Eavesdropping on a pollster phone conversation with Estelle, a "Main Street? Trump voter. She's a mother of three, works for the DMV in Jefferson City, MO, [and is a completely fictional person]:
Yes. I voted for Biden in '20, but, yes, I voted for Trump today.
Why did I vote for Biden? I don't remember. I guess because he seemed kind. He reminded me of my grandpa.
Would I have voted for Biden if he was running this time? Maybe. I haven't thought about it much. He is really old.
Why do I like Trump? Not sure. Maybe because he's rich and famous, but he's not a snob. He talks like a lot of people I know. He makes me feel that he's one of us despite his being such a big shot.
Harris and Walz? They're ok, I guess, but, I don't know–they're just so ordinary. And besides, I just can't stand the people who are rooting for them, like my holier-than-thou, woke sister-in-law. I don't want to see that bitch win.
Sure, it bothers me a little that Trump might be a little loose with the money rules and cheats on his wife, but he's a TV star. He's rich and famous, and the rich and famous play by different rules. Melania doesn't seem to mind. And the Democrats are just as bad, they're just more secretive and hypocritical about it.
Abortion? Sure some of the religious kooks are going too far, but it's not a problem in my state. And besides, I'm never gonna need an abortion and neither will my daughter. She's a good girl. When I watch these so-called feminists ranting on TV, that's just not me. That's such a turn off.
E. Jean Carroll? Who's she?
As far as January 6 is concerned, I don't understand what the big deal is. How is it any different from the riots after George Floyd's death? Those were good people on January 6th fighting for what they thought was right. I don't personally think the election was stolen, but they sincerely did. Who knows? Maybe some of them went a little too far, but it was in a good cause. They were very sincere, and they've been treated so unfairly.
The documents in Mara Lago? Again, what's the big deal? They found the same stuff at Biden's and Pence's place. It's just political persecution, if you ask me.
Is Trump a security threat? What are you talking about? He's the president.
The generals? Well of course, they don't like him. They're all part of the Deep State that has been trying to get rid of him since forever.
Will he be a dictator on Day 1? Oh come on. He's just playing. He wants to get the Democrats all worked up.
Deporting the immigrants? He's just going to do it to the bad ones. I have neighbors who are lovely, hard-working people from Mexico. They came to America legally. So should everyone else.
Yes, he should go after his political enemies. That won't bother me one bit.They've been so unfair to him. They need to be held accountable.
What's the point of this exercise? Partly that I want to humanize the Trump voter. Estelle is modeled on a family friend of my wife, a warm, slightly zany, salt-of-the earth lady, not from Missouri but from the Bronx. She died years ago, but she's exactly the kind of person who would vote for both Biden in one cycle and Trump in another. And it's lots and lots of people like her–not racist xenophobes–who pushed Trump over the top.
So I'm not upset that a candidate with whom I have policy disagreements won this election, but I am deeply disturbed that someone who is so egregiously and obviously unfit won it. So here we have Estelle, a very nice, decent person who nevertheless believes that someone who is borderline criminally insane is fit to be president of the United States. How is this possible? Well, she lives in a silo of misinformation that just washes over her. She's not super political, but she's very impressionable. She does not believe that Trump is criminally insane–how could he be? He's president of the United States. That's impossible. So anybody who says he is says it only for partisan, political reasons–people like her bitch sister-in-law.
The point is not to blame people like Estelle but to grapple with the reality that democracy is not giving us the leadership we need at a time that's critical for the human future. I want democracy to survive, but clearly any system that can give us Trump twice–twice– is beyond broken. If we were some small country in the southern hemisphere, it wouldn't matter so much. We could find a way to live with a tin-pot dictator. But we're America. The world depends on our having relatively sane, competent, morally mature leadership. We're too big to fail.
Somehow, some way, we have to come up with something better because the stakes are too high, and the role that the U.S. plays in the world is too critical. We are confronting two unprecedented global crises in the not-too-distant future–eco-catastrophe and a technological singularity. We can't leave managing our way into the future to crackpot moral morons like Musk and Trump and religious nuts like Mike Johnson. We need sane, competent, morally mature leaders who can work with sane, competent, morally mature leaders in other countries to confront these issues in a sane, competent, morally mature way. And the great powers are producing exactly the opposite kind of leaders.
So the question for me is how do we get from insanity to sanity. I refuse to believe it's impossible. We're not talking utopia here, but we are talking about the future viability of the human race. Why is there so little sense of urgency about this? It's as if we're all sleepwalking. How big a disaster must we suffer to wake us up?
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