OPINION: To my Trump-supporting friends, rich and poor
My Dear Rich Trumpists,
Well, here we go. Voting has already begun. It is probably too late to change your minds.
Here’s to the important new tax cuts you all envision with a Trump win. Ra. Ra. There’s big money to be made in this election, especially when you consider the many tens of millions at stake, with the changes that winning Democrats could make to the estate tax.
I know that is the animating reason for your support of, well, an obscenity-spouting, fascist-aspiring felon. Did you all hear him recently rambling on in an arena packed with men, women and children about the size of a dead golfer’s genitalia?
I’ll bet most of the chatter around your club dining rooms does not include exclamations about penis size.
I know you consider Trump a classless, amoral grifter, who, after all, drove many of his own businesses into bankruptcy. You know he’s also a foul-mouthed lech, who was found guilty by a jury of his peers of sexual assault.
I’m sure none of you would want your daughters to be left alone in a room with him.
Of course the problem for all of you this election season is that the wheels have come off the old Republican coalition, the one that kept conservative rich Connecticut voters happy for so long.
The anti-abortion wing of the coalition didn’t cause a problem for decades, and your daughters didn’t hold it against you for voting for pro-life Republican candidates, since Roe Vs. Wade was in place and abortion access was safe.
But Trump killed that. The dog caught the car.
The other wheel that has spun off the Republican coalition belongs to the crazy gun enthusiasts who won’t accept any kind of gun control on weapons of war, sensible background checks and limits on some gun ownership that a vast majority of Americans support.
But as mass shootings proliferate, with your own grandchildren increasingly at risk in classrooms, tolerance for this kind of numbness to gun violence is waning. It’s getting harder to explain to your children support for a party that refuses to stop it.
Can you imagine your conservative selves 20 years ago supporting a candidate who exploded the deficit like Trump did while in office?
Another tough pill for Reagan-era Republicans to accept in the time of Trump is the former President’s obvious alliance with Vladimir Putin. To see this you don’t even need to believe the reporting in Pulitzer-Prize winning Bob Woodward’s new book, about Trump’s continuing post-presidency dialogue with Putin or his personal life-saving help proferred to the Russian dictator during the pandemic.
After all, Trump himself told us about Putin’s “genius” in invading Ukraine and his own plans to facilitate Ukraine’s surrender to him.
Ronald Reagan must be spinning in his grave to see Trumpist Republicans prepare to turn their backs on NATO. Trump has made the GOP the party that supports world dictators, not the freedoms of a democratic Europe.
Hungry for new tax cuts, you won’t listen to the scores of Nobel-winning economists, people from his administration, who know him well, including chiefs of staff and four-star generals, who warn of the economic disasters of tarriff taxes, the fascist regime that awaits if he wins.
It’s all embarrassing. I know you won’t put a Trump bumper sticker on the BMW.
But I know it’s also very hard to stop thinking about the new taxes a Kamala Harris administration will unleash, not just on what you make while you’re still alive but on what you hope to leave behind.
So you’re voting your pocketbook, no matter how hard you have to hold your nose and how obvious the damage to the country will be.
My friends, the poor Trumpists,
While I can understand the motivating principles of the rich in supporting Trump, I struggle with understanding support from the middle class and poor.
The Trump GOP is the party of the rich in a way it has never been before. Tax cuts for the very rich was the only legislative accomplishment of the Trump presidency. He tried hard to dismantle affordable health care.
The world’s richest man and other billionaires have poured some of their fortunes into creating a social media ecosystem that has convinced you to support the candidate that will help them, not you.
Do you think Elon Musk or Rupert Murdoch care about your wages or health care?
Democrats, on the other hand, have given you health care protections for pre-existing conditions, child care tax credits, fixed drug costs, job-building legislation promoting the new American chip industry, protections for Social Security and Medicare and the rebuilding of American infrastructure, an unfulfilled promise from the Trump years.
Sadly, the ridiculous racist tropes of the Trump world, people with dark skin out to eat your pets, do resonate. Many of you really believe Trump when he says the vice president is stupid. Maybe you buy into his racism and misogyny.
You believe him when he says Harris is a Marxist, a vice president who has presided over a post-pandemic economy that is the envy of the world, lifted out of the ditch Trump left it in, with a stock market at unimaginable highs.
That’s capitalism baby.
But you tell me, write back, push the comment button, and explain how Donald Trump, born rich, the darling of the uber wealthy, made your life better while he was president and what you think he would do next, other than repeat his one act of first-term legislation, cutting taxes for those who need it the least.
This is the opinion of David Collins
d.collins@theday.com
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