In the post-election transition period and the first head-spinning days of Donald Trump’s second administration, some observers have noted that Trump’s oft-repeated campaign promise to reduce consumer prices has completely disappeared. Indeed, Trump airily waved off the promise in a December interview, saying that reducing prices would be “very hard” and then adding vaguely: “But I think that they will.” Reassuring words indeed.
For those of us who have said all along that inflation (the rate of increase in consumer prices) can come down—which it did during the last two years of the Biden administration—but that bringing actual prices levels down (known as deflation) could only be done by inducing an economic depression, Trump’s abandonment of that particular promise is good news as a policy matter.
Even so, it is infuriating as a political matter, because Trump himself has claimed that he won the election by successfully exploiting voters’ anger about grocery prices. And he did so in his inimitably self-aggrandizing yet oblivious way: “I won on groceries. Very simple word, groceries. Like almost—you know, who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries…. I won an election based on that.”
But what about Trump’s voters? Have they shown any anger or even mild annoyance that they are not going to receive that supposedly fundamental boon from a Trump restoration? Not at all. Nor have they seemed bothered by the new administration’s surprise moves on a number of other fronts. Buried in the blizzard of headlines that I have skimmed over in recent days was a quote along the lines of “Who voted for this?” referring to Trump’s cut in spending for cancer research. Which would be a good question in normal times. Today? Not so much, because the idea of political accountability has become quaint, if not laughable.
In any presidential transition, there is inevitably some slippage between campaign rhetoric and actual governing. For example, after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign was laser-focused on “fear, smears, and queers” (as former Senator Al Franken phrased it so memorably in his book-length description of the Bush campaign), Bush claimed a mandate to partially privatize Social Security. (Happily, he failed.) Even so, Bush did not completely abandon any of his campaign promises in the way that Trump has.
So what is different now, and why? In particular, what do we know about Trump’s voters (who accounted for 49.8 percent of the total votes cast in 2024), given that they seem to have no problem with grocery prices after all?
Religious Commitment Cannot Explain Trump’s Voters
“What Would Jesus Do? Law, Religion, and Patriotism Through the Looking Glass,” which I published yesterday here on Verdict, focused on Trumpists’ reaction to the Episcopalian Bishop of Washington’s calls for Christian mercy toward weak and vulnerable people. I described that reaction as a turning point in how we should understand the religious right in the U.S. Led by self-described “Bible-believing Christian” Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, America’s Trump-following Christians have now abandoned Jesus’s teachings and indeed now characterize Christian mercy and charity as “radical ideology.”
Their move eliminates the possibility of nonpartisan and nondenominational (or even nonreligious) agreement on core tenets of what it means to be a decent human being. It was one thing to embrace an unrepentant sinner like Trump for their own political purposes, but choosing Trump’s depredations over their own professed religious beliefs is truly revelatory (religious pun intended).
I should add here that the abandonment of the religious tenets that those so-called believers once so loudly professed is hardly the end of the story. The new administration, in its zeal to attack vulnerable people, has now announced that its immigration agents will no longer respect the boundaries of schools, hospitals, and churches. That’s right. The attack on “sanctuary cities” has now morphed into an attack on sanctuaries themselves. What had been a bedrock of American law to respect religious spaces is now gone, and the religious right seems not to mind a whit.
I Respect People Who Voted for Trump
But if it is not grocery prices or religious beliefs that keep Trump’s supporters in the fold, what could explain it? A week after the election, I published “Respecting Trump Voters and Abstainers Must Include Viewing Them as Responsible for Their Decisions, Not as Helpless Children” on Dorf on Law. My point there was that the pervasive post-election spin about people innocently voting for Trump because they were genuinely upset about grocery prices or their personal economic situations was profoundly condescending.
After all, that rationalization essentially says that people ignored everything that Trump said (and the incoherent, chaotic campaign in which he said it) and then went through the effort to vote for him because they were so angry that they could not think straight. I begged to differ, noting that sentient adults—even those who are busy with their own lives and do not spend their time in policy discussions—should be presumed to be able to say, “I’m angry, but I want a solution.”
Trump offered no solutions, however, saying only that he would somehow make good things happen. Moreover, the things that he told people he did want to do—especially imposing tariffs and deporting the people who are central to putting groceries on our tables—were obviously going to increase prices. This does not take a Ph.D. in economics to understand. If a person were not looking for an excuse to support Trump, whom they idolize for other reasons (none of them admirable, as I explain below), they would never support such an agenda.
