Reporter's Notebook

I want to reply angrily to rural Trump voters: “Well I hope it feels good. And I hope it still feels good four years from now, when you’re still as economically depressed, neglected and looked down upon as you are today, and meanwhile millions of undocumented workers, Syrian refugees, Ukrainians, NATO allies, and poor people from other countries who had better jobs thanks to free trade agreements have suffered through the first term of President Donald Trump. I hope that big Fuck You you delivered last Tuesday still makes you feel great. Like, you really stuck it to us.”

Then, with condescending sarcasm, I want to remind them, as they moan about machines and foreigners taking their good, secure jobs that pay decent living wages, that the American Dream is open to all people. And that if they just buckled down and worked harder, stayed out of trouble and laid off the meth, I’m sure as heck they’d get ahead and succeed, just like I have.

This is my snobbery in full effect. Let’s just get it out there, as I continue to spew ...

These are the people who preach Capitalism and the value of Competition in the marketplace. And to them I want to open my arms and say, “COME. COMPETE.” Come to The City and compete with us—the doers and makers of this society. We make the movies you watch, the shows you stream, the video games you play, the Internet you surf.

And I get that maybe they’re resentful, but I’ve got some resentments of my own. See, I left my nothing town full of nobodies. I moved to Boston, got a job at an ad agency and worked my way up to creative director, making a six-figure salary and shooting commercials like a real-life Don Draper. It’s a pretty cool job by most people’s standards. And I didn’t get it because my parents knew somebody in the industry, or because I went to some elite college. I didn’t have an “In.” I just had talent and desire and I worked at it and it eventually worked out.

And working hard in my career isn’t where it all began. Before that I worked hard in school. And you know what? Most of the other kids I knew who worked hard in school are here in The City making stuff and making money. And maybe when we were working hard in school, you were making fun of us. And maybe it feels a little bit good to stick it to you.

I practice what you preach. I worked hard and I succeeded. If I espoused conservatism, I’d be what they call a Self-Made Man, a big success story. But because I’d like my success to help buoy others who haven’t had the same chances, I’m called an Elitist.

There’s a lot of generalizations here, of course. But a map of the United States divided into two colors is perhaps the greatest generalization of all. And I’m sure some will be offended by my words. This is not a scientific article, or even an op-ed designed to offer a defensible position, but merely a memoir combined with a rant under the guise of a confession.

But I wonder if some of it rings true for some of the folks reading this. And I wonder if a resentful person living in the country might see things from my point of view.

If it rings true to you, let us know and we’ll include: hello@theatlantic.com.

Personally I can relate to some of what Jon is saying. As an Army brat, I grew up all over the U.S. and a little abroad, but mostly in Kansas, where my dad retired to the countryside about 10 miles outside a town of just 5,000 people. My high school in that small town was a big step backwards for me academically (no A.P. classes, for one), having come from a well-funded public school in the Maryland suburbs. Socially the Kansas school was really isolating, because most of the students—who grew up together in a tight-knit community—didn’t relate to me much and didn’t really want to, especially given my awkward introversion at 14. I became miserable and resentful—mostly toward myself—and went to live with my mother, stationed in Georgia, for the second half of high school.

After college, I went straight to New York City—the extreme opposite of that Kansas town—and I’ve lived there and DC ever since. Those big cities definitely have their flaws, and the smug attitude and myopic political views of many New Yorkers get insufferable at times, but overall, there’s no other place I would have wanted to spend the past decade. The biggest reason? The vast diversity of people living there—diversity in all forms, but namely the array of places from which they came, across the U.S. and abroad. They came to the big city in their twenties to pursue a passion, work hard for an opportunity, and enjoy an endless stream of culture that extends well past Netflix. The people I most enjoy in NYC and DC aren’t from NYC and DC; they’re the ones who got out of their sleepy towns and dreary suburbs, at least for a while.

If you’ve lived in a small town your whole life, on the other hand, and you’d like to tell your story or vent your resentments to Jon, please drop us a note. Update from Susan:

Yes, Jon, we get it. But your choice to leave and become Don Draper does not invalidate the issues at hand. I tried your route. I got my fancy degrees and worked in the big city for a while. God bless all of you who can do it. I sure couldn’t. I couldn’t drive by the poverty and see the violence on the news while listening to my coworkers complain that their neighbors refuse to control their dandelions. I tried reading Malcolm X and signing up for Big Sisters, but in the end, I could not figure out a way to make a meaningful difference there, and I couldn’t live with the cognitive dissonance of a suburban existence.

So I moved back to northern Appalachia, on the opposite side of PA from you. This is Trump country. People want to work. They want to raise their kids, and in reality, most people can do that. Where it falls apart is with three main issues:

• Higher education. If your kid wants to go to college, and you are barely scraping by in a low cost-of-living place, there is no way to help him. This cost inflation is obscene, and it is entirely government caused.
• Health care. If you own or want to start a small business, ACA has become a boulder around the neck. Five years ago my insurance premium was $382. The quote for 2017 is over $1100. Again, it’s pretty easy to draw a straight line from the law to the premium.
• Retirement. No one really, truly wants to go back to working in the mill. But you could earn a living wage, and when you retired, you would have a decent pension. Those days are gone. This one gets blamed on free trade.

The reason you get called a snobby elitist is that we shouldn’t have to choose between an intolerable existence in the city, or poverty in God’s Country. We don’t want your six figures. We just want to live and for our kids to have some options when it’s their turn to make these choices.

Update from Paul:

Susan’s frustrations are valid but her comments are about the causes are not. I’m not aware of any evidence that supports the idea that the rising cost of college is caused by the government, that the ACA is what is driving private healthcare insurance costs up (in fact there’s some evidence to suggest that the ACA is slowing the otherwise normal rate of price increases), or that the government (Republican or Democratic) is responsible for the collapse of privately funded defined-benefit pensions.

All of these are real problems, but none of them can be easily solved by direct government action. I definitely agree that free trade killed a lot of older manufacturing companies in businesses with high labor costs and lower value add. The solution isn’t getting rid of free trade, which makes everyone poorer, it’s much more generous help for those displaced as a result.

If we want to reach common ground on our problems, it would help to have a more evidence-based discussion about the root causes.  This does not mean we'd reach complete agreement on all the root causes (ACA in particular is still too new to really deeply understand how it is affecting health care inflation rate), but I think it would certainly help.

Here’s some help from Reason’s Robby Soave regarding Susan’s contention that the federal government has caused college to become so expensive:

Long have liberals vowed to make higher education more affordable by offering ever more generous loan subsidies, and long have conservatives and libertarians argued that federal aid merely gives colleges license to drive up the price. A study by the New York Federal Reserve offers some new evidence that the latter group is correct. According to the study’s authors:

We find that institutions more exposed to changes in the subsidized federal loan program increased their tuition disproportionately around these policy changes, with a sizable pass-through effect on tuition of about 65 percent. We also find that Pell Grant aid and the unsubsidized federal loan program have pass-through effects on tuition, although these are economically and statistically not as strong.

The argument goes like this: Since government aid programs make it easier for students to pay the sticker price of admission, no matter how high that price rises, universities have every incentive to respond by charging more. The universities have little to worry about—they get paid up front, regardless of how difficult it is for the students to repay the government (or the government’s actual creditors: the U.S. taxpayer).

Here’s one more reader response, from Philip, who challenges both Jon and Susan:

I don’t usually like to write in, especially in a thread that I figure will probably have more of me (urban, liberal, Clinton voter) than of the people like Susan who are writing in with their more pro-Trump opinions. But I have issues with both the self-proclaimed liberal urban elitist and his respondent, so I might as well take the plunge.

To Jon, I ask, as Susan does, why he assumes they want to come to the city. I think it’s entirely fair that they don’t. People should have an opportunity for a good life wherever they want to live, not just by coming to the city to “compete.” And saying they’re all on meth (even if you acknowledge the condescending sarcasm) is really no better than Donald Trump calling Mexicans rapists. Both are hyperbole; neither is particularly helpful. They have legitimate concerns, and we should address them. We should have even if Hillary had won. They matter.

But that brings me to Susan. She points to three issues: health care (especially costs); higher education (especially costs); and retirement (and the lack of pensions nowadays). My question is where in the world she gets the idea that voting Republican will help on any of those points.

OK, I see that she thinks the ACA is responsible for rising health care costs. I have two big issues with that. One is that health care costs have been going up far longer than the ACA has been around, and they’ve gone up less with ACA than without it. The other is that most of the mechanisms for reducing costs for individuals under the ACA have been gummed up by precisely those Republican politicians she just empowered (more on this in a moment). Medicaid expansion for the poorest? Blocked by Republican governors, who then sued to not have to do it. Subsidies for those making too little to afford the exchanges without them? Not funded by a Republican Congress, which is suing to prevent the administration from paying the money out of general funds. Which of these two parties is trying to help with the cost of insurance? And of course, that’s without mentioning all the people (many in that same part of the country she lives in) who now have health insurance who couldn’t get it before.

On higher education: Susan is totally right that higher education costs are ridiculous. But what Republican policy does she think will help with that? Perhaps it’s true that the way the government currently runs educational grants inflates the price of college; I think it is too! But there are ways to help a kid going to college if you’re barely making minimum wage (itself an idea that Republicans tend to oppose of course ): all those dang grants. And of course, if you go to some colleges—elite and liberal and urban, mostly—they’re cheap or free for those making very little money.

