to earn back the good graces of liberals or walk on eggshells, even people like myself. As such, I do think part of this move of young men towards the right is a tendency not to feel this way all the time and not to feel like you’re the enemy for one wrong thing you said or did, even if it was five or ten years ago. Obviously, a layperson like myself does not have the platform of Musk or Rogan, which makes them bear a greater responsibility for not spreading misinformation, but the point stands regardless.

I believe many people think I might be too fair or sympathetic towards Musk. However, I read his biography from Walter Isaacson. I read it with the impression of “hey, my fellow liberal friends might be too negative about Elon Musk,” but finished the book with the impression of “wow, this guy really is an asshole.” There are multiple stories in the biography of him putting in “surges” at Tesla and SpaceX, making his staff pull all-nighters or legitimately firing people for no reason whatsoever, effectively upending people’s lives for no reason. It got results with SpaceX and Tesla, but there are two experiences that stuck with me in his biography that made me realize why he switched sides so quickly.

First, Musk has an estranged daughter who cut him off after he did not support her gender transition, and Musk felt slighted and reacted by a lurch to the right. Musk was obviously not blameless: he often berated his daughter for her sexuality and proceeded to attribute her transition to the “woke mind virus,” which any child would feel aggrieved by. Musk also felt slighted by the Biden Administration’s praise of General Motors and Ford for leading the electric vehicle (EV) revolution, and not Tesla. In defense of Biden, General Motors and Ford are significantly more friendly to labor unions than Tesla (to put it lightly), so politically, the administration validly saw supporting the more union-friendly automakers as the right thing to do.

Despite winning an election, I want to be clear that I personally think there is a right and wrong. Electoral politics aside, I don’t think constantly hating on trans people or mass deportations is morally right. I don’t think the constant racist or sexist remarks are cool. I am horrified at Trump’s comments that he will pursue military action against the “enemy from within.” There were very Hitler-esque vibes from Trump saying immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” I am a teacher now and I fear for the future of the profession with Trump as president.

January 6th was the turning point for me to no longer empathize with how people could support Trump because I personally saw it as a descent into fascism. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I was also disgusted and felt a bit estranged from Christian churches and friends who seemed to celebrate an overturning of 50 years of precedent and reproductive rights. Although I still privately pray, believe in God, and listen to podcasts about faith and worship music, I struggle significantly with this aspect of the evangelical church and am trying to reconcile my personal beliefs over how I can be a Christian and love my neighbor and simultaneously call people who believe something I fundamentally believe to be wrong my brothers and sisters in Christ.

But personally, I am a soon to be a lawyer. If I were going to vote purely based on my economic self-interest, Trump would probably help my pocketbook more than any Democrat. For the most part, I am relatively assured that my wife and I will be fine in that respect, which is a sense of security that clearly most people do not feel right now.

I believe, like many Democrats, that Trump is racist, sexist, and a fascist. However, how many people believed these things about Trump, like many of us do, and voted for him anyway out of their self-interest because they believe issues like immigration and the economy transcend abortion and democracy? Although I think and many of us think these labels for Trump are true, how helpful are they in convincing and persuading voters who may be on the fence?

I think there is a need to recalibrate. If more than half the country felt seen by Trump and voted for him, across demographic lines of young male, Latino, Black male, Arab, Jewish, Asian, White, and immigrant voters, then to write off our half the country as racist, sexist, and fascist and embracing identity politics over more material interests is very much a losing strategy. Condescension over anyone who is not on our side and close-mindedness toward ideological diversity is not a winning strategy. Winning over the Elon Musks and Joe Rogans of the world back to the left might help. In four years, if the economy and wars abroad are still not doing well, then we could be singing a different tune and believe this strategy was right all along, long-term, especially given how poorly Trump’s first term went and how hard it is for incumbents to win these days.

I can’t say I have a definitive prescription for what the party as a whole should do besides being more reluctant to cast people like Musk and Rogan out and to be more reluctant to portray people we don’t agree with as racists, fascists, and sexists. It is one thing to give Trump these labels. It is another to paint his multifaceted and complicated supporters with the same brush. Another common sentiment among my more liberal and progressive friends is that we were angry and energized after Trump won the first time. Now, this is an incentive to disengage and just not focus too much on politics anymore.

I, like many liberals, am all over the place on where to go forward, and the last several days have been very difficult. I have had a lot of trouble concentrating at work and in law school.

But I do endeavor to understand why people vote for Trump anymore instead of trying to just resolve my cognitive dissonance of discomfort with the left’s censoriousness. I endeavor to embrace nuance instead of black and white notions of what people should or shouldn’t do. I endeavor to be more in touch, to start diversifying my podcast listening to not just the New York Times politics podcasts, but possibly Joe Rogan to not agree, but understand. Of course, I say this with the caveat that I have to listen to Joe Rogan with my headphones in and when not in a liberal space due to the fear of the consequences in my liberal circles if someone knew I listened to Joe Rogan. But I think one thing we can all do better is keeping a more open mind, even when we don’t agree.

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This post was previously published on Ryan Fan’s blog.

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