The C Word

After Donald Trump was elected the first time, the notorious liberal media were very understanding. On my social media, I saw a number of chastened big-brains reaching out to little-brains who had voted for the big salami. They felt that they had been deficient in understanding their fellows. They were tortured by the thought that their own attitudes might be tainted by arrogance, privilege, worst of all conceivable possibilities: smugness. I was there, meaning I was online, when one of them cast her net out into the storm, and a wee-brained Trumper stepped forward and said, yeah, he voted for Trump, and he’d do it again. He had to, because he was a working man living in coal country, and he felt left behind and disrespected by the Beltway Establishment to which Trump was now going to administer a sorely needed whupping. Thank you, said the pundit, please, tell me more about your situation, and about what we have done wrong to make you feel this way. Well, he said, as I suppose you know, coal is a dying industry. It was healthy and on the rise eight years ago, but then Obama got in and set out to destroy coal country by imposing unneeded and burdensome regulations. And what made it so personally distressing, he went on, was knowing that he was doing it deliberately and maliciously. Obama was doing it, even going so far as to pretend to believe that climate change was real, to hurt the white people he rose in the morning despising and went to bed at night after having spent the day growing his racist hatred of honest white laboring men into a blazing inferno of hate. To have spent much time since 2009 in places where Trump voters dwell is to know that there are many such stories in Shithole Gulch.

When Trump got in again in 2024, the media exploded with op-eds and think pieces and interviews with that one barely-moderate Democratic Senator who got elected in a red state, all wagging their finger at readers and hissing the same warning: do not condescend against the Trump voters. They had been condescended to for too long, by too many snooty people, and now they were the Establishment. Spare your soul from damnation, we were told, and possibly buy yourself a small say in how this new country would be run, by denying yourself the cheap, cold thrill of condescending to them. I have made the acquaintance of a great many Trump voters. I have gotten to know scores of them, in my family, at work, at the gym. I have experienced countless more of them in passing. I have condescended to nary a one of them. I do loathe all the omni-destructive pumpkin-headed pieces of shit, which, I cannot stress enough, is not condescension.

I have seen a lot of attempts to analyze and understand Trump voters that have struck me as condescending, and they are the ones contributed to the general discourse by people trying to say they were wrong not to know what was going on in the country, that they respected these people different from themselves with their strange views and relatable habits, and they wanted to know more. During Trump’s first term there was, famously, a growth industry in articles recording conversations intrepid explorers had with Trump voters, and the people they talked to seemed enough like the people I know to convince me that what the big-city rubes mostly learned was what it feels like when a small-town cracker meets a sophisticate with his heart melting all over his sleeve and decides to shine him on, for shits and giggles.

One big lesson I heard about a million times was that, while Americans might disagree about the shape the country is in and what might be done about it, Trump voters had “valid concerns”, often economic in nature, that was weighing on them and twisting their thinking apparatus into balloon animals. I am as sure that the wandering journalists accurately relayed what was said to them as I am certain that what was said to them was bullshit. But there is a nuance to it. The Trump voter might well indicate that he was concerned about the job market, and the reporter interpreted this to mean that only Trump seemed to really care about hooking these sturdy yeoman up with steady jobs. This was then fleshed out into an righteous diatribe from the reporter about how Hillary Clinton had driven the working people who ached for an excuse to vote for her to distraction and despair, because she ignored them and never talked about jobs. “He talked about jobs, Jackie!” the faded comedic icon turned MAGAfied raving racist lunatic Roseanne Barr bleated at her sister in the inaugural episode of her rebooted TV sitcom. But as anyone who spent their time following the campaigns of the major candidates in 2016 instead of staring meaningfully into the eyes of Lutie and Tater—I was born in Louisiana and grew up in Mississippi, and these are actual names of actual cousins of mine, for which I do not expect to take any shit—Hillary Clinton did talk about jobs. She talked about job training and the need to meet the information economy halfway in a landscape that had been changing for some time and was not going to stop. The Trump voters of small-town America did not want to hear any of that. They wanted to hear that they couldn’t find good-paying jobs because filthy immigrants who Democrats had smuggled across the border to cast illegal votes for them got first pick of everything. And that’s where Donald Trump’s personal magic came through for them.

