Who Are All These Idiots Who Voted For Trump?
Who Are All These Idiots Who Voted For Trump?
A Users’ Guide for Progressives and Other Haters to the 77,284,118 who did
By Willy Stern
This article is for you if you check at least half these eight boxes:
⎕ You cannot name the price to the closest $10,000 of the Ford F-150, even though it has been the top selling pick-up truck in America for the last 47 years.
⎕ In the last five years, you have not had a single tradesman in your home as a friend. Think electrician or plumber; it doesn’t count if you just paid him to unclog your toilet. Your cleaning lady doesn’t count either.
⎕ You have so much money that you don’t know what a dozen eggs or a gallon of milk costs -- to the nearest dollar -- at your Whole Foods.
⎕ You don’t have three good friends who voted for Trump.
⎕ You pride yourself on your open-mindedness and tolerance yet have disdain for Trump voters, who don’t share your world view.
⎕ You think you’re smarter than the average Trump voter.
⎕ With your college and/or grad degree from what your crowd considers “good” schools, you believe that your opinions are more sophisticated and nuanced than those of red state factory workers, farmers and active-duty military members. C’mon, be honest now.
⎕ In your heart of hearts, you pretty much agreed with Hillary Clinton’s claim that half of Trump’s supporters could be put “in a basket of deplorables.”
Still reading? Okay, my friend, let’s stipulate that you are probably a very decent person, give to all the right charities, know all the best people, yet know virtually nothing of working-class America.
In other words, welcome to the world outside your bubble. You are, in your own way, as provincial as a Mississippi pig farmer.
This article will answer for you that key question we hear so often: Who are all these f*#king idiots who voted for Trump?
Herewith, 20 key characteristics of the 77 million:
1. Our kids volunteer to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. Our kids would die for our country. Our kids do die for our country. Your kids’ public service consists of raising a few bucks for sustainable gardening for their 8th grade project at their $30K/year private school.
2. We are just as smart as you are. But we don’t judge intelligence on whether you went to Pomona or Brown. We judge smarts more along the lines of whether you can take apart -- and fix -- your own snowmobile engine when it goes kaput.
3. We are charitable. But our main form of charity is helping neighbors do tasks like building their homes. This takes both polished handyman skills and dozens upon dozens of hours. What do you do for your neighbors other than take in the mail when they are vacationing at a high-end eco-resort in Patagonia?
4. We play a game with NPR. We turn it on when leaving our driveways and see if we can go a mile before an “expert” with mentholated voice presents a ridiculously liberal opinion as fact. We seldom make it 200 yards. How would you feel if your taxes paid for a right-wing radio station? Did you know that not a single NPR journalist is a Republican? Not one.
5. We read deeply and well. Your image of us delving into National Enquirer in our mobile homes while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds is plain wrong. We still reference, from the 1970s, the great public intellectual Herman Kahn, when he termed your class “the overeducated incapacitated.” We also enjoy this spot-0n corollary from William F. Buckley, the late founder of National Review: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty at Harvard." Amen to that.
6. We read and watch mainstream media. We try to laugh at their naivete. We are only too aware that virtually all journalists at “top” news organizations have no idea who we are, how we think, or how we live. We suspect they look at us as one might see monkeys in a zoo; we are specimens to be viewed and analyzed but not to be taken seriously as equals. Oh, goodness no. It's our hope that scribes at WaPo and CNN might read this article. But we doubt it.
7. When passing a homeless beggar, we tend buy him a Big Mac at McDonald’s. We don’t walk by with our heads averted, hoping he won’t drip spittle on our shiny leather Oxfords. When did you last treat a street person to a hot meal?
8. Our kids get fine educations at our local community colleges and state schools. They attend law, medical and business schools there too. Nobody at these institutions shrieks nasty anti-Semitic slogans or breaks into admin buildings to pour cement in toilets. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry when we hear that you pay private tutors $400/hour in the hopes your precious progeny might win admittance to Columbia or Northwestern.
9. We don’t kvetch about your politics and your politicians ad nauseum. We teach our kids not to grumble but to act. We are too busy living our lives. We wonder why you have a compelling need to scold, denigrate and attack.
