I will start this off with a few paragraphs from the New York Times‘ Michelle Goldberg, who was part of a feature where several Times opinion writers summed up Trump 2.0’s first 50 days.

During the first Trump term, I would sometimes have to catch myself because even though I thought and think that Trump is uniquely despicable and dangerous, the fact remains that if you just want to look at the number of lives lost and global damage done, George W. Bush really outstripped him. Trump is maybe a worse person, but the damage that he did in his first term was much more contained.

I think that in the second Trump term he’s changed that very quickly. Not just by taking America’s soft power and setting it on fire in all sorts of ways, but really making these abrupt decisions that are going to kill hundreds of thousands and maybe more than a million people and he’s doing it in this incredibly arbitrary, careless way.

In 2018 during Trump 1.0, she said this:

I think a lot of people feel sort of harassed because this false equivalency that has dominated so much of the coverage of the Trump administration — that basically equates an actor saying a bad word with white nationalists marching around with semi-automatic weapons on their backs and saying ‘oh look, both sides are participating in the death of civility’ — is maddening to people. And it also maddening to people to constantly be told to worry about not just their own actions and the results of their own actions buy how will their actions influence some imaginary Trump voter who they’re trying to win over in the mid-terms.

I think people can’t live like that. They can’t live in the way we’re constantly overly solicitous of the feelings of these alienated white people and contemptuous of the feelings of the majority of the people who find this administration intolerable.

I am going to tie the two Goldberg quotes together here by noting that back during Trump 1.0, the strange affliction that infected moderates, including some I know personally, of both-siderism continued to rage despite the terribleness of Donald Trump. You see, if you say that a racist, divisive person with racist, divisive signs in their front yard is a racist, divisive person, then you, Mr./Mrs. Left of Center, are the same as the person you are criticizing. Often, this was based on nothing more than getting the sads over people arguing at backyard barbeques that Black folks being murdered by cops is bad or whatever.

Now, during Trump 2.0, this strange urge to equate, I don’t know, a person hating policies that hurt fellow Americans with those getting off on policies that hurt fellow Americans seems to have lessened just 50-ish days into our Four-Year National Nightmare. Indeed, Trump’s policies this time around are likely to end up literally killing a large number of people both here and abroad. But at the risk of contradicting what I just wrote, I am going to offer a request for a little empathy for a small percentage of people who voted for the Rotting Orange Winter Squash.

I would guess that out of the total electorate that voted in 2024, roughly 10%-15% voted for Trump because they were fooled or poorly informed. I would bet they don’t consider themselves MAGA. Here is one example: a federal parks worker who voted for Trump because she believed his promise of free IVF and instead lost her job in the DOGE massacre.

One of my neighbors expressed regrets to me in 2018, voted for Trump, and immediately experienced buyer’s remorse. He was not fooled into voting for Trump in 2024, but I think of him often. He had lost a good job when a large employer closed up shop and had to accept a lower-paying job. He thought maybe Trump could do something better and very quickly found out that Trump couldn’t care less about people like him.

There are plenty of these stories. Given the fact that we very well may be witnessing so much damage done to nation that it could be years before we recover fully, if at all, it is easy to feel schedenfraude and Fuck Around and Find Out about these people. However, if we indeed ever have free elections again, we are going to need those people on our side.

I am far from one of those naive optimists who believe gosh darn it, if we only try, we can get the evil, mean people to see the light and be kind. The rest of the electorate who voted for Trump are absolutely not reachable. Yes, 35-40 percent of Americans are hard-core racists and mean-spirited monsters who delight in the pain of others. Whether it’s in your DNA or not to think that way, reality doesn’t give a shit, kiddo. There are cruel people on that other side; in fact, one of them just died, and no post-death hosannas about his supposedly being bipartisan will change that fact.

But for the rest, they were lied to and believed it. A lot of the problem wasn’t that they were stupid. Some of it was the media reporting everything that projectile-vomited out of Trump’s lying liar mouth as straight fact without questioning it. Trump said he’d fix grocery prices right away, give out free IVF for people wanting to start a family, and be laser-focused on making the economy work for the middle class.

Of course, none of this is happening, and Trump/Musk are moving at light speed to destroy the economy and our basic rights in ways that might be called alarmist if you predicted it just six months ago. So, people who believed the lies due to the hope that things might become better for them and never really heard the media push back on it are shocked by what is happening.

And yes, they should have remembered what Trump was like the first time around. But human memory is an unreliable narrator, and some people have a hard time with that reality, so they trust their memories.

The point of all this, again, is that we will need these people for the next election. Those are the voters to target in 2026. As tempting as it might be, we can’t dismiss them.

The last word goes to Aaron Neville.