How Donald Trump Won-“I Don’t Care”

Let me be clear, I do care that Trump won, and I care about determining how this awful destructive force has been unleashed on our once great nation. And I think I have cracked the code. It’s because a lot of Trump supporters just said, “I don’t care.” Certainly people were motivated to vote for Trump for many reasons, but I believe it boils down to suspending their empathy to feed their fear.

Much on-line ink has been spilled these last weeks eviscerating the Democratic Party and Secretary Clinton. Most certainly the party, and especially Debbie Wasserman-Shultz bear a tremendous amount of blame, not just for the Clinton loss, but for not having the infrastructure and ground game in place to retake the Senate and make gains in the House. This was inexcusable, but hardly a surprise. Wasserman-Shultz voted Republican about as much as she did Democrat, and didn’t use the previous 4 years to build a 50 state organization as Governor Howard Dean had started.

Then, there’s this concept that the Democrats didn’t pay attention nor understand white working class people. Bullshit, white working class people didn’t want to listen. They don’t want to admit that the world has changed and jobs have evaporated, and most won’t come back. But they just didn’t care to hear that truth. If the Clinton campaign is guilty of anything it is NOT lying to these people about how their plight would have to be addressed. Trump came in throwing around a bumper sticker (Make America Great Again), and they just didn’t care enough to pin him down on the specifics. Nor did they care enough to even look at Secretary Clinton’s very detailed proposals.

It wasn’t about the economy either. The economy is doing pretty well considering where President Obama had to start 8 years ago. I live in a fairly high-end neighborhood (I got lucky and got one of the last of the older homes, not the rebuilt McMansions, at a bargain price 15 years ago), and it is some of the better-educated and well-off people who had Trump signs in their yard. Why, because they didn’t care enough to get to the truth about the Clinton Scandals (that there weren’t any), nor to understand how ill-equipped Trump was to lead. They didn’t care enough to consider that he might be all bullshit as opposed to some great business man.

Just last week I got into an exchange with a friend who shared a meme which claimed that Herr Trump never said people to have get out of the country (he did). I pointed this out to her. We got into the registering Muslims thing, and of course she went on the rampage about them killing us. I pointed she had statistically greater chance of being killed by a white Christian American than a Muslim, that in fact, this year she had a greater chance of being shot by a toddler. When I refuted every argument, she finally responded with, “I don’t care.” This is a response you get over and over on social media when you present people with irrefutable facts that dispute their claims. Any number of times, they finally throw up their hands and say, “I don’t care, I’m voting for Trump.”

The evangelical Christian movement has lost all credibility, because they don’t care that Trump has been divorced twice, committed adultery, defrauded small businesses to the point of bankruptcy. They don’t care that he bragged about grabbing women by their pussy. They don’t care that he made anti-Jewish statements, or that he referred to most Mexicans as rapists and murders, or that he wants to start “registering” certain people as Muslims. They don’t care that he stood on stage and mocked a disabled person. They made excuses for him, finally claiming that he was “new” Christian…you know…all is forgiven, so we don’t care about all that other stuff. All because they thought he’d return them to power.

They don’t care that he’s now backtracked on nearly every promise he made. They don’t care that a person raised in wealth, supported by his father’s fortune, and known to be a fraudulently poor business person is going to somehow fix their problems.

They don’t care that Russia was interfering with the election, and collaborating with the Trump campaign. Can you imagine just a few years ago the rage, especially from Republicans, over something like this. Trump has normalized the behavior of Russians hacking our election. They are now normalizing white supremacy with the picks of his cabinet and advisors. He is normalizing the dismantling of our system of Public Education…and his supporters just don’t care, and why is that. It is not because of the economy, it is certainly not because of his supposed “Christian” beliefs as opposed to Secretary Clinton’s…his supporters don’t care about those things. The reality is, they care that he has fanned the flames of hate, given everyone at least one boogeyman they can fear, and he hates the same people they hate.

Just today, it’s being reported that House Speaker Paul Ryan has joined the “I don’t care” club. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Ryan said he could not prove Trump’s baseless claim that “millions of people voted illegally,” which the president-elect tweeted to his millions of followers last Sunday. “I don’t know. I’m not really focused on these things,” Ryan said when anchor Scott Pelley asked him about Trump’s blatant lie.

When Pelley continued to press him, Ryan said, “It doesn’t matter to me. He won the election, The way I see the tweets you’re talking about, he’s basically giving voice to a lot of people who have felt that they were voiceless.” “Who cares what he tweeted, you know, on some Thursday night, if we fix this country’s big problems?” he added. “That’s just the way I look at this.”