CAN'T DO THE TIME, DON'T DO THE CRIME

Pretty much every week, a national news outlet discovers that Trump’s base still likes Trump.  Well of course they do.  These are the folks who think of themselves as “real Americans.”  They believe that the country belongs to them, and they resent the hell out of people who are different than they are, including minorities, immigrants, and better educated white people, whom they suspect of looking down on them. 

Trump’s base didn’t vote for him because they thought he was a nice guy, or because they thought he’d pivot towards mainstream Republican politics when he got to the White House.  They don’t care about the hundreds of petty, stupid, malicious things he’s done in his first two months on the job.  All they want is for him to make life miserable for the people they hate – immigrants, minorities, and educated white snobs.  They enjoy watching him fuck shit up.  As long as he keeps doing that, his base will stick with him until the roof caves in.  Which it may well do, once the impact of the Trump-Republican budget hits home.  Until then, they’ll greet Trump’s mistakes with cries of “fake news.”

So along comes David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, who notes that while Donald Trump ran populist campaign, he’s governing (to the extent that what he’s done can be called governing) like a typical Republican.  That means he’s in the process of screwing over a lot of his working class supporters.  Brooks concludes by saying “it would be nice if the people who voted for Trump got economic support, not punishment.”

I don’t get it.  Why would that be nice?  Trump voters put an evil man in a position to do real harm to millions of people.  Even worse, lots of them were rooting for that outcome – as long as they thought the damage would be inflicted on someone else.   Now the chickens are coming home to roost.  It won’t be fake news when they get that letter telling them that they’ve lost their health insurance, or that they can keep their insurance, but the premiums have doubled. 

I’ll reserve some compassion for misguided Trump voters, but they’re at the bottom of my sympathy list.  If Trump’s policies are going to cause suffering, why shouldn’t the ones who brought him to power bear the brunt of it?