Why People Vote for Trump

I’m seeing a lot of very confused and outraged people wondering why anyone would ever vote for Trump. It’s a natural human instinct to notice when something about the world seems inconsistent with your understanding of the world, or unexpectedly running against your assumptions.

This kind of confusion seems to occur most acutely if you’re 100% convinced of your own moral certainty, factual high ground and correctness. That’s because your brain is still looking for consistency, even when doing so means running up against faulty assumptions that also come from your brain.

So, you notice the inconsistency, and you are confused and maybe angry. How could x=1 be true if my observations tell me that x≠1? The world must be wrong!

First off, you need to have the humility to realize that your worldview is distorted, imperfect, and at times highly flawed, or filled with massive blind spots that you don’t even notice. The same goes for every single cable news talking head, politician, journalist, scientist, bureaucrat, plumber, doctor, lawyer and clergyman.

In science and philosophy, this concept is known as “epistemic humility,” which is just a fancy way of phrasing the fact that human understanding is imperfect in myriad ways we can never truly grasp.

Start there whenever you encounter a problem, conflict or inconsistency that just doesn’t jibe with you at all. If your immediate instinct is to assume pure unadulterated malice fills the gap of your understanding, then you need to take a big epistemically humble step backwards. Maybe two or three.

Internalizing your own epistemic humility also means understanding that other people have the same imperfect, flawed and blind spot filled map of the world. Theirs is different from yours in many ways. In some ways their map is 10000x superior to yours. In some ways, their blind spots lie exactly where your vision is 20/20.

If you can see perfectly, and they’re blind in a way they don’t even know, it’s almost impossible to give them a helpful description. You’re Anne Sullivan pumping water into Helen Keller’s hand, trying to get her to get it.

If Helen Keller doesn’t trust you or Helen Keller knows you hate her, think she’s stupid, think she’s racist (she was!) or that you believe she’s deplorable, you’re never going to get her to understand what you’re trying to tell her. Never. Even though you’re “right.” The fact of you being right is immaterial if the person you’re talking to knows you hate their guts.

And again: epistemic humility. You knowing for sure that you’re right and they’re clueless does not guarantee that it is true. You might be wrong or you might have an inferior understanding. Maybe Helen Keller is talking and hearing perfectly well but YOU can’t understand her.

At this point, your mind has a choice — a figurative fork in the road. On one hand, you can be humble and thoughtful, which is a very tough road. It’s going to take work to get through to do that work of getting a better understanding, or to even admit that you’ve been wrong. Your brain is one of the most energy demanding parts of your body. Despite being just 2% of the average person’s body weight, brains take up 20% of our energy use. Thinking takes up even more energy. Chess grandmasters can burn as many calories as long distance runners over a match.

Evolutionarily, your brain really does not like to have you sitting, thinking, burning up calories, because for 99.9% of humanity’s existence, you probably should have been finding food or avoiding being food.

So you’re adapted to taking a shortcut that, evolutionarily speaking, probably works perfectly almost all of the time to keep you alive long enough to pass on your genes. This shortcut lets you assume that if you run into a discrepancy, it’s because someone or something means to do you harm. They’re out to get you. They’re bad actors. This assumption means you can move on to go find food instead of wasting calories on thinking.

It’s a win-win proposition for prehistoric man to get food instead of a slightly more nuanced understanding of the tribe across the valley’s political motivations. It’s not even remotely close because eventually you’re probably going to have to kill or conquer those people anyway.

Just because you have, as a modern human, more access to calories than you could possibly ever need, it does not change how your brain prefers to operate. It prefers to avoid heavy thinking to get a better, nuanced understanding of the opposing tribe. It goes to malice unless you catch yourself on Hanlon’s Razor, and remember that you shouldn’t automatically assume malice when stupidity also fits the bill.

Couple Hanlon’s Razor with epistemic humility and you might also consider the possibility that your own stupidity is to blame.

Oh you’re never wrong? Or you’re never that wrong? Take a big step back.

Explaining Trump

If you’ve taken a step or two back, you might be able to humble yourself enough to get the tiniest glimpse into the worldview of someone voting for Trump.

For the record, I’m not a Trump voter. I have about as much distaste for Trump as I do for Harris. I find them both to be odious in ways that are (obviously) unique to my own worldview, which is different from yours, and no less valid. I don’t hate you automatically because you’re voting for Harris, just as I don’t automatically make that judgment about Trump voters.