Therefore, when pundits all but patted voters on their heads and said, “It’s not your fault, you just didn’t understand what you were getting us into,” they disrespected Trump’s supporters. Trump told people over and over again that he was out for revenge and that he viewed his opponents as enemies of the people who are “scum” and “the enemy within.” He never bothered to pretend that he was anything but what his critics described him to be. His apologists tried to say that “that’s just the way Trump talks” or that “people shouldn’t take him too seriously,” but that was obvious nonsense.
In short, I disagree with Trump’s voters, but I refuse to disrespect them by saying that they were hoodwinked. Some people voted against Kamala Harris or abstained from voting (which amounts to giving half a vote to Trump) specifically because she was a woman or nonwhite, while many others voted for Trump because they thrilled to what he was saying about inherently violent Others crossing the supposedly “open border.” For many of his voters, it was all of the above.
They also knew that boys are not in fact coming home from school having been turned into girls, but that also did not stop them from voting for Trump. Trump focused on the 0.6 percent of the population who are transgender, and his voters are getting what they want: pitiless repression of the smallest, most vulnerable group of people who simply want to live their lives with a modicum of dignity and freedom from fear.
Trump’s supporters voted for him because all of this is what they wanted. Trump represents their true beliefs. I respect that, even though I despair that anyone would hold such beliefs.
But What About People’s Pain—and the Polls?
Notwithstanding what I have written here, the pain that people have experienced is real. The pandemic caused prices to go up and disrupted people’s lives in other ways. And even though there was plenty of evidence that the United States was doing better under President Biden than any other country in the world—to the point where even a politically conservative British magazine called the U.S. economy “the envy of the world” shortly before the election—plenty of people are still barely getting by.
The problem is that the vast majority of people have barely been getting by for decades, with income and wealth inequality getting worse and worse in the U.S. and nearly elsewhere else. These people have voted for liberals and traditional conservatives in various elections over the years, but now enough of them voted for Trump to end the U.S. as we have known it. Most voters are fully capable of seeing through a charlatan, but enough of them nonetheless voted for Trump to put him back in the White House.
We are thus back to where we started, trying to understand what was different this time. We can, however, explain Trump’s support without resorting to infantilizing condescension toward his voters. Trump admitted to the largest television audience of the campaign that he merely had “concepts of a plan” to change the American health care system, and he had even less specific ideas about everything else.
Even so, we have all seen exit polls saying that Trump’s voters told interviewers that they were motivated by grocery prices and economic pain. Should we not respect their own words? Trust is a fine starting point, but it can also be naïve to take people’s statements at face value. After all, Trump’s voters knew that it would be awkward to say to a stranger’s face: “I voted for Trump because I’d never vote for a woman of color,” or “I voted for Trump because I hate anyone who is not a White person born in America.” They therefore said something that made them seem sympathetic, which allowed them to avoid having to justify their support for Trump.
The tragedy is made worse by the likelihood that the return of Trump will make people feel much less embarrassed in coming years about openly admitting their bigotries. Future opinion polling might then become much more honest, but at the cost of a further coarsening of American life.
These voters knew what they wanted, and they also knew exactly what they did not want: a Black/Indian woman as president and a bunch of people in power who punch up instead of punching down. Others have pointed out that Trump’s supporters have rallied behind Trump because he hates the people that they hate. Why would we not imagine that they are now getting exactly what they want?
In the end, all of the evidence before the election, during the transition, and in the ten days since Trump returned to the White House tells us that the 2024 election was won by haters. I find it unbearably sad that there is so much hate in the world and that so many people are willing to give up democracy and the rule of law in order to empower a president who will harm their perceived enemies.
In short, I do not respect the hate. To the contrary, it is deeply depressing to see hatred win. But I can respect the haters at least enough to believe that they knew what they wanted, that they knew who would give it to them, and that they knew what to say and what not to say to pollsters.
This is all heartbreaking. Even though I have been among the most pessimistic public commentators in the years since Trump’s emergence, witnessing that pessimism being validated (and then some) is still painful. But is there reason for optimism hidden in the current gloom?
Surprisingly, the answer is yes. In November, I ended the second part of a series of columns with this:
In Part Three of this series, I will offer some thoughts that I hope might be helpful to those who do end up staying [in the United States rather than expatriating], even though there is no sugarcoating the current situation. Many countries have gone through truly bleak periods, and the U.S. is now set to join that tragic list. But it will be useful to think about how the tide might turn. More to come.
It has taken me more than two months since then to sort through some thoughts about that essential question. In a Verdict column next week, I will begin to try to offer a glimmer of optimism—or if not optimism, at least some reasons to fight the understandable urge to give up hope.
