Was This Worth It, Trump Voters?

A 100-Day MAGA Check-in

Photo by Natilyn Hicks Photography on Unsplash

Trump Voters,

Pardon me for interrupting America’s Greatness Celebration, but I was thinking about you today.

I really have to wonder what story you’re telling yourself after 100 days of this person in power:

The Stock Market is in a free fall comparable only to the Great Depression.
Your retirement portfolio is surely circling the drain.
We’re in a fruitless, completely unnecessary trade war with our allies.
Prices on groceries and online products are rising exponentially.
Massive layoffs are now beginning all over the country.
We are rapidly approaching what appears to be an unavoidable recession.
Our National Parks are being gutted for logging and mining.
Funding for cancer research, for children’s lunches, for the Arts, and for public schools are all evaporating.

And as you see all of this unfolding after just 100 days, I have to ask you: was it worth it?

Was losing your elemental freedoms, a fair trade for reinforcing your racism by making sure the qualified, experienced, rational woman of color didn’t get to keep doing the work she’d already been adeptly doing?

Was elevating a felon to the presidency who clearly has no plans for affordable healthcare, international diplomacy, economic stability, or environmental protections, really an acceptable price for owning Libs like me?

Is the reality that an unelected immigrant billionaire is currently running roughshod through our Federal organizations and thoughtlessly ending the lifelong careers of American public servants—the acceptable collateral damage of you being able to feel superior to those other “scary” immigrants?

As the possibility grows that your parents are going to spend their final years here in worry and pain because the financial and healthcare supports they paid into for decades are being stolen from them, does it ease that anxiety to know you’ve conquered the Woke Mind Virus—whatever the hell that is?

As you watch this miserable, cognitively addled tyrant spew incoherent word salads and capriciously lay waste to every law and system our nation was built upon, are you comforted in knowing that your guy won?

I mean, sure you may lose your job, your kids will get preventable diseases, your Trans granddaughter will live in terror, your retirement will be nonexistent, your immigrant co-worker might be torn from her family, your daughter may not be able to vote, and you’ll be living the rