Did Trump Voters Want This?

The answer isn’t “no.”

Image: Quinn Dombrowski, CC

At the end of last week we learned that the Trump administration has apparently deported a 2-year-old American citizen with no due process.

I do not really have the ability to adequately express how horrific this is. The judge in the case, Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, also seems enraged and disgusted.

Doughty here probably voted for Trump, of course. He seems pretty convinced that agents deporting American children without trial is bad. He presumably does not think it is what he voted for.

Is he right?

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Some things Trump voters didn’t vote for

Voters—even well-informed voters like Doughty—tend to vote in ways that do not necessarily make a lot of sense. Voting is mostly driven by identity, especially partisan identities and racial identities. Policies factor in to some degree, but more often those policies are excuses rather than drivers.

In other words, people will decide to vote for a person (say, Trump) for reasons of identity (say, because the are white Republicans) and then will back and fill policy “reasons” to justify their vote. (For example, they might say they voted for Trump to solve the crisis at the border, which does not in fact exist.)

Trump is a very bad politician, which means, among other things, that he doesn’t really know what voters expect of him (because he doesn’t listen to them at all) and is in any case incapable of paying attention to policy in enough detail to even attempt to give voters what they want. In that context, I think it is the case that there are some policies and initiatives which Trump voters really did not vote for and can say with a fairly clear conscience that they did not want.

Thus, I do not think Trump voters cast their ballots to gut the VA, or to destroy Social Security, or to end FEMA and disaster preparedness. These are things Trump did not promise to do in the campaign; on the contrary, he promised to do better than Biden on disaster aid, and he claimed he would not touch Social Security. You can certainly say that Trump voters were bounders and fools to trust him to keep his promises here. But being fooled isn’t exactly a moral failure. On these issues, Trump set out to fool his voters, as he set out to fool those who enrolled in Trump University. He scammed them, and being scammed is not the fault of the people who are scammed. It’s the fault of those doing the scamming.

And some things they did

On immigration and deportation, however, the calculus is a little different. Trump said repeatedly that he would deport huge numbers of people; the exact figure varied, but sometimes it got as high as 30 million—a terrifying number. He demonized immigrants too in inflammatory and ugly ways—lying about legal Haitian immigrants and saying that they were eating people’s pets, for instance, even as state Republican officials in Ohio begged him to stop.

Trump made it very clear that he wanted to harm vulnerable people who he considered subhuman and disposable. And people who voted for him knew that. They pulled the lever hoping he would hurt those they too considered subhuman and disposable.

Now, I think many Trump voters didn’t necessarily realize the extent of Trump’s hatred. Luterhan pastor Martin Niemöller cheered on Hitler hoping he would get the Jews, and then was horrified when Hitler went after, not just practicing Jews, but Jewish Lutheran converts. Similarly, I think a lot of Trump voters were hoping he would go after immigrants who deserved to suffer, and have been startled that Trump defines “immigrants who deserve to suffer” as “two-year old American citizens who aren’t white.”

I am glad that Niemöller was willing to protect Jewish converts, and that he eventually figured out that supporting Hitler was a mistake. But I don’t think it’s right to say that Niemöller’s support for Hitler was a mistake. Niemöller hated Jews; Hitler promised to make hating Jews policy. Hitler kept his promise; Niemöller just belatedly realized that the hatred in his own heart was in fact hatred, and led inevitably to escalating atrocities.

In the same way, Trump voters (like presumably Judge Doughty) pulled the lever in the voting booth in the name of hatred and persecuting immigrants. That was Trump’s promise, and everyone, including I think low information voters, knew that that was Trump’s promise. Harming immigrants was the core theme of Trump’s campaign; it received a great deal of coverage. At the very least, you wouldn’t vote for him without figuring that it was okay for the government to target immigrants—and non-white people—if it wanted to, as a treat.

The problem with letting Trump voters off the hook

Even if Trump voters did a Niemöller and did in fact vote for atrocities and bigotry, wouldn’t it be wiser (as many argue) not to press the issue? If Judge Doughty (like Niemöller before him) is willing to turn on the regime that brung him, shouldn’t that be sufficient? Why insist on emphasizing moral culpability for (six months’) past actions when what we need to do is build a coalition going forward?

I think we should certainly applaud Doughty, and welcome anyone who wants to oppose Trump. But if we’re going to defeat fascism, we need to be clear what fascism we are fighting. It’s not enough to say, “Okay, well, bigotry and hatred of immigrants is fine up to a point, but we need to delimit that more carefully. Let’s put rules in place that make it okay to murder practicing Jews, but not Jewish converts. Then all will be well!”

Trump called on people to vote for hate. And they voted for hate. And now we are living in a fascist authoritarian nightmare. We will not get out of that nightmare by insisting that we need to protect only the best victims, and that as long as we do that, we can throw everyone else into slave labor camps or the nearest convenient ditch.

As Niemöller eventually realized, hate and fascism take you only one place. We need to make it clear that the targeting of toddlers, the elimination of due process, the arrest of judges—these are not accidental technical cases of overreach. This is what Trump promised; this is what you get when you demonize your neighbors and wallow in a self-aggrandizing orgy of hate.

Yes, Trump voters voted for this. And if we want to ever get this country to a better place, those voters need to understand that Trump, in this area at least, did not betray them. They betrayed themselves. And worse, they betrayed that two-year old child.