On retirement: Those pensions aren’t coming back. But you know what’s still there? Social Security—which the Republicans tried to privatize the very last time they had the presidency. I think she’s wrong to blame the lack of pensions on free trade (it’s probably more the fault of companies ceasing to prioritize corporate citizenship and the duty to their workers over the bottom line—something our new president-elect is somewhat of an expert on), but even if she does, the Republicans are the ones taking out the safety net beneath it. Speaker Ryan has already started to do this with his Medicare proposal—which, by the way, he’s packaging as part of the ACA repeal. So the same people who riled up their base because they claimed the ACA would endanger Medicare are now endangering it themselves to get rid of the ACA.

Basically, my problem with Susan’s perspective comes down to this: For the past eight years, the Republicans have spent every ounce of energy trying to stop Obama, and by extension the Democrats, from governing, and from actually doing anything for people like her. But her response is to empower them by voting the obstructionists into even more power. It’s like a team that needs a field goal looking at Lucy swiping the ball away from Charlie Brown before he can kick it and saying “you know, that Charlie Brown just can’t kick. Let’s put Lucy in charge. I’m sure she’ll put the ball through the uprights.”

So the liberal elitist, Jon, is wrong to imply we shouldn’t care about red-state and red-county voters. But the respondent, Susan, is claiming that the people who put us in this situation are the people we should trust to get us out.

Update from Susan, who gets the final word here, if you’re still following along:

This is fun! Thanks. A couple of clarifications, if it’s relevant. Here’s the graph showing how government caused tuition increases:

What happened in 2010? Bankruptcy law was changed so that student loans can never be discharged. [Update from reader Darren: “I think the bankruptcy law change that she’s talking about is the one in 2005, and not 2010 like she states. Not sure where you’d want to put such a minor correction, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to point that out to y’all.] This complements the Reason research showing that student loans drive college cost increases.

Also, you will notice I never said that Republicans would or could fix any of these problems. The problem is that neither Republicans nor Democrats work for any of us out here in flyover country. They work for Wall Street, and Big Pharma, and Monsanto, and Big Oil, and the military/industrial complex.

And I didn’t vote for Trump. (I went for Gary Johnson.) My personal opinion is that the problem is corruption and crony capitalism, and more laws favor those with more lawyers. As long as people think one of the parties or some politician is going to help “we the people,” then they’ve got you fooled.

I understand why people voted for Trump; they are hoping that maybe, just maybe, he won’t be a politician.  

I’ve come to realize that at least some of the anger they have is about the fact that working-class people have been told for decades that they are the backbone of America. We need them to sacrifice their health and safety on the factory floor or in the mines. They are the important ones, in the American narrative, not those guys in the city behind desks.

The fact is, they were never that important. Oh, we needed workers, but we didn’t need to make blue-collar work sound like a religious calling. We did it because when you tell people that their work is important, they will do it for less money. This is a simple fact.

It’s the same reason we say teachers have important jobs. Not that teaching isn’t important, but the deification of teaching is mostly grounded in keeping wages down. Yes, you are doing the most important work … which is why we can’t pay you. But please, keep coming to the office because your job is very important.

The market should set wages for these jobs, but the political ritual of naming some groups as “important” can knock a good 10 grand off the prevailing wage. People will go into work because they want to feel important. They will accept less money with the idea the suffering is necessary. There’s a reason why nurses are called the backbone of the medical world instead of doctors, and it’s all about preventing certain employees from demanding their worth.

Really, rural America bought the lie about being very important. And now that there aren’t enough jobs there to keep up the lie, they feel deceived. They want to think they are important again. Instead of realizing that they had been lied to by politicians for decades, they decided to throw in with the politician lying to them now.

If you’d like to respond to that blunt assessment from Melissa, drop us a note and we’ll include. In the meantime, regarding her point about nursing, I emailed Melissa’s note to my mother—a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps and whose sister has been an ICU/ER nurse and nurse practitioner for nearly three decades—and she offered this on-the-go reply:

Nurses are the ones who actually take care of patients. They are the guardians against inappropriate or unsafe orders from physicians; the ones who actually observe changes in patient conditions; the ones who interpret to patients what the doctor says; the ones who are there to watch the family dynamics and who the patient advocates are. Nurses are the ones who really know how the patients are doing, not just what their numbers say. An experienced nurse can know when a patient is about to crash and often save lives, because they are with the patients all day long—not for a five-minute visit, maybe once a day, by a physician.  

And boy, do I agree with [Melissa]; we have deified blue-collar workers. Since we have not made the entry level to nursing a bachelor degree, we continue to treat all of them as blue-collar workers. Since it can be a very physically demanding job, we need strong people as well. (Hence her backbone metaphor.) But we don’t have enough men in nursing. It is still considered women’s work. Same with professional child care; we pay them so little but they have such an important role—raising new humans. It is so back assward.

Let me know if this is what you are looking for. Gotta go to earthquake training.

She lives in Portland, Oregon, and just finished 24 total hours of certification training to lead a neighborhood response team when The Big One hits. Speaking of earthquakes, and the urban-rural divide of Jon’s note, don’t miss Ron Brownstein’s latest piece:

The earthquake that elected Donald Trump has left the United States approaching 2020 with a political landscape reminiscent of 1920. Not since then has the cultural chasm between urban and non-urban America shaped the struggle over the country’s direction as much as today. Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and educational divides that explained Trump’s stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week, none proved more powerful than the distance between the Democrats’ continued dominance of the largest metropolitan areas, and the stampede toward the GOP almost everywhere else.

His piece includes this graph—“Of the Country’s 100 Largest Counties, These 25 Provided the Greatest Democratic Margin of Victory”:

Update from Sam, a reader who grew up in rural white America, left it, is back now, but who’s torn about staying:

I totally get where Jon is coming from. Like him I read the Cracked article, and the essays from Michael Moore, and there’s a lot of wisdom there about the urban-rural/professional-working class divide. Another great analysis was in the Harvard Business Review and I mostly agreed with that article also.

I was born in Middletown, OH, of Hillbilly Elegy fame. I grew up in Franklin, a smaller town next door, and lived in even smaller, more rural towns in Ohio and Indiana as I got older. As an adult I have lived in more diverse, densely populated areas but now live in an inner-ring suburb and work in an Indiana hospital getting people signed up for Medicaid. The economic and cultural neglect of these areas is real. The paper plant my father worked at for 30 years closed, taking all its employees’ pensions with it into bankruptcy, just one of many such stories.

Small farms are disappearing and most of the jobs are low-paid temp work in a warehouse if you have a vehicle, a fast food gig or nothing if you don’t. Like the author of the Harvard Business Review pointed out, paying somebody whose parents had social standing $15 an hour to work in McDonald’s is not going to make them feel better about their place in the world. The opiate epidemic has absolutely ravaged this area. Meth is a rural problem, but it doesn’t kill you instantly. Heroin does, and nobody is cooking it in their trailer; it comes from outside the community.

These issues don’t get the political attention they deserve, and while the people I help are better off than many of the inner-city poor, they also don’t have the public transportation and high concentration of social service agencies the inner city has to help people, and many of the community institutions that served that function are in decline. So yes, I get why people voted for Trump. I was shocked at first, but given time to reflect, I understand where they’re coming from.

And yet ...

When I was in the 7th grade I witnessed a gay black boy in my class get viciously bullied. Two older white boys were looming over him and calling him all the things a gay black boy can be called. I truly believe that if I hadn’t happened upon this scene, he would have been beaten. His family moved away shortly afterward. I’m 33 years old, so this was not so long ago, and if those white boys are voters now, well I think I know who they voted for.

When I was 15 I became an atheist. All those people saying how bad our politically correct culture is, and how people feel silenced? Well you better believe I felt silenced as an atheist in small town America. I was told I was being disrespectful on occasions just for stating my beliefs. Not insulting religion or the religious, just saying I didn’t believe in it myself was considered offensive.

In high school, emotionally sensitive boys were bullied. Non-athletic boys were bullied. A quarterback tried to rape a girl at one school, was transferred to another school, to continue being a quarterback. Once I overheard another school athlete brag to one of his friends about how he’d forced his girlfriend to have anal sex. I had to sit next to him at graduation.

I’ve been casually asked if I’m a Feminazi, like that’s the actual description for my beliefs instead of a hateful slur. When my husband was trying to become a history teacher, he was at a bar in his hometown once and got called “college boy” like it was an insult. Some of these bullies I know became cops.

So excuse me if I feel a little damned superior sometimes. I loved living in a diverse area where I had undocumented Hispanic immigrant neighbors who offered me tequila and carne asada on the weekends. I loved having a Thai restaurant down the street and seeing Muslim African children at the playground with their veiled mothers chatting nearby. And yes, I love reading the news, and learning about the world, and helping people get government assistance.

Now that I’ve returned to the rural white America of my youth, I miss diversity. And I can’t forget the traumas of being different, of being curious and progressive, and worldly in this place.

Most of the people I interact with on a day-to-day basis are decent, good people, and it’s wrong to paint them with a broad brush. I’ve certainly rolled my eyes at the elitism and ignorance of urban professionals who don’t have the first clue about what life here is like. You can’t just erase the struggles of conservative, small-town Americans. Those struggles are real. But I don’t want to be erased either.

