“This isn’t what Americans voted for.”
Everybody says this when Donald Trump does something stupid or awful. My friend Jonah Goldberg says it from time to time. John Bolton said it on a recent edition of the Dispatch Podcast.
With all due respect to my friends and colleagues and for their desire to take a charitable view of their fellow citizens, and with equally due contempt for Rolling Stone et al.:
Americans are not stupid: Americans know damned good and well that whom we’re voting for is what we’re voting for. We do not have the excuse of ignorance or stupidity.
And Americans are not timid little weaklings pushed into a corner by the big bad world and forced to turn to an erratic would-be caudillo to protect us from … Canada and Denmark. On any given Monday morning, a comfortable majority of the world’s 100 most valuable companies—and 30-odd of the world’s 50 most valuable companies—are U.S. firms. (Saudi Aramco sneaks in at No. 6, Taiwan Semiconductor at No. 9, and Tencent at No. 16; Europe doesn’t show up until LVMH down at No. 27.) The United States has 4.2 percent of the world’s population and 26 percent of the world’s economic output. The United States has more military resources than the rest of the top 10 players combined. The annual revenue of the 20 largest U.S.-based companies easily exceeds the GDP of any country except China or the United States itself. Sweden, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates are rich countries, and none has an economy as large as Walmart’s annual revenue. If CVS were a country, it would be a crappy country—but its economy would be larger than Egypt’s.
Our economy, already gigantic, has been outperforming supposed peers for decades and currently is growing at three times the rate of the United Kingdom and more than twice as fast as those of Canada, Switzerland, or France. We have more nuclear weapons ready to go than any other country in the world, more people than any country except China and India. We have about 6 percent of the world’s land but 30 percent of its wealth, more than all of Europe and Japan combined.
If the United States cannot afford to act like a decent country, then no country can.
And perhaps that nihilism—the conviction that human decency is too expensive—is what is at the heart of Trumpism and its hold over both the Republican Party and a large enough share of the U.S. population to win elections.
Trump was not elected to help people—economic growth during the first Trump administration was exactly the same as it was in the Obama years (please apply the usual caveats about presidents and economic performance) and less than during the Biden, George W. Bush, or Clinton administrations. American farmers were even reduced to taking supplementary federal handouts because Trump’s idiotic trade wars wrecked their export markets. That isn’t what help looks like.
Trump was elected to hurt people.
The creed of cruelty is nearly universal among Trump loyalists. Of course, they don’t put it that way, but ask them and they will tell you the truth in spite of themselves: Trump was elected by people who resent this or that group for its status, its wealth, its influence, its political power, its class condescension, etc., and electing Trump—again—was a way to get back at “them,” “the media,” “elites,” etc. Nobody voted for Trump for policy reasons, because he has no policies, only tantrums. Nobody voted for Trump for philosophical reasons, because he has no philosophy beyond, “I am your retribution.” The excitable ladies and gentlemen over at The Daily Wire sell “Leftist Tears” mugs, and there’s a reason for that. The tears—of our fellow Americans, wrongheaded though they may be in their politics—are what this is all about. Forget policy—those tears are the deliverable, the only one that really matters.
It is time—well past time—to stop making excuses for Americans: for Americans’ cruelty, for Americans’ selfishness, for Americans’ childish insistence on being led by their resentment and by their lowest instincts.
Trump did not trick Americans into electing him—there never has been, and never could be, any question about what sort of man he is: What else could you make of a thrice-married serial bankrupt borderline illiterate fantasist who before the presidency was best known for having appeared in a reality show franchise, a short string of pornographic films, and however many pro-wrestling programs? What new depths are there to be plunged by Donald Trump, who ended his last term in office with an attempted coup d’état? From 2017 to 2021, the Trump administration offered a clown-car parade of lying, lawlessness, incompetence, imbecility, corruption, cruelty, kookery, cowardice, and so much whining that you’d think they’d be sick of whining even though they weren’t. There was nobody eligible to vote in 2024 who wasn’t walking the Earth in the first Trump administration.
This is what they voted for.
Of course Trump wants to imitate Vladimir Putin, with Canada and/or Greenland and/or Panama as his Ukraine; of course he’s already talking about a third term—if Xi Jinping can be president of China for life, then Trump must at least be able to violate the constitutional limit on terms to keep up; of course he is openly using his position to enrich his family and his cronies through dodgy crypto nonsense—Putin is rumored to be possibly the wealthiest man in the world and he didn’t get that way from savvy investments in tech startups; of course Trump is locking people up without any regard for due process or any other aspect of the law—that is how the men he thinks of as his peers do it, and he himself is, let us not forget, a literal criminal.
Elect a game show host, get a game show host. Elect a criminal, get a criminal. Elect a coup plotter, get a coup plotter. And, as a bonus, you also get an administration full of sycophants and henchmen who are themselves criminals and coup plotters and others who are simply comfortable working with criminals and coup- plotters and maybe prefer to do so. No amount of Fox News bluster or National Review turd-polishing is going to change that. Them’s the facts, as plain and as visible as the sun.
Americans are not children. Americans are not mentally disabled. Americans are whole and complete human beings, and, as voters, they are morally culpable for the decisions they make—especially when they make that decision twice.
And as Americans look out into the world—or look inward with honest eyes—we may begin to appreciate that the fundamental problem isn’t that our country is reviled under the current administration—the problem is that it deserves to be.
As somebody wrote way back in May 2016: You asked for this. And you got what you asked for.
