Questions for Trump Voters

And to those expressing remorse for their votes, come join the rest of us resisting the Trump administration.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

If you’re a Trump voter, I have some questions for you. And I’m genuinely curious as to how you would answer.

Did you vote for an unelected billionaire, Trump’s biggest donor, the wealthiest person on the planet (at least for now), with conflicts of interest galore, to be placed in charge of destructively freezing or cutting funds and programs, firing huge numbers of federal employees (with no understanding of the underlying work they do on a daily basis), accessing our personal information, and decimating critical departments without any thought to the massive harms and rippling effects across the country and around the world? Because that’s pretty inefficient.

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for cutting USAD programs that help schools and food banks buy local farmers’ products? Did you vote for the catastrophes facing farmers as a result of Trump’s trade wars, funding cuts and freezes, and the firing of federal staffing? Catastrophes that may cause many to lose their farms (and lead to the closures of the small businesses that serve them). Did you vote for depriving millions of people around the world of critically needed food aid supplied by American farmers, resulting in needless suffering and death? Did you vote for a dust bowl 2.0 (with all of the disastrous short and long-term consequences) that will now be more likely as a result of Trump 2.0’s cuts to conservation funding?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for people to be illegally detained and deported to foreign countries (certainly without due process), imprisoned in those countries, and likely tortured? Did you vote for legal visitors and tourists to live a nightmare of ICE detention that included solitary confinement, or for U.S. citizens to be illegally detained and harassed? Did you vote for 10 year old U.S. citizens to be deported in the middle of their treatment for brain cancer?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for the president and others within the executive branch to defy court orders, give a middle finger to the constitution and the rule of law, and call for judges who rule against them to be impeached (likely encouraging physical violence in the process)?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for our government to bully a small, vulnerable group of people, to encourage physical violence against them, to erase them? Many who are just kids? One who is my son? Did you vote for that? Did you vote for rolling back the rights of all Americans?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for seniors and people with disabilities, some living month to month, to have a harder time accessing their benefits, placing them in financial jeopardy with devastating health consequences? Did you vote for total collapse of Social Security and losing access to the money you’ve put into it throughout your adult life? Did you vote for the Commerce secretary to outrageously claim only “fraudsters” would complain about missing their monthly Social Security check?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote to eliminate the trials of innovative therapies, ensuring the death of many patients with advanced or resistant cancer, including children? Did you vote for the Trump administration to wage war on the scientific community? Did you vote to eliminate the EPA’s research and development capabilities (leading to greater pollution of our air and water and greater rates of chronic disease)? Did you vote to eliminate public health and medical research funded through the NIH (that will lead to more deaths and lower qualities of life for many of us, including our children)? Did you vote for the brain drain of current and future scientists abandoning the U.S., from medical researchers to space scientists, ensuring we will no longer be a world leader in many areas of scientific research and innovation?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for the Trump administration to drastically limit our ability to forecast deadly weather events, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and massive rains? That will result in greater loss of life? Maybe the lives of your own friends and family? Or your own life? Did you vote to place American fishermen and consumers at greater risk by limiting or eliminating NOAA’s ability to provide timely extreme weather and coastal hazard information? Did you vote to drastically limit our ability to understand and plan for our world’s inevitable and increasingly rapid changing climate?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote to eliminate critical grants that flow to your communities’ libraries and museums, jeopardizing access to literacy programs, digital resources, books, internet access for those without it at home, after-school programs, field trips to museums, and work-force training? That will hit poorer rural and urban communities the hardest? Did you vote to add even more stress to your community’s public school district by eliminating federal dollars devoted to special education, negatively impacting your community’s kids with disabilities? Did you vote to take away their opportunities for a happy and fulfilling life?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for universities in smaller and mid-size cities, where they are the largest employer, to lay off significant numbers of employees or maybe even close their campus? FYI, Moody’s just lowered their 2025 outlook for universities from stable to negative, directly as a result of executive orders and the actions of DOGE (and this has never happened before). Did you vote for regional economies cratering around these impacts on universities?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for Trump’s economic policies to be “less a matter of turning the ship’s rudder and more similar to a ship firing torpedoes at itself”? Did you vote for the instability and chaos created by Trump’s erratically changing tariff policies, that will limit the ability of businesses to plan and expand as well as lead to businesses cutting jobs and perhaps even closing their doors? Did you vote for spikes in food and construction costs (the latter negatively impacting housing availability and costs) that will likely result from the impacts of mass deportations on labor?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for a decrease in our rights to speak out against those running the government, to increase our fear of doing so? Did you vote for citizens to be fired, doxed, jailed, or worse, for speaking out against injustices, for exercising their constitutional right to free speech? Did you vote to have additional financial, health, and other stresses added to your life to make it harder to stay informed of your government’s actions? Did you vote for Congress to roll over and expose its belly to the executive branch, to give up its constitutional authority as a third branch of government, and for members to spinelessly ignore their own constituents? Did you vote for the death of our American democracy, replaced by some form of authoritarianism where the super rich get even richer while your day-to-day just gets harder?

Help me understand your thinking here.

Did you vote for Trump, Musk, Vance, and all of their cronies to defecate on the graves of our founding fathers and mothers, on the graves of the veterans who fought and died for our nation, on the graves of those who fought for civil rights and other forms of social and environmental justice, on the ideals of our Democracy, and then wipe their asses with the constitution?

The thing is, I don’t think many of you actually did vote for these things.

I base this on many Trump voters already expressing varying degrees of buyer’s remorse for everything I mentioned above and so much more I couldn’t cover. This includes Republicans in a Michigan focus group who used terms such as erratic, disruptive, and dictator to describe Trump’s actions and their concerns. Other Trump voters experiencing remorse include veterans, people with family members who’ve been rounded up by ICE, federal workers who’ve been laid off, farmers, ranchers, and teachers, and voters who were anxious and unhappy with their lives, simply voting to change the economic status quo, voting to fearfully protect their group’s historic status (having succumbed to this message), and/or voting against the left more than voting FOR Trump. And I think those expressing remorse will only increase.

To those of you expressing remorse, join the rest of us in resisting the Trump administration (and their allies at the state and local levels). Join us in the streets, in demanding that Congressional members do their job, in demanding our state and local officials take action, in boycotting, in speaking out with our voices and in print, and in other ways that make good trouble. Let’s work together to reign in this lawless administration, disrupt the status quo of power and wealth, and limit the suffering the Trump administration is causing and/or has set in motion. Our immediate struggle isn’t about left or right, conservatism or progressivism. It’s about saving our democracy.

But if you did vote for the things listed above, if you really do want an authoritarian state built on a foundation of white Christian nationalism, where the super rich rule over the rest of us, then I think you’ve identified yourself as one of the true enemies from within.