I grew up here, but I don’t feel like I belong here. There are millions and millions of people like me who aren’t being mentioned in the think pieces about the denizens of Red State America. The author of that Cracked article talked about how even though he grew up in a rural town, he’s now urban and therefore liberal. Well what about those of us who are still rural, yet liberal? The advice now for Millennials is to colonize conservative areas, reverse the political segregation that is dividing this country.

Well guess what, I can’t wait to be able to afford a home in the city again. I want Indian food and public transportation and cocktail parties. If I could have those things here, maybe I would stay. If I felt like my lifestyle and preferences weren’t sneered at, maybe I would stay. If I didn’t have to have awkward conversations with people who are racist on a regular basis, maybe I would stay.

I want good things for the good people around me. But I often feel like they don’t want me. And why should I go where I’m not wanted?

Cultural bigotry is a two-way street. It’s wrong when prissy elite professionals do it, and it’s wrong when coarse blue-collar workers do it. The liberal elites may own popular culture, but the conservatives owned my childhood. They have good cause to resent being treated with disdain, and so do I.  

Here’s one more reader, Jacob, regarding his “liberal views forged in Appalachia”:

I can related to Jon in some ways. I’ve seen the Trump voter in my childhood hometown in which I spent 18 years and still visit due to my parents living there. More than 75 percent of my home county voted Trump in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. It was never a surprise to me that a town like mine would be scared enough to vote for the most unstable presidential candidate most can remember. In many ways I understand exactly why they did. In fact, despite my liberal views, minority status, and opposition to Trump, I understand them.

Rural NC saw significant change as I was growing up. It wasn’t much—a Latino grocery store here, a few more Mexican immigrants in the elementary classrooms over there. Being in an agricultural town, our community depended on the labor of illegal immigrants that most individuals in our 95 percent white town refused to do. Even when the manufacturing jobs left the community, we were happy to take unemployment and blame the new faces in town.

Being Latino myself, I was lucky that I had a white mother. My mother being a teacher, and having a slightly fairer complexion I was spared from most (but not all) taunts of “go back to Mexico” that many of my Latino friends had to endure.  My father was never so lucky: Death threat, and verbal abuse persist in his factory job to this day. “You can’t work in the factory like me” echo like the first words I every truly understood as a child.

I did work hard. I graduated top 5 in my class, received a full scholarship to a private liberal arts college—where again I felt like a minority, only this time it was poor, Latino, and with a lack of exposure to different cultures. I’d never interacted with African Americans, Asians, Muslims, Jews, or anyone else who wasn’t white, Baptist, and suspicious of foreigners.  

You see, in my little hometown the people don’t go to college. If they do it’s often at for-profit colleges where they rack up loans and start life multiple steps back.  They don’t trust outsiders, because quite frankly they had little access to them until the ’90s, and they had even less knowledge of what existed beyond “sinful” Asheville, NC. These are people who do work hard but fail to see how the industries and jobs they known their whole lives will soon no longer exist.  

These people more than anything are terrified of losing what they have only ever known. Trump to them will help keep their community safe, keep their community from change, keep their community Christian—and they might even get rich and have more jobs (or so they believe). Most times I wish the people in my hometown could do a cultural exchange program, to see that all blacks aren’t dangerous, that Muslims have family values just like they do, and that those illegal immigrants they see are working damn hard and against odds to hopefully have success for themselves and their children.  

I write this as I sit on a bus late from work in Silicon Valley back to “the city.”  I’m still working hard each day. The difference is now with Trump, I’m willing to work a little bit harder.  I’ll be more active in politics and continue voting for those I know can make the world better for ALL of us.  

1. The VP-elect went to the theater to see a show. He went as a public figure, but he didn’t attend in his capacity as a public figure. He asked for no attention.
2. The cast, learning that he was going to be attending, wrote a note to Pence that implied heavily that he was a racist and that they expected him to help enact racist policies.
3. The cast then picked him out of the audience at the end of the show and read the statement that heavily implied that Pence was a racist planning to enact racist policies in front of a crowd who cheered every time a well-worded jab hit.

To say Dixon’s speech “heavily implied that Pence was a racist planning to enact racist policies” seems like a stretch, but decide for yourself by reading the note’s contents here (as read aloud to the audience):

Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us at Hamilton: An American Musical, we really do. We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf all of us. All of us.

This next part from Dixon seems improvised: “Again we truly thank you for [attending our] show—this wonderful American story told be a diverse group of men and women of different colors, creeds, and orientations.” (He also told the audience not to boo Pence.) That’s a strong but polite defense of pluralism. And it was objectively a very divisive election, with Trump’s campaign especially divisive, and his transition is already divisive, so defenses of pluralism can’t be made enough right now. It was probably in poor taste for Dixon to encourage “everybody to pull out your phones, tweet and post, because this message needs to be spread far and wide” (besides, that speech was bound to go viral anyway). But it doesn’t seem like harassment when it’s done politely at the end of the show—a show about American history that’s inherently political and known precisely for its diverse cast; there was no ambush here.

But back to Ben, who insists “it isn’t really a question whether this is harassment or not”:

If it were a just-elected President Obama in the audience being grilled by people who were “worried he would strip the right to bear arms from law-abiding Americans” and who “hoped he would protect all the rights of all the Americans, not just the ones he felt were convenient to protect,” there would be a national uproar in the media at large. It would be universally decried, and that’s without calling implying anything half so personally negative as the Hamilton cast did to Pence.

It’s possible and perhaps reasonable to say “well, it’s harassment, but he’s a very good target for it,” but that’s not the same thing as pretending this was a quiet note slipped into his hand for his consideration at a later date. Whether you think it justified or not, this was a pointed insulting message delivered to a captive audience in a hostile room.

If the only thing that justifies it as acceptable (not just legal) behavior is that it’s OK to do it to “them” as it seems to be, then I’m not sure I can sign on. We just tried the “demonize everyone who disagrees with us and try to make it impossible for anyone with different views to exist in public society” tactic for six years, and I’m not sure the election indicates that it’s working out very well for us.

What do you think? Disagree with Ben, as I do, or was it unfair to spring that speech on Pence the way it happened? If so, what should have been the best approach? Email your thoughts. Update from an anonymous reader:

As a history teacher, I applaud the Hamilton cast and the way they took the opportunity to deepen the lessons of their show in a deliberate and direct way to Pence, our newly elected VP. It’s the epitome of speaking truth to power and it is our right as Americans.

Kate would agree:

I don’t see this as harassment. To speak in a civil tone, requesting  consideration of your concerns, after the completion of the performance seems like a good use of the “bully pulpit” you have as a performer, especially as a performer in a play about the complex tensions in creating our country. Harassment might include calling Pence names, interrupting the performance to say things like “But we won’t have freedom if Pence has his way,” inciting the audience to yell or boo Pence, or orchestrating a scheme so that Pence couldn’t leave until the cast had their say. None of these things happened.

We haven’t heard that Pence was offended in any way. I’m sure it was unpleasant to be booed, but the cast didn’t do that; the audience did. The cast asked for the booing to stop.

Trump, who wasn’t there, seems like an inappropriate person to lecture others on the standards of harassment. Because if he believes that’s harassment, what about the things he’s said about Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Alicia Machado, Rosie O'Donnell, Megyn Kelly, the Khan family, and the women who say he’s physically harassed them? Clearly they are all far beyond  respectful rebuke the cast made.

Another reader adds, “I appreciate the nuanced debate, but I’m surprised that the litany of examples of Trump’s harassing people left out his multiple, actual incitements to physical violence against protesters at his rallies!”

Stephen has the only solid dissent I’ve seen thus far, among the scores of emails streaming in:

The question is not whether talking to Pence was harassment, but whether Pence and his supporters will perceive it as harassment—the answer to which is rather obviously “yes.” It simply reinforces their narrative: the snobs are out to get us, and nothing we can do will make them stop calling us names.

So the question becomes: What are you trying to do? Have a real political impact, or just engage in emotional self-therapy and tribal bonding with people who already agree with you? Or to put it another way: Will this help flip Iowa? If it will, it’s politics. If it won’t, it’s narcissism and self-regard.

Here’s another reader, Lee-on, who sees things much differently than Stephen:

Mike Pence made the conscious decision to run for VP with Trump in a campaign filled with divisive language and rude remarks. He made the conscious decision to go to a show on Broadway where it is no secret that the LGBTQ community is strongly represented. He put himself in the public eye, pushed anti-LGBTQ legislation and policies [including conversion therapy], and then put himself in one of most famous places in the world that embraces fully the LGBTQ community. Getting asked by the cast to remember that they are people too, and that he should consider their rights when assuming office, is not only not harassment; it’s the only tool they have to voice their concern.

Louise looks back at some legit examples of harassment:

Donald Trump demanding President Obama’s long-form birth certificate for several years was harassment. Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “You lie” to Obama during a State of the Union address was harassment. I don’t recall Rep. Pence castigating his colleague Rep. Wilson at the time. [Pence actually did say he was “disappointed” with Wilson’s outburst at the time.] He Nor do I recall Mr. Pence—either while serving in the House or as governor of Indiana—suggesting that Donald Trump refrain from casting absurd aspersions about President Obama’s place of birth. [Though Pence in early September did put pressure on Trump regarding birtherism by affirming Obama’s Hawaiian roots.]