I know and deeply love many people who are voting for disgusting politicians I wouldn’t pee on if they were on fire. My official political stance is that absent some kind of divine intervention, most federal politicians should be launched into the sun at their own expense. If you’re interested in why I would hold such views, I’d be glad to tell you.

Suffice to say, people vote for all kinds of stupid, absurd, horrifying and benign reasons.

Some people vote to get the sticker.

I’m not going to hate someone because they like getting a little bit of an ego bump from wearing an “I voted” sticker. Life is hard, so grab some harmless joy when you can.

I don’t lay claim to superior vision but I think my perspective lays some of the inconsistencies bare that the more ideologically oriented simply can not or will not notice.

If you think Trump voters are brainwashed, I agree to a certain extent, but I believe the same is true of Harris voters in different, and sometimes more egregious ways. You’re all brainwashed. I love you even if you like pro wrestling and it’s real to you.

Some of the biggest gripes about Trump are that he’s a uniquely dangerous racist. Again, I have not ever voted for Trump, nor will I ever, but you couldn’t throw a molotov cocktail in the Oval Office without hitting a racist president at any point in our nation’s history. If you think your guy is especially not racist then I think you’re fooling yourself and you just haven’t actually bothered to look very hard.

You might look at a quote from Donald Trump about desegregation and mandatory bussing like this and correctly assume that it’s incredibly racist:

“Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have got to make some move on this.”

But whoops, that was actually Joe Biden. But you voted for Joe Biden… the racist? Hold up. Let your brain catch up and tell you that you voted for Joe Biden because he’s less racist than Trump. Seems like a cope. Wait… did you vote for Biden in the 2020 primary against Kamala Harris even though he’s racist? Someone certainly did.

You voted for someone despite a history of racist statements, and yet you believe no one should vote for Trump, because he’s made some racist statements?

I understand you believe Biden’s statements and policies are not that bad. Okay, then you should give the same kind of fuzzy grace to people who are voting for Trump, because they’ll tell you the same thing. Now what? You both have the same grace for yourselves and your preferred candidate that you won’t grant the other.

Not very graceful in my view.

Every negative thing you don’t like about Trump is also true in different ways about Harris (or Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.)

You have a core belief that Harris is clearly better, even with her faults. That’s the same belief in play with Trump voters. You don’t have a superior claim to assert your belief is truer or better.

I could go through all of your grievances about Trump in excruciating detail, but here’s a greatest hits, very briefly:

Trump appointed SCOTUS judges who got rid of Roe v. Wade!

For one, Trump has said he would veto a national abortion ban and he says it should be left up to states. That’s a more liberal position on abortion than just about any republican president going back forever. The problem with Roe is that it was a bad SCOTUS decision and everyone knew it. All it said was, “you can’t make a law banning abortion.” It didn’t include any specifics and it didn’t make a law… it just prevented laws from being made.

Over the ensuing 5 decades, Democrats NEVER pushed through a law or amendment codifying nationwide abortion rights, and if you were cynical or paying attention, you might conclude it’s because they preferred to dangle their constituents every election cycle to gin up campaign funds and votes. You got dangled, you voted, and then they dropped you. They do the same thing with gun control (they’ll never pass a shriveled turd of any kind.) But please keep writing checks!

If you want to blame Trump for appointing originalist judges then fine… but you can’t make a case that he’s uniquely bad in this regard. Both Bushes appointed the same kind of judges.

You also need to note the agency of the entire Democrat party that never moved on codifying abortion rights. They had 50 years. They didn’t do it and they really didn’t try. You should figure out why.

Trump is anti-immigrant

Trump is about as anti-immigrant as Obama. By any standard, Obama is the GOAT of deportation. No one is going to beat his stats. He’s a first ballot hall of famer and Trump can only hope to be a distant 2nd. Biden also continued building Trump’s wall. Like what are we talking about here? I could post anti-immigration quotes from all 3 of these guys and you wouldn’t be able to tell who said what. Trump says meaner things? I guess so but more people got deported by Obama and it’s not even close.

Trump is a Russian Asset

If you still believe Russiagate, then as a friend, I need to tell you that you’ve been utterly fooled by one of the biggest orchestrated political propaganda campaigns in history.

