I Was Wrong

Author’s note: I am reprinting my own Daily Beast column from this morning without permission. Please don’t tell them because they’ll probably fire me. I wrote this very late last night, but I can’t bring myself to write anything else just yet. Mostly I’m just feeling terrible for Jim Gaffigan.

Welp. I thought we were past this. I really did. I was wrong.

For the last years, my Twitter feed has been filled with MAGA trolls telling me that people like me “are the problem.” I never believed them. At least I didn’t until last night, when my nation confirmed it. Turns out, people like me really are the problem, and I must admit, as Donald Trump begins the process of assuming his second presidency, that I don’t know what to do about it.

The thing is, people like me don’t want to believe that half of my countrymen support the things Donald Trump supports. We thought four years of corruption, lies, ineptitude, graft, and cruelty cured our dalliance with our authoritarianism. Turns out the following four years of recovery only whetted their appetite.

This is not us.

People like me believed that the office of the presidency would humble even the most hardened heart, just as it has for each of its previous occupants (well, there might have been a couple exceptions before Trump). We thought that even if a humbug were to assume the office that the other two thirds of the government would keep him in line. We thought even the most cynical politicians would put the nation’s interests above their own. We were wrong.

I know Trump voters told pollsters that it was all about the economy, and maybe it was. Eggs and milk are higher. I’m not disputing that, but people like me thought our fellow Americans recognized that the cause of that inflation, and which the Trump administration initiated and the Biden administration continued, kept the economy afloat, and that President Biden steered the nation towards the soft recovery every economist believed was impossible. People like me were wrong.

In 2016, we thought Trump’s blatant misogyny would turn off enough white women voters to deny him a victory. In 2024, we thought overturning Roe would do the same. Both times we thought American misogyny would not deny a highly qualified female candidate a victory. We were wrong.

In 2016, we thought Trump’s blatant xenophobia and racism would turn off enough white people of good will to deny him a victory. In 2024, we thought enough Latinos would rebel against the same. We were wrong.

Time and again, people like me have been wrong about our fellow Americans. Those Americans have told me, time and again, that I live in a Hollywood bubble (despite the fact that I live in Savannah, GA) and that I don’t understand the problems of regular folks like them, despite the fact that I come from fairly modest circumstances, myself. Time and again, I have dismissed these people’s opinion of me because I didn’t want it to be true. Turns out it was true. If this is who “regular folk” want to lead them, then I really don’t understand at all.

Because I don’t understand how a nation founded in the highest aspirations of a people can choose to be led by somebody who only appeals to their basest desires. I don’t understand how a nation that has fought so hard to overcome the worst of its sins can be led so easily back into temptation.

What do my fellow Americans envision mass deportations are going to look like? A country that only 80 years ago locked 120,000 people into internment camps are now going to do the same to millions? This is what my fellow Americans just voted for. Unless they don’t really believe he’ll do it. In which case they’re voting for somebody they believe is lying to them. Forgive me, I don’t understand.

America obviously wants a return to something… I wish I’d ever heard a cogent explanation of exactly what, but there was, apparently, a time of American greatness that was also, somehow, a time when the men were men, the women were happy and in which, as Garrison Keillor so lovingly described his mystical hometown of Lake Wobegon, the children were above average. It is, in other words, a fiction. Worse, it’s the fiction of a fiction. Because that America loved its neighbors. This America spits on them. Or maybe, again, I’ve just got it all wrong.

Speaking of Garrison Keillor, another disgraced octogenarian making a comeback, I remember when Trump won in 2016, Keillor wrote:

Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long, brisk walk and smell the roses.

I remember reading those words for the first time and feeling righteous indignation at them. How dare he, I thought, When he has the privilege to go read Jane Austen and smell his damned roses. Eight years later, I take his point. The world is going to keep spinning, one way or the other, and there’s not a damned thing people like me can do about it. Not anymore.

People like me feel foolish today. Not because we lost an election, but because we put our faith in those stupid higher ideals that founded our nation. I know, I know. Trump supporters will say the same, and both of us will believe that the other side misread those same, stupid founding documents. But when I read the opening of the Constitution, I don’t read it in the voice of Donald J. Trump. I hear it in the voices of my immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents. Of my friends and neighbors and the people I interact with every day. What does it mean to Donald Trump to form a more perfect union? What does it mean to them?

Are we more of a union today or less? People like me believe one way. We’re wrong about everything else. I hope we’re wrong about this, too.