10. We are among the 45% or so of Americans who live in a home with a gun. We are responsible gun owners. We enjoy hunting, we eat what we harvest, and we can defend our homes. We are amused whenever the Harvard-educated scribes at the Gray Lady confuse a bullet with a cartridge. Or call an AR-15 an “automatic rifle.” Perhaps they didn’t teach in the hallowed halls of Cambridge or New Haven that “AR” stands for ArmaLite, the firm which developed this form of weaponry. We find it vaguely amusing that you believe that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens will somehow stop crazies from shooting up schools.
11. We teach our kids the importance of personal responsibility. By contrast, we often think you present as a spoiled, entitled 5-year-old. What kind of example are you setting for your kids? We wonder why you don’t seem to have all that many conversation topics beyond Trump’s evil doings. We remain puzzled as to why you believe that your constant bemoaning will somehow accomplish your political goals. How about coming up with original ideas that resonate with the American public? We encourage you to continue to blame election losses on racism, and to bang your drums for open borders, for boys playing girls’ sports and for bloated government. Please continue to deploy nasty rhetoric and vitriolic attacks. Yes, you do all that, while we keep winning elections.
12. We can’t help but wonder about Barack Obama’s intelligence when he referenced people like us in fly-over country as "clinging to their guns and religion.” Yeah, sure. We kinda’ like guns and religion. The same way, we imagine, that you apparently like paying $6.95 for a cuppa’ joe at Starbucks, donating to the ACLU and commuting an hour in traffic to moil at your high-paying consulting job in lower Manhattan, only to arrive home in Larchmont long after your kids are asleep. Every weeknight. Who’s the smart one now?
13. We sport Carhartt coats and steel toe boots. We find these products more practical and durable for work and play than, say, Arcteryx parkas and UGGs. We are also your dinner party partners, neighbors in Highland Park, colleagues at your white-shoe law firm, fellow congregants and ex-college roommates from Princeton. But you wouldn’t know. That’s because you assume we share your politics and have made so many nasty comments about people like us, to our faces, that we stopped disclosing long ago. To use your own verbiage, we stay “in the closet” since being honest is not a “safe space” anymore.
14. We may have one too many on Saturday night, but we show up in church Sunday morning. We prefer a homespun homily to the musings of the ethically challenged Paul Krugman, who seems never to have met a statistic he couldn’t distort for his own lefty agenda. We do consider the NY Times indispensable, particularly the movie and book reviews. We use the Times’ snooty opinions as spot-on counter-indicators for what we will the view and read.
15. We believe in actions, not statements. We don’t understand your obsession with virtue signaling. When we see land acknowledgements, we wonder, why? If you really think the land was stolen from the Indians, give it back. Trust us, they will accept. Did you know that the Washington Post’s own poll revealed that 90% of Indians were not offended by the Redskins name? We live near and among Indians. Outside a few polished activists with law degrees, we have never met one yet who calls himself a Native American.
16. We are real outdoorsmen. We are in nature a lot, whether ice fishing for walleye, farming soybeans, 4-wheeling in our Polaris ATVs, or in our duck hunting blinds. We know the difference between otter tracks and badger tracks. We find it cute that you consider yourself an environmentalist because you write an annual check to the Sierra Club and take your kids to a luxury “green” resort in Croatia.
17. We keep our kids in public schools because we believe in public schooling. We want our children to be proficient in math, history, reading and science rather than what we term the “crapology” subjects: race/class/gender ideology. We remain bemused by those limousine liberals in Memphis who were in favor of busing when it was an Alabama issue but were the first to enroll their kids in private schools when integration arrived in Tennessee.
18. We can recognize the difference between trolling and policy. We wonder why you have not figured out yet that Trump is often just having great sport at your expense, as he waits for your entirely predictable reactions. Yes, that would “Trump Derangement Syndrome” in all its glory. Consider that Trump voters consider you guilty of the “3 Cs,” those being condescending, contemptuous and clueless.
19. Our mantras: Free markets. Free people. American exceptionalism. Rugged self-reliance. We don’t believe that increasing government spending solves problems. Quite the opposite. The U.S. Department of Education’s budget ballooned from $38 billion in 2000 to $79 billion last year. Yet test scores and outcomes keep dropping across the board. We enjoy the old saw about why first-class stamps from the U.S. Post Office shot up from 37 cents two decades ago to 73 cents today: We now pay for storage!
20. We are as troubled by your politics as you are of ours. And just as sure we are right.