Every single part of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative has been debunked or quietly memory holed.
https://x.com/alexandrosM/status/1833153530565398610

The only part of Russiagate left standing is that Russia spent some money trying to spread misinformation on American social media, as if it’s something new and alarming. Every single one of America’s adversaries is constantly trying to propagandize us. It all pales in comparison to propaganda coming from inside the house. It’s also nothing compared to what America gets up to in terms of our own spycraft and intervention on our adversaries and even our allies!

The NSA is spying on you and me, right fucking now. You should be mad about that, but you’re not. Trump voters are mad, and they (accurately) see that Trump was victimized by a hatchet job from the American intelligence community and the entire media apparatus that went along with a made-up story. And it went on for almost the entirety of Trump’s presidency! Every day on every mainstream media channel it was Russiagate FOR YEARS on end. Trump voters remember. You might not care but they do, and you should understand why, or try to.

Trump is a Nasty Asshole

Trump is the only politician who speaks off the cuff, abrasively and with sometimes alarming candor. To you, the person who has decided he’s racist, etc., that’s a bad thing and it’s just more proof of his badness.

To Trump voters, it makes him the ONLY POLITICIAN WHO SPEAKS OFF THE CUFF and they see him as refreshingly honest and forthright. Every other politician reads off of a teleprompter, or has an earpiece with people feeding them perfectly crafted political-speak. Trump voters like the candor. They like the abrasiveness. They like this style of politician because they (accurately) sense that every other pol is a scripted robot who never ever tells them the truth.

Why Vote For Him, Though?

I think I’ve established that for Trump voters, all of the grievances you have are irrelevant. Not because they’re evil or racist but because no candidate or party has a monopoly on being shitty and they just prefer Trump’s shittyness to Harris’s. You disagree with them. Okay? So do they, with you. Now what?

Much of the preference for Trump comes down to the fact that people feel betrayed. Again: you obviously disagree, but you’re not them.

They feel betrayed in various ways by the DNC, which has taken a weird turn away from working class voters and embraced all kinds of niche pet causes that run counter to the average blue collar worker’s preferences and values.

The DNC used to be at least as anti-immigrant as Trump, and it wasn’t that long ago. Biden himself has some fire and brimstone speeches about the border. The working class (correctly) sees a massive influx of immigrants as a threat to wages and job security. If you live in a rust belt town with few jobs and suddenly you’re competing with 3rd world immigrants who are given refugee status and free money to come live next to you, that’s a very personal issue. You wouldn’t like it. You might vote for the guy who said he would stop it.

People also feel betrayed by inflation. For decades, the US had low inflation. Then almost as soon as Biden took office, inflation soared to 40 year highs. People have gone into higher debt than ever. People are poorer and they can tell. If you’re financially sophisticated, you might note that Trump passed a bunch of inflationary policies the same as Biden. But people don’t see it that way. Even worse: the Biden administration at first said inflation wasn’t happening, then that it wasn’t bad, then that it was “transitory” then that it was actually a good sign of a growing economy.

All the while, if you’re a regular middle class person buying gas and groceries and electricity, you knew inflation was bad, it wasn’t temporary and it’s not good for you. You saw the house you wanted to buy soar in price, well out of reach. Your insurance rose. Your taxes rose. Your debt interest costs rise. You can argue (and people try to) but you’re just yelling at people who are hurting and telling them that no, actually, things are great.

They don’t believe you and they shouldn’t believe you. They’re mad and they want Trump back because when Trump was in office, inflation wasn’t bad. End of story.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the economy and of people feeling prosperous when it comes to how they prefer to vote. If you’re someone in the keyboard class who has seen your wages, house value, stock portfolio and net worth rise, then you have to understand the flipside of that equation for people who haven’t. And you have to understand the messaging from the Biden administration has ignored and even derided those people — while Trump’s messaging is resonating with them.

He’s telling them that they’re right to feel the way they feel. You’re telling them they’re wrong.

If you can understand something about the average Trump voter, understand that they’re very tired of being told they’re stupid racists, and they have the same basic goals and desires you do. They want to prosper and see their children live in a better world.

They also disagree with you — something else you have in common. It doesn’t mean they’re evil. It means they have a different view. If you’re still struggling to put yourself in their shoes to understand their differences, then maybe it’s a problem you have with empathy.

The alternative is that you have 70+ million people in a tribe who are evil racists your tribe needs to destroy. Not a great outlook.