Do I know everyone in America who voted for and professes to love Donald Trump? I already know way the fuck more of them that I would prefer, so the answer is plainly, no. Is there a single one of the, I’m gonna say hundreds, of the Trump voters I do know who are not racist, stupid, mean as snakes, paranoid, conspiratorial, detached from reality, and eager to watch the world burn with their children in it if the only alternative is to allow people they hate for reasons having to do with nationality or sex or skin color and big-braininess to share the country with them and live out their lives in peace and as much prosperity as they can gather around themselves? Uh, no. Do they give a single infinitesimal fuck if they themselves die in poverty and squalor? They do not, so long as those other people are doing no better.

The single funniest thing in the world has to be the progressive-minded game-changer motherfuckers who dream of crafting a shared language that will enable them to help the Trump voters make that leap their souls cry out for, the moment when they recognize that what they want is radical change, and if they’d just break the cycle and vote for, I don’t know, Bernie Sanders, then they could all levitate into the promised land together. It is now gospel among some of them that my cousins and co-workers and fellow gym rats were driven to hold their noses and vote for Trump because of their very reasonable hatred of the corrupt and feeble Corporate Democrats, and if only the DNC hadn’t rigged things and Bernie, the most popular man in the world, had been their candidate, all them would have voted for him in a heartbeat. Uh, no. Just trust me on this, no. I have broken bread and stood at the next urinal with these people, and motherfucking no. Another jukebox classic goes, “If we could only get through to them that they are mysteriously voting against their own interests!” As the Trump cultists I know see it, they 100% are not. Their interests are white male supremacy and hating people with college degrees, and that matters more to them than anything. They are content to be spottily employed, catastrophically in debt, and unable to afford a doctor’s care so long as they and their children get… that other thing, the thing Trump serves them on a silver platter whenever he promises to ship all the brown people the fuck away from here before they can sneak into their backyard and fricassee their cat. If you’re capable of abstract thinking about solid matters, you can see them as idealists who won’t sacrifice their principles for wealth and comfort.

The ultimate recipient of the good warm-hearted media establishment’s condescension is JD Vance. JD is a bad person with a limited, snout-like brain. But when that memoir I never could finish showed up in stores and he started tweeting about how it pained him to see his own people falling for Trump’s conman spiel, a shitload of credentialed professional thinkers and wordsmiths fell for him like a ton of bricks. His appeal was that of someone with an exotic background who had run the gauntlet—Yale, law clerk, venture capitalist, mentored by fellow niche literary-nonfiction celebrity Amy “Tiger Mother” Chua—and was not in a position to explain the hicks to the swells. To understand both the nature of Young JD’s appeal back then and the value of his message, it is important to understand that it wasn’t his book that wowed his new friends, it was his own credentials. He was a freak-show display that could also be welcomed into the club; if he’d been able to write as well as Harry Crews or Larry Brown or Charles Willeford but didn’t know the secret Yale handshake, his book would have just sat their and stank.

When I tried to read the thing, I recognized Vance’s specific species of hustler when I got to the passage about how his relatives hated Barack and Michelle’s ever-loving guts, but not because they were racist, gosh no; they hated anybody who’d gotten over-educated and too big for their britches and had probably been to the opera. This sort of thing is very impressive to people who are abnormally sensitive about their own education and privileges and want to make it clear that they’d turn down an invitation to the Met if they found out someone had just dropped a bunch of old Hee Haw episodes on YouTube. But one of the first thing you learn growing up in Mississippi is that no one, absolutely literally bar none no one, ever goes a quarter of an inch out of their way to explain to you that this person who might look kind of racist to a judgmental outsider is in fact not racist at all unless the person in question is in fact racist as fuuuuuuck! But it can be hard for the weak-minded and unprincipled to just let go of the people they loved before they knew any better. After Vance had established himself as a racist lying pigfucker without a shred of integrity and many times less dignity, George Packer was still writing him tear-stained love letters in the legacy media: “With his gifts of intellect and rhetoric, Vance might have brought the country’s conflicting strands together,” he sobbed, sounding like an Ivy Leaguer who’d come to the provinces to teach English to the peons and whose prize student had just burned his epic poem and announced he was going off to the West Coast to write porn. It makes you wish someone would sit the poor fella down and spend an afternoon explaining human beings and the real world to him. I’d do it myself, but I’m afraid I might come off sounding condescending.