Along those lines, Shelley adds:

Here’s a story about Michelle Obama and Jill Biden being booed at a NASCAR event. (Pay attention to the statement after the event.) I know Ben is complaining about the cast letter, but I offer this example as evidence of the way the Obama administration routinely met with boos and often still managed to make the message that seeing America united for shared causes—in the NASCAR case, supporting veterans—is more important than personal insult or affront.

And good thing, because I can think of no single bigger affront against a President than the birther movement, with Trump at its helm, which implies that a black citizen is always suspect and is seen as less than legitimate, with no form of proof being ample enough to discount the accusation of illegitimate power grab.

Ryan tackles the comparison that Ben makes with Obama:

The problem with Ben’s logic is that then-Senator Obama never campaigned on a platform of “strip[ping] the right to bear arms from law-abiding Americans.” Gun fanatics may believe he did just because there is a (D) next to Obama’s name, but there is nothing that Obama ever said that can be remotely equated with wanting to “strip the right to bear arms from law-abiding Americans.”

On the other hand, Pence’s boss has campaigned on stripping away freedoms. Trump has said he wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Trump has said he intends to “open up the libel laws” to go after journalists. Trump seems very willing to use his newly acquired power to quell dissent and punish detractors. This is a dangerous man to have in the White House and it is imperative to stand up and call it out.

Another reader joins Ryan:

Let’s look at Ben’s straw-man example of Obama. Say Obama went to take in a Loretta Lynn concert in Nashville. If he ever took during his national campaign a similarly maximalist position on guns as Trump and Pence took (and have continued to take since the election in their appointments and lack of conciliation) on race and religion, then it would be within both Loretta Lynn’s and the crowd’s right to confront him (confront, not harass). Then in what objective observation of Obama’s behavior before or since his election would anyone think Obama demands an apology?

This goes back to this respect that Ben and Trumpers seem to want. They do not get to dictate the manner, method, and location of being confronted by the real concerns of fellow citizens. They seem to forget respect goes both ways. They demand respect but seem to want unyielding deference. Demands of apology and fealty from their defeated opponents is no way to get respect.

Elaine makes another good distinction between Obama and Trump:

When Obama gets booed, he addresses it and engages. Trump and Pence won’t engage with people who disagree with them except on Twitter, so they are making us do desperate things in order to be heard.

Here’s Beth on Trump’s lack of magnanimity:

The bottom line is that this was a missed opportunity for the incoming Trump/Pence administration. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Trump to tweet “Thank you for your voices! We love all Americans!” The fact that he can’t ignore it or pretend that he really cares about all Americans is horrifying. To recycle an old theme from his campaign: If he can’t handle his VP being potentially offended by people exercising their First Amendment rights, what will happen when he’s offended by someone like Kim Jong-un?

I hate to say I agree with George:

My first reaction to hearing Trump’s reaction to the Hamilton cast’s message was outrage. This is the man who apologizes for nothing, and he expects the cast of Hamilton to apologize of this!?

My second reaction was a slow realization that he's just played us again. Trump is not really asking for an apology by asking for an apology. He knows full well the media reaction to such tweets. The blogosphere will erupt, it will get TV coverage, print coverage, radio coverage, water cooler coverage. And while those of us who cannot stand his hateful rhetoric will be talking about the double standard he is using, and assorted injustices, his real audience will be laughing and sharing memes on Facebook about this.

My final reaction is sadness. This is how it’s going to be. Trump knows the system, and every time we argue with reasons and facts and specifics, careful pleas to sanity and American values, we are going to get burned. Our current media landscape is not set up to deal with this man. All we can really do is watch him shape his wings and wonder if he will, at some point, fly too close to the sun.

It’s one thing to ignore a troll in the comments section or Twitter, but incredibly hard when we just elected one to be President of the United States. This is a genuinely depressing time.

Update: In stark contrast to Trump:

Okay one more email, for the sake of open discourse. Here’s a reader who prefers the anonymous attribution “had enough from both sides now”:

Of course the cast of Hamilton had every right to reach out to Pence and exercise their First Amendment rights after the performance. Was it harassment? No. But was it the right thing to do?

Pence was not there as a public servant, but was confronted and accused in an unfair arrangement in a public space. One held the stage and the microphone; one did not. One had present a group of like-minded supporters; one did not. One had the element of surprise; one did not.

Perhaps the cast should have let their powerful piece of work and its message stand for itself. The fact that Pence even attended such a performance is interesting. Perhaps just a friendly acknowledgment from the cast, “Hey Mike, glad you could come, hope you liked the show” would have been a MUCH more powerful message. Such a friendly callout puts a bit of onus on Pence: “We see you here; you are now a witness and accountable.” Perhaps an open public letter the next day seeking Pence’s review of the performance, forcing him to air his views? Put him on the spot for respectful public discourse.

That would have been much more effective and persuasive than what they actually said, what they accused. And it certainly would not have given any more ammo to the Man Behind the Tweet, who uses these digressions to fuel his rabid fans.

Have we not yet learned that SHOUTING at someone or groups of people is wrong and counterproductive? That it actually has the exact opposite effect that we desire and causes people to retrench and hold tighter to their beliefs, even if misguided? It certainly doesn’t force the person to look at their views from a different perspective.

We recently learned this hard lesson with the Black Lives Matter protest. What should have been a very powerful and important movement became polarizing and divisive and was used to fuel the horrible rhetoric of the Republican campaign.

No one should be treated like this, even if the claims are true and they are made with just intentions. Until we can stop shouting AT each other and really start listening to each other’s differing points of view, we will be doomed to this endless spiral of pointed accusations with no end in sight.

Shouting down political opponents is nothing new, but for people with modern sensibilities, being called a bigot when it’s unwarranted actually has an effect similar to a racial slur. It creates a sense of shame and anger, and it forces people to remind themselves that they’re fundamentally a good person. Like other slurs, it shuts down the conversation immediately and creates a mutual distrust.

Add in the new culture of safe spaces and trigger warnings, and you create an ideological echo chamber. Little by little, the social justice movement seems to be morphing into an insidious and sometimes subtle form of oppression, where controversial ideas are expunged from the public dialogue—by force of law if necessary.

Donald Trump is a cartoon character of a man. He’s likely committed multiple acts of fraud, his political knowledge is suspect, and even when addressing thousands of people, he sometimes seems to blurt out whatever insensitive comment comes to mind.

But the more his opponents exaggerated his evil nature and disregarded the legitimate policy concerns behind his questionable language, the more they turned him into a champion for all of those who the government had left behind. Both parties and the majority of the press unleashed all of their powers against him, but rather than backing down and providing the usual political doublespeak, he simply withstood the onslaught.

Meanwhile, Hillary was basically a character from House of Cards, with numerous scandals, questionable ties to everyone from Wall Street to foreign governments, and a policy agenda pulled straight from the polling computers. When I failed to find an inspiring third-party candidate, the choice was easy.

The silver lining is that this will be a shock to the system for many young liberals. In their confusion at the result, maybe they’ll take that extra step to start looking at the issues from all sides. Perhaps aspiring politicians will realize that the status quo in Washington simply isn’t good enough, and that a lot of people will vote for whomever provides the most believable case that they will change how things are done.

As divisive as this campaign has been, I’m still hopeful that some good can come out of exploring that divide more deeply. The more people who realize that in many ways we’re more the same than different, the better off everyone will be.

This video is a must-see:

Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It's not a simple racism story

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 9, 2016

In fact, according to a poll from The Washington Post and GMU, nearly one in five Trump voters say they approve of Obama’s job performance. And the still-president has a 56 percent approval rating—more than Reagan at the same point in his presidency.

This next note, from Len, has a core reason for voting for Trump that I definitely haven’t seen yet: “I went Trump for his obvious LACK of principle, and pitched HRC due to her obvious religiosity.” Len elaborates:

I’m a middle-aged white male in Wisconsin with a rural Xtian upbringing. I am blue-collar for life and can’t afford more college at my age. It would be a waste of my money. My house, in a semi-rural area, is completely paid off, so that’s a plus: but the value of it, on the tax rolls, is about $45K. It’s a nice enough place.

In 2012 I voted for Obama (although I disagree with the guy, I like him personally), in 2008 I voted Green. I wanted to vote for Jill Stein this year but got worried about Hillary Clinton actually being elected. I vote for Tammy Baldwin [for Senate]. I voted Trump because, while I was laid off four times in six years, I did a lot of jobs, and work of various kinds, and I think got a pretty good view of how people live here. Oddly, for around here, I am violently opposed to Protestant religion and its global view, and voted for Trump as I consider Clinton a religious zealot. I chose to vote for a guy with no discernible principles at all. But Clinton? Globally, I regard her as a complete religious whack-job.

Len follows up:

I know this is a VERY out-there thing, but I do in fact consider modern Progressivism and Liberalism a form of Evangelical Protestant Christianity: the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. This is a very fringe idea at the moment, but it has very deep roots. There was a serious theological battle before the U.S. Civil War about whether Protestant Christianity was about saving the individual or projecting the Christian world-view into the physical realm. The firebrand abolitionists forced the United States into a physical battle over a physical injustice: slavery. The roots of the so-called “Social Gospel” are in that decision: to attempt to force, or instill, a Christian “defend the weak” values into the physical realm, on a mass, real-world scale. (I am kind of morally neutral about it.)

If you look into Hillary Clinton’s religious beliefs, you will find it, just like I did: She is, really, a Wesleyan Protestant Calvinist religious zealot. For real.

Oh, and Chris: Human beings get into fights all the time, all over the world; it’s what people do. So what happens when you ascribe, to yourself, the role, the job, of “helping the loser,” when one fight only leads to another? When as soon as you “empower” one combatant, they abuse and oppress the loser of the fight, that YOU just helped them vanquish? (As a case-study, I use Israel.) The whole theology is flawed.

Anyway, I am not popular with my supposedly “secular” Progressive and Liberal acquaintances, and they get very upset at being termed “religious fanatics.”

Here’s the third Obama/Trump voter to write us, Kristin:

My elderly mother and aunt were the biggest Trump supporters from the very beginning. As a college-educated, registered Independent woman and divorced mother of six (five daughters and one son), I stood by during most of the election. Presently, four of my children are grown, working under the weight of this economy. Three are in college.  

A few years ago, as a non-traditional student, I finally completed my BS in Humanities (a minor English, with emphasis in Women’s Gender Studies) and went on to an MA in English Literature (two classes away). I have recently started an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) and this is where you and I meet: in a bulk e-mail announcement that always happily begins “Hi Kristin...”

I watched, I listen, I researched—a lot. Previously, I voted Obama. I celebrated Obama. This time I voted Trump.  

I am not a Deplorable; I am an American, and a couple of generations ago, all of my grandparents were immigrants. I have sent my voice forth, in the poems attached. Yet there is only anger from the other half that I didn’t know existed until Obama flew from city to city on taxpayer money and warned my friends that a Trump victory would be disaster from America.  

I will let my poems speak. From the very bottom of my heart, I thank you for listening :)

Here’s one of the pieces of writing she attached:

Dear Protesters,

I’m sorry you are hurt. I hurt too. In 2008 I voted for Obama. In 2012, I didn’t vote at all. Either way, it didn’t matter. Nothing changed.

Protesters, I still didn’t have enough money to pay my mortgage, which had tripled. Neither did my family, my neighbors, my friends. And my job disappeared, over the Pacific, or the Atlantic. I forget. “It’s the right thing to do,” they said, those Third World countries that keep changing names deserve a better life for their people.

But Protesters, I didn’t get it. I still don’t. I looked in my refrigerator and then I stood in line at the food bank where they gave me rancid cake mix—did you know a cake mix can get rancid? I watched. I waited. Along with my family, my neighbors, and my friends. We held our breath as the Bail Out began.

Protesters, something DID happen during the Bail Out. But it missed us. We lost our homes, our cars. Our marriages. Still, we prayed. We waited. And we learned a few things while we waited, too. We learned that one meal eaten late in the afternoon can be counted as lunch and dinner. We also learned that “help wanted” meant under 20 hours, and if you get sick and you can’t pay the rent on the 5th of the month, a five-day “Pay or Quit” Notice of Eviction will be hanging on your door. Then the daughter who can’t read will ask you what it says and the daughter that can read gets very quiet and without asking, does her homework. And takes out the trash.

Protesters, I’m a woman, too, and I was so excited to see a woman candidate on this almost 100-year anniversary of the Women’s Right to Vote! Sure, I had questions about Obama Care, about e-mails, and dead soldiers in Benghazi. And issues about Trump. War with Russia and Global Warming. But Protesters, as a college-educated woman, I know that all guilt should be proven or else it’s all rhetoric. After all, this is America. I listened.

Then my paycheck came in, direct deposit, and the bank re-calculated a $4.00 gasoline purchase, a $3.00 Safeway charge for milk, and a $3.89 charge for tampons (can it already be that time of the month!) This triggered two $35.00 charges and after I paid the water and the electricity I had two crisp dollar bills and a handful of change in the palm of my hand. And 14 days till payday.

Protesters, that night, I listened one more time to Hillary speak. I really, really, really listened. Afterwards, I clicked off the television, tiptoed into my daughter’s bedroom and kissed her on the forehead. And I knew: something had to change.

I also knew that Hillary would understand my choice NOT to vote for her this time around. After all, she’s a woman, too.

Protesters, in the end, you’re not protesting President Trump. You’re protesting my cry for change. Your protesting ME.

Once again, I apologize if I hurt you.

With Love,
Your Fellow American

If you’re also an Obama voter who voted for Trump and want to share your perspective, please drop us a note. Update from a long-time reader, Scott:

First time I’ve emailed, but as a former subscriber to the Daily Dish, I have followed Notes with interest and appreciate the curated reader comments. Thank you for continuing to air these discussions with Trump voters. I am despairing over the notes from these Obama/Trump voters, Aaron and Kristin, who feel like the government let them down since 2009, or that the social justice movement was too aggressive.

To Aaron, there is a big difference between describing systemic racism and injustice vs. labelling individual people as prejudiced. All of us work together to create these systems, even if individual people are free of animus toward African Americans, Muslims, etc. My interpretation is that many in positions of power, including white people, are having their eyes opened to the daily reality of people not like them, who have never been treated like full, equal members of the American community, and who are now asserting that equality. I do not believe in the need to have safe spaces to keep people from uncomfortable ideas, but at the same time, saying the rise of their use on college campuses somehow led to the expungement of controversial views, etc. from the national discourse is quite laughable. And tying that to assertions of equality for those our systems have prevented from being equal is a strange rhetorical leap indeed.

I also wonder if Kristin has spent any time contemplating why she feels that “nothing changed” despite her vote for Obama in 2008. Perhaps it was a GOP Congress that from the outset refused to let anything pass proposed by President Obama that could have actually helped her situation or the situations of her family members?  

***

Here’s one more reader note, from Vince—an Obama voter who didn’t vote for Trump but relates to a lot of sentiment that elected him:

Alan [the reader who voted for Trump mostly out of a disdain for identity politics] voiced exactly what I feel about this election.

There seem to be many parallels between Alan and me: I too am a straight white male, raised Catholic. I have been married for 22 wonderful years to a black woman, and I adore my extended family. At 51 years of age, I have lived my entire adult life a stone’s throw from West Hollywood, the throbbing heart of the bluest state. I voted for Obama twice, and pretty much any analysis of my voting record for the past 30 years, or indeed my lifestyle and closest friendships, would reveal an open-minded, liberal-leaning independent. Oh: and I’m a 20-year professional employee of UCLA with a Master’s.

The difference between Alan and me is that I just could not vote for Trump, as I saw him as too reckless. I voted for Gary Johnson, knowing that in a state that Hillary would win in a landslide, I was safe to cast this protest vote.

However, I am thrilled to see the cynical, greedy Clinton machine finally smashed to bits. I am thrilled to see the arrogant cocoon of the news media, popular culture, Hollywood, liberal activists, DNC, identity politickers, and academia punctured by reality. I am thrilled to see the progressive juggernaut derailed. Trump could have replaced “Make America Great Again” with, “It’s the Authoritarianism, Stupid!”

The progressive left seems to have grown more hysterical, more bullying than ever before. It has enacted an illiberal, punitive, terrifying form of politics where everyone is one wrong position or one misunderstanding from being ex-communicated from the world of the decent. You’re either an Angel completely signed onto their endless quest for progressive utopia, or a Devil. While too many grope for the overheated “Marxist” to describe this kind of politics, it is far more apt than the totally inadequate “Political Correctness.”

It has obliterated any serious debate on a host of subjects by vilifying and demonizing some very good, decent people throughout the country. This cannot be stressed enough: While it has only gotten worse—ironically, as big culture war battles like marriage equality have been settled—it has been this way for decades.

So has the vicious mocking and slandering of anyone who lives outside of the liberal elite urban hubs—the demographic that put Trump over the top—as hateful, ignorant rednecks, a stereotype that has been a liberal punchline for generations. The Democratic establishment has become as much of a corporate-elitist imperium as the Republicans’, and it too has totally failed this large and economically desperate swath of Americans as much as the GOP. The only difference is that as the Democrats hold these peoples’ heads under water they insult their intelligence by promising “job training” while a black Ivy Leaguer tells them to “check their privilege.”  

Liberals need to answer this question honestly: Even if the Republican candidate had not been a narcissistic, vulgar, bigoted clown, no matter how temperately he spoke about a need to control our borders, criticized Obamacare or questioned the wisdom of bringing tens of thousands of war-traumatized Muslims into the U.S., would you not have tarred the candidate and his supporters as bigoted scum anyway? Of course you would have. How, in that respect, was 2016 any different?  

This new progressive bullying lies too much, obfuscates too much, railroads too much, silences too much, divides by identity too much. And it is finally an unsustainable strategy in a democracy where everyone gets a voice at the ballot box.

***

Update from a latecomer to the discussion, Alex, who has a detailed account of “why my brother, a life-long Democrat (and prior Obama voter) voted for Trump and I didn’t”:

My brother works as an electrician in the boroughs of New York City. He is also a veteran and an ex-EMT. Last year, I went there to celebrate Thanksgiving Day with him. Later that night, I, along with him and a bunch of his buddies retreated to his “man cave,” and we drank (I was cajoled into multiple shots of “Fireball’), told stories of yore, and got around to talking politics.

I was hesitant and a bit nervous to dive into this topic, since he knows I am a conservative and he is a life-long Democrat. His friends are an eclectic group: ex-cops, union guys, stage workers, etc. Some are like him, veterans. Almost all were loyal Democrats. I was therefore very much surprised when they all stated they were going to vote this year for Donald Trump. They were equally surprised when I said that I most likely would not.

I asked why they flipped from their party and now supported Trump. Let me distill all the responses given down to this one: “He gets us.”

My brother, financially, is “middle class.” He is, however, “working class.” He is one of the millions of workers to whom we owe our very lifestyle. They RUN our country in the mechanic sense. Everything you eat, use, and operate depends on THEM. Nothing works without them. Your life would devolve into the 16th Century without them. They are workers. Most are white and male. And they voted overwhelmingly for Trump. It was a workers revolt.

Democrats are always boasting that they represent the working class; this is only partly true. Every protest you see by “workers” is industry specific and they are surrogates for the Democratic Party. They represent the teacher’s unions, the fast food and restaurant industry, and the services sector. They usually are comprised of more minorities than the working class that voted for Trump.

Aaron Sorkin, who produced the T.V.  Series “West Wing” recently made the news by penning a letter to his daughters in response to Trump’s victory. It was published in the far-left magazine Vanity Fair. In it, he states:

and it wasn’t just Donald Trump who won last night—it was his supporters too. The Klan won last night. White nationalists. Sexists, racists, and buffoons. Angry young white men who think rap music and Cinco de Mayo are a threat to their way of life (or are the reason for their way of life) have been given cause to celebrate.

Newsflash to Aaron Sorkin: one of my brother’s buddies is a rigger and stagehand. Your industry employs thousands of folks like him. He is not a racist, sexist or a xenophobe, and as a white male, he is sick and tired of rich, liberal elitists constantly saying that he is. And neither is my brother. Both my brother and his buddy voted for Trump. When you order a seafood entry at one of your fancy, expensive favorite restaurants, it was made possible by some guy fishing in the middle of the ocean, in places like the Bering Sea, where it is so cold and the waters so rough that it is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.  You can bet that those guys voted for Trump. Many of the workers in the lower rungs of your industry, who without, your damn plays and T.V. shows cannot be made, voted for Trump.

Sorkin’s letter is exhibit #1 why Trump won.

When a water main breaks and poor Aaron Sorkin can’t take a shower in his 3,700 square foot, $6.1 million dollar mansion in Los Angeles, who goes out and fixes it? Some guy (or gal) whose job it is to do so. He or she goes out regardless of the weather conditions and grapples with equipment down in the mud and restores the water supply. Ask that white male who fixed it who he voted for, Mr. Sorkin.

New York City’s “Water Tunnel 3,” that is almost complete and has been under construction since 1969 is famous for the workers that have created this marvel. They are called “sandhogs.” They get paid very well. Some of them die in this very dangerous vocation. These jobs are family heirlooms passed onto generation after generation. Many of these workers are white; all of them male. Many are Irish. The last leg of this massive construction project which would have reached the outer boroughs was shut down in April of this year by the socialist, liberal mayor of New York, Bill DeBlasio. Funny how once Manhattan got its part of the water tunnel finished, somehow there was no longer any money left to complete the tunnel into Brooklyn and Queens where the “bridge and tunnel” crowd live, huh? DeBlasio should ask some of these workers who they voted for, Trump or Clinton.

The people who make sure everything works in this country, those who farm the grain your food is made from, those who make sure your lights are on, those who transport everything you see around you by truck, train, and plane, those who process all the food you eat, those who you depend on day and night, do not all live on our two coasts. They live in “fly-over country.” They have been referred to as Aaron Sorkin did, as racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and ignorant. Some of them are. Some “liberals” are as well. But the vast majority is not.

They have seen their manufacturing jobs disappear, many as a result of NAFTA. Trump made it clear he will re-negotiate that treaty. Trump appealed to the average white male worker who just wants to have a good paying job and who was sick and tired that the elite Washington D.C. political class along with academia had convicted them to be what Hillary Clinton deemed as a “basket of deplorables.”

Aaron Sorkin and Hillary Clinton can continue to attack Trump voters with such incendiary jabs all they want. And Trumps everywhere will continue to be elected.

“Mainstream media” is an oversimplified attempt to describe dozens of entities ranging the ideological spectrum. There are plenty of traditionally liberal publications/websites/networks, obviously, and there are a litany of conservative outlets across all platforms as well but they’re no more a collective than Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or NPR are collectively talk radio.

If there’s criticism to be levied at the mainstream media, it’s not for any specific political bias. Rather, such criticism should stem from the industry’s willingness to devolve, over the last decade or two, from information providers into infotainment peddlers. CNN and Fox and MSNBC keep a never-ending stream of talking heads on their networks, and they do it to drive conflict and drama, and they do that to drive ratings and subsequently advertising revenue. As the amount of legitimate news that’s available to report is less than the airspace they have to sell, they have filled the gaps with commentary, opinion, and (in a lot of cases) drivel, and then called that news.  

That commentary has become hyper-partisan on both sides, because in order to keep the eyes glued to the TV, you’re forced to forever ramp up the rhetoric, to call everything a crisis, to proclaim whatever it is you’re talking about to be the most important thing going on anywhere. It’s my belief that the American electorate has become largely incapable of distinguishing between legitimate news and trumped-up (pardon the phrasing) nonsense designed to rile up the viewers/readers or produce clicks/likes/shares/re-tweets.

In a society where we can’t tell the difference between news and entertainment, we treat everything as entertainment and thus feel no compunction in decrying the mainstream media wholesale, even when (especially when) that media does eventually attempt to provide what it believes to be objective truth. That’s why my Facebook feed treats angrypatriot.com as a legitimate news source. The people on it can’t tell the difference between hack websites and The New York Times, or else they’ve been convinced the difference doesn’t matter.  

That’s why Lindsey explicitly says she doesn’t care what the mainstream media thinks, and why she hilariously calls on the media not to report the truth, but to advance a narrative more to her liking. She appears to believe there’s no longer an objective truth to report on, only post-fact narratives to be advanced.

Trump exacerbates this, of course, by actively attacking anyone who says anything negative about him and by lying pathologically. As such, we appear to have reached the point where the truth is no longer relevant to the discussion, where a great many of us don’t believe that truth exists at all. How much further before we get to Orwell?

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

Andrew Simmons on our site yesterday addressed 1984 in the context of 2016. Update from reader Kevin, who points to another literary classic:

Another, less obviously violent but no less repressive fictional dystopia applies better than 1984: the one invented by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. As far back as 1985, when he published his prophetic screed Amusing Ourselves to Death, the late media critic Neil Postman wrote:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture . . .  [emphasis added]

Postman’s description in my opinion captures the Trump phenomenon and the man’s essential power—to a T. It’s that triviality and distraction, rather than violent oppression, that most of us Americans will experience.

Pixar’s version:

***

Outside the media bubble but still within the social bubble of big coastal cities, we posted “‘Confessions of a Liberal Urban Elitist’” and “‘Elite Doesn’t Mean Born With a Silver Spoon.’” Both reader notes center on the theme of coastal professionals resenting being called “elitists” by rural Trump voters, especially when such professionals grew up in working-class communities themselves.

Along those lines, here’s Daniel, a reader who began on the lower rungs of the economy:

I am an immigrant who came to this country in 1995 as young adult with exactly $10 in my pocket. When we arrived to Seattle as refugees (see: Syria)—and legally, I might add. My family went on welfare courtesy of some relief agency settling us—yes, that stuff with food stamps and everything. It gave us a way to orient ourselves, and within seven months we were off it.

My first job was working for minimal wage ($7 as I recall) with bunch of illegal Mexicans (who got $4.50) in a machine shop, working a lathe and smelting lead— a nasty toxic process. I was buzzed in and buzzed out, just like I suppose they did/do in steel mills. I still go by that place when I think my work is stressful, just to remind myself.

So I think I started as barely-ends-meeting “white working class” and perhaps have a bit of insight into it. But then I very rapidly progressed out of that term/category.

Fast forward 20+ years. I now have a solid job in software, a nice family, and a decent house of the least expensive part of Mercer Island. I did it without finishing my education I started in my home country. I must thank the high-tech software industry for letting university dropouts prosper. I am not privileged in any way, except that I used my brains, worked hard, and didn’t sit around on my ass. My mother wound up being incredibly successful at real estate—again, by working harder than anyone I know.

So when I hear about people from the Great Middle or South sticking a finger to the “elites” in the coast cities, I have very similar reaction to that of Jon’s. Why? What have I done that you couldn’t have? It’s not like I even bothered with education—although my kids are certainly going to go to university, if I have anything to do with it. I didn’t even chose to move to the coast myself; my parents did. But when I came here, I applied all the resourcefulness and all the brains that I have and I did just fine both financially and morally! What in that behavior is making me “elitist” and worthy of disdain from the center of the country?

Renie’s parents were also refugees:

No one from the top of the elite world would ever see me as part of it. I may have a PhD; my husband and I may have worked all our adult lives in universities; we have lived for more than 45 years in one of the bluest enclaves in the U.S., but we are invisible to the elite that truly does govern our country. But to working-class whites, we appear as alien as any Goldman Sachs partner, and that is despite the fact that we now run a small ranch and interact often with people whose lives up to now appear to have been very different than theirs.

A lot of that is assumptions: that people like us were born to the life we have lived; that we have no clue about people whose lives are different than ours; that we don’t respect them; that our rejection of fundamentalist Christianity is because we have no moral grounding; that we are somehow “others” and not real Americans because we are liberals. Remember that it’s not just liberals who scorn conservatives and ignore flyover country. I’ve had people I know afraid, literally afraid, to set foot in Boulder because they see it as so alien and scary.

As for living an insulated and privileged life—yes, I do know people whose lives were and are very privileged. But I come from parents who literally started with no money when they came to the U.S. as refugees. My dad’s CPA clients were small businessmen; they owned kosher butcher shops, small clothing stores, bowling alleys, and beachfront businesses until I was a teenager and his company merged with a larger one. My husband’s father graduated from CCNY at the end of the Depression with a degree in electrical engineering. His first job was driving a laundry truck; he took a step up when he drove an electrician’s truck. Eventually he got a job as an engineer for the federal government and he was on the way to a very successful career.

Both of our families did bring ambition, education, and a belief that they could succeed. And after much hard work, frugality, and sacrifice, they did.

Another immigrant story comes from Kavinder:

I am a 25 year Sikh-American medical student. I was originally a Republican and my politics was in great part (and still is) influenced by my father and his journey (documented here in Notes). After my time getting my undergraduate degree from NYU, my politics and ideology shifted (due to open-minded inquiry, not some false PC indoctrination that Trump supporters believe is wide spread on college campuses). My politics also influenced my career choice of join into medicine.

For the record, my policy choices aligned more with Bernie Sanders, but I supported Clinton (quietly) in the primary and more openly in the general election. Besides commenting online and getting my immediate family to vote for Clinton in my deep blue state, I did nothing else. [For a longer reader note along those lines, see “The Guilt and Pain of a Clinton Supporter.”]

Let me begin by saying that I will NEVER accept Trump as my president. I will also join the resistance against him (in the ballot box and on the streets). I will not take the Trumpian agenda lying down, nor I will accept the hate crimes being committed in Trump’s name. Nor will I compromise on my core values of a open democratic and inclusive society.

At the same time, I do want to acknowledge that two bubbles exist in America, and one is made up of the Northeast and West Coast where liberal initiatives made gains. This is the bubble I live in, a progressive urban and cosmopolitan bubble. The other bubble is made up of the Mid-west and South, a backwards bubble (economically and socially).

I want to believe that most Trump voters are not personally racist or motivated by hate of the “other” (evidence is proving to show otherwise). But at the same time I do want to reach out to blue-collar workers (people I grew up around my entire life) and understand why the think and believe what they believe. If I can go from being a conservative Republican to liberal Democrat as a result of open-minded inquiry, then I believe other people can. I do not want to believe that half of our country is irredeemable, and I want to bridge the divide and work towards a progressive future.

Lastly here’s Susan, a reader in Portland, Oregon (where most of my family ended up after living all over the Midwest and South):

I guess I’m an elite, by Trump voters’ definition. I grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., my dad worked in a factory. I went in the military, finished college on the GI bill and moved to the west coast. I remember bitterly finding out my cousin-in-law back in GR, a gate guard at an auto factory, made three times a year what I made as a college graduate and news reporter. My fault for picking a low-paying profession, lower than teachers, with whom I used to commiserate. If people think THOSE jobs are coming back, well, I hope they hold Trump’s feet to the fire. They’ve been lied to, big league.

If you have something notable to add to the thread, hello@theatlantic.com is always open. We’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of emails since the election, and we can’t post all of them of course, but we’re doing our best to feature the smartest, most thoughtful, tough-minded arguments and personal stories. I’m truly awed by the quality of notes coming in—the best I’ve seen since Notes launched more than a year ago.

Update from yet another reader, Mike:

I reject the notion of a “Liberal Bubble” as it has been described in the media recently. To me, it’s more indicative of liberals’ proclivity to hurry into the arms of defeat whenever they can. As our politics has seen over the last several decades, liberals seem to look for ways to surrender ground all the time. They seem to have taken to heart all the conservative tropes about how they’re somehow not #RealAmericans. This bubble talk is just one more instance of that.

How is it the liberals who are in a bubble and not other factions of the country? We’re not getting that impression from the popular vote!

If anything, we are a country of bubbles. The Trump supporters were deluded when they voted us into this mess. They bought into a massive con because they were conveniently insulated from a lot of important information. That’s by no means a unique feature to their cause, but that’s also kind of my point.

Now, if we were to say there was a “Clinton Bubble,” then I would agree with that. But really, it’s a stretch to call her a liberal to begin with.

But really, we’ve all just been divided into convenient demographics to make it easier to market to and exploit. Recent events should make that all the more evident.

On the other hand, some of the “liberal urban elitist” passages are a bit close to some of Charles Pierce’s recent pieces (here and here). But after reading through such sentiment, I find it hard to pile on with that camp against those who effectively vote against their own interests, or to demean the importance of a “working class job” to America. I’m keenly aware that every job I’ve gotten means someone hasn’t gotten the job I was hired for, and it sure as hell isn’t because I'm intrinsically “better” or that much smarter than the next person.

And try as I might, I just can’t go along with Dan [the likely Clinton voter who wrote that “we cannot fight systemic issues by punishing individuals”] or Vince [the Gary Johnson voter who shares Trump voters’ disdain for identity politics and “the new progressive bullying”]. I’ve heard variations of the “I’m tired of those coastal elites telling me to check my privilege”-sort of angle, the “why is the left publicly shaming everyone it disagrees with?”-type of question.

So carry that to its logical conclusion as a form of protest in this election. One votes in opposition to 19-year-old sophomores in Boston talking smug in your Facebook feed. In exchange, you get a president who very well may end Medicare with a unified Republican government. If you like the idea of your elderly parents having a safety net, that seems to be a fairly disproportionate weighting of voting priorities (but hey, sure showed them college elites what’s up, eh?). Basing votes on shallow name-calling is laughable; calling Donald Trump a “bigot” is pretty soft, considering people like me were called a “fifth column” not too long ago. (How much of the American population, circa 2001-2004, had their fidelity to the republic cast in doubt for holding an opinion of being against a war?) The world's tiniest violin scrapes a hardly discernible melody here.

But, to quote the “liberal redneck,” you can be right, or you can win. And I don’t really care to be on any particular side of winning a pathetic name-calling contest. So sure, I’ll cede that ground to Dan and Vince. Maybe TNC is on the right track:

There isn’t much quarter given to the racism that Trump inflamed, of course, but there’s a pretty elegant point made around the 24-minute mark. “Own your history.” Not just the convenient parts, not just the 4th of July, not just FDR and his dog Fala. There’s a lot of ugliness to go around, and where I’d break with TNC is that cordoning off one section of society as racists—no matter if they voted for a race-bating candidate or not—is not going to get us over to the next checkpoint of historical progress. Because we need help to get over that checkpoint, and politics is the art of sausage making, not organic soybeans.

So, to my fellow coastal elites, perhaps it’s time to retire your privilege checking (since there are more than a few 20-something white kids wondering where their privilege is, as they work bussing tables despite having gotten a more privileged education). Instead, own your history. That’s enough. Own the ugliness that you too are a part of (like this embarrassing, petty election we’re discussing). You’ll probably find far more allies in owning the whole, rather than splitting up the ugly composites. And in doing so, you’re far more likely to be a part of a coalition of voters like the one Obama road to victory on. Twice. And then you can be a part of making the country a little better.

Or the left can instead expend its energies on “being right” in a comments section. We may not have responsible governance, but gee, sure does feel good to let people know how you feel about Scarlett Johansson being cast as the lead in Ghost in the Machine, right?

Update: That “liberal redneck”—Trae Crowder, a comedian in Celina, Tennessee—was on Real Time recently:

Another long-time reader, Jim, cuts through all the hand-wringing and recriminations on the broader left over identity politics and the mainstream media and white women going for Trump and political correctness and James Comey, etc, etc, and points instead to a reason for Trump’s victory that’s right in front of our noses: Clinton.

I read your collection of notes by Trump voters. I think there’s a lot to learn here. But mostly, it just confirms my greatest fears in advance of Election Day: That in an anti-establishment year, the Democratic Party chose the most-establishment of candidates they could possibly have chosen.

The Democratic coalition was beginning to fracture along the borders of its components’ varied interests—for example, forgetting that many Latinos are not necessarily pro-immigration—their families having been here before the white folks—and thinking that Tim Kaine could somehow assuage the fears of white men while also appealing to Latinos because he speaks Spanish better than your average gringo. In a year rife with populism, they nominated a woman whose husband and surrogate is the president who has had NAFTA hung around his neck for 20 years. In a year about economic and cultural anxieties and the anger they bring forth, the Democrats turned to entreating people to care about policy as the solution to unease. They proposed technocracy as the solution to popular discontent. Morons.

If you have anything to add along those lines: hello@theatlantic.com. Update from a cooly pragmatic reader, John:

After every election there is a lot of handwringing over what caused the losing side to lose, and there are always numerous reasons. This effort ignores the fact that a handful of voters in a few key states tilted the tables in one direction. We don’t need to focus on finding the particular factors that mattered the most. We just need to get more people to vote on our side. Get the other 40 percent or so to vote and you can stop worrying about attracting the racists, bigots, misogynists, and misunderstood working people, wherever they live.

Most others, though, anticipate discord. “I dread the spectre of Trump looming over our table,” a reader sighs. Another traveling home to Michigan expects to be alone in grieving Trump’s victory, and one going to rural Alabama looks ahead to “further exhaustion: over-worked and underpaid to go ‘home’ to a different kind of work—tactfully avoiding political discourse.” Another reader is feeling “anxiety because of the election,” but for more complicated reasons than Clinton vs. Trump: “I’m queer and my (Clinton-supporting) family isn’t totally down with that and I’m not ready for the discussions around the dinner table.”

A tiny number of people—2 percent of everyone who responded—said they actually canceled plans because of the election. (That’s not counting the people who said they were newly relieved to be staying home, or those who were dreading Trump talk so much they wished they could skip the family dinner.) One reader: “I want my family to know that their political choices have personal impacts.” Another explains, “We can’t face family that voted for Trump.” And for a reader with a conservative Republican father, a schism over politics was a long time coming:

We’ve had our disagreements but we could always be civil until the last five years. I’m spending Thanksgiving alone because my father (a Trump supporter) sees me as the enemy and “does not like me anymore.”

But among your responses is also, as one reader puts it, “the usual family drama.” There is stress over traffic and cooking and in-laws and meeting a boyfriend’s parents and, for a gay woman, introducing a girlfriend to extended family for the first time. Some look ahead to bittersweet celebrations—the first family gathering since a grandfather’s funeral, the first Thanksgiving without a mother, perhaps the last with a sister in hospice. This reader is nervous: “First time I will not be drinking while surrounded by people that love to drink.” Another says:

Thanksgiving has traditionally been a high-stress time for my family, filled with high expectations and obligations. This year is the first without such feelings, so I’m anticipating a chill and relaxing day.

It’s encouraging, in the dreary-as-usual November of an unusually divided America, to see that just over half of you are purely happy about seeing your loved ones for Thanksgiving. (This includes, of course, the person who simply wrote “Turkey and gravy”—agreed. Enough said.) And in a more poignant way, it’s encouraging to see all these mixed feelings all mixed together. We’re a country of mixtures and contradictions, and we are families of the same. And in the briefest descriptions of your feelings headed into the holiday, there’s a spectrum to match. Excited. Resigned, you wrote. Sadness. Peace, fulfillment. Anxious. Joy. Joy.

I spoke on the phone with another reader, Donna, who had written in to say she’d lost a longtime friend over Thanksgiving weekend when an email exchange about Trump’s election got heated. Donna now feels that “the friendship lasted possibly only because I bit my tongue for 30 years.” The following has been condensed and edited from our conversation:

We were friends for 30 years and he had always been very right-wing. But we had a lot of things in common. He and I share a love of the arts and humanities. Even there, his opinion would slip in at times, in ways that I thought were unfair. I would just listen and maybe once in a while say something very general.

Ironically, the breaking point came over a question of unity: The friend had described a national zeitgeist in favor of Trump, says Donna, and she was so irked by the apparent assumption that most people agreed with him that “I guess I couldn’t fake it anymore.” She wrote back to him saying she was upset and didn’t agree. In his reply, he said he didn’t want to know her anymore.

I asked Donna whether she regretted staying quiet for so long to preserve the friendship, and she wasn’t sure:

He feels so strongly about what he believes, and I don’t think that anybody could change him much. Had I spoken up, I don’t think I would have changed his mind.

After he wrote this long email, I really had a hard time getting to sleep, I was so upset. I had to take a tranquilizer. But last night [after he ended the friendship] I felt a lot calmer, maybe because I finally told him.

Have you ever lost a friend over politics—or found a way to repair a relationship that politics broke? Do you have close friends with whom you disagree on fundamental issues? We’d like to hear your stories: hello@theatlantic.com. I, for one, could certainly use the advice.

But we’ll end on a more cheerful holiday note with Bill and his wife, two liberal Democrats in Tucson who were apprehensive about an invitation from their conservative neighbors, “who couldn’t be further from us on the political scale of things—or so we thought”:

The third couple they invited, also neighbors, are also Republicans. We are all friends, play a little golf together and share a meal occasionally, but we have not spoken since the summer, as we were away at our summer home and arrived a few days before Turkey Day. We were nervous, but we accepted when the host, over the backyard fence, casually mentioned that they had banned all news from their home and are enjoying getting caught up on repeats on the Home Channel.

The afternoon was lovely. No one brought up the election. At one point, as we were discussing in general terms the difficulty in finding anyplace to put our savings and earn anything, the host said he thought the market was going to crumble soon anyway since the President-elect would probably be indicted and impeached soon. His grace at the dinner table was lovely and asked that the healing in the country start right now. We all said a big Amen.

Later, as we discussed health issues, as we tend to do at our boomer ages, the other Republican mentioned that at least we would soon have a single-payer system, e.g. Medicare for All, since the Republicans are going to screw up the current system that seems to be helping an awful lot of Americans and a single-payer system will be the only solution to fix it … a lot of “about time” chiming in around the table. Another shocker.

Hillary’s name never came up. I was all prepared to use my current approach, “I hope HE is successful and helps all Americans.” Never had to.

So, we were pleasantly surprised to say the least, and we thanked all our neighbors for a graceful dinner and their “act of kindness” toward their distressed/depressed Democratic friends.

Did your family or friends surprise you by coming to an understanding? Let us know. And, in case you missed it last week, here is Sage’s illustrated take on Trumpsgiving:

Trump also needs a pull-back guy—I should be hired, by the way—to help him pause before hitting send on Twitter, to take ten deep breaths in front of any microphone, etc. (Ol’ Slick Willy from Arkansas needed a pull-back guy too, especially for that body part that always got him in trouble, you know?)

Seriously though, I think the all noise over the executive orders and the appointments and the nominees have been shrill. I have tuned out, I’ll admit it. Elizabeth Warren reading Coretta Scott King makes her a warrior princess?  The same woman who ridiculously claimed Native American heritage? Really? I’m supposed to pay attention to that? Nah, we’re still celebrating our win over ‘Bama!

Time will tell with Trump, but it hasn’t told yet. I am not ready to start a fire in Berkeley because they invited a guest speaker I don’t like, but I’m not ready to cast a ballot for Trump’s second term yet either. Damn man, I know we are all for instant gratification these days, but holy shit, let’s all get over the election hangover before we start impeaching, re-electing, calling the damn game against Tommy Brady with most of the game still to play. Let things play out, let those elected to govern try to govern—it’s harder than it looks.

The loyal opposition is important and needs to be robust and constructive and play a role, but screaming drowns out conversations—and conversations are still what we need more of in this country.

He continued the conversation yesterday—and it seems like he’s slowly turning against Trump:

My take on the president about 60 days in? Not much: He is the same blowhard, thin-skinned, egomaniacal maniac I voted for in November. Do I regret my vote? Not yet. Might I down the road? Sure.

The foreign Russian influence in our democratic process troubles me, and if it’s determined to be true, I will not stand for it. Can’t have it. Still smells eerily like Whitewater to me right now, though. The vast left-wing conspiracy maybe!

Throwing out Obamacare? I’m all for it if a workable alternative replaces it. I wouldn’t support getting rid of it just to get rid of it. Just like so much of it all, Obamacare has some things I like and some things I do not. Make it better, call it whatever you want, let’s just make the problem less of a problem for less people and move forward.

Less regulation? I’m for less regulation. I’m not John Stossel yet, but in general I do think we have a million stupid regulations we could get rid of and be better off for it.  

Sanctuary cities? We already solved the nullification crisis some 150 years ago, didn’t we? No state, not even California or New York, can stand on solid ground defying the federal government on matters of immigration. Weed, maybe, immigration and enforcement, no. I’m ok with strangling the shit out of sanctuary cities.

Expanding military spending? I’ll defer on that one; I have a brother in the Army, so I’ll follow his lead. I want them equipped, capable, and ready— but not fighting other people’s wars. Can we afford it? I don’t know.

His Supreme Court nominee?  Seems like a man of the law, serious and studied. I have no problem with his nomination. The Court should always be around 5-4.  It keeps us all in the same sane lane.

Overall, Trump has not been the wrecking ball or the middle finger I anticipated. He’s a dumpster fire in a lot of ways, but mostly harmlessly so, in my opinion.

Should he comment on an NFL player not standing during the anthem? No, it is his right and he should protect that even if he hates it. Should he tweet about Ivanka’s fashion brand? No. Should he claim wiretapping without proving it? No.

It’s all ridiculous reality TV that we should expect from Trump—and frankly expect from ourselves. Like it or not, that is who we are. We are not “all Berliners” anymore; we are all Kardashians, and our president proves it—as does our collective “we” every day. We know who is in the Sweet 16 or what happened on The Walking Dead, but we don’t know shit about Mike Pence or the governor of our own state.

I’m guilty, I promise—hell, this email proves it. My opinion on Trump so far is as worthless as anyone’s, maybe more so than most. I wake up every day, take kids to school, work my ass off for 10 hours a day, get to baseball or soccer practice, listen to the news on the radio, help with homework, pay some bills, do my taxes, change out a light bulb, do some laundry, seduce the wife and go to bed. Repeat. Repeat. Oh shit, it’s the weekend? Soccer tournament, cut the grass, wash the car, plant some flowers, go to church, check Monday’s work calendar, get back to it.

Notice that I left out bitching and complaining, committing a crime, tweeting, screwing my neighbor’s wife, expecting something for nothing, asking for a handout, stealing someone else’s pension, polluting the land, harming any animals, swearing to destroy another country, beating up someone who looks different from me, worrying about who is in the stall next to me at Target ...

So I voted for Kanye’s better half. He hasn’t jumped the shark just yet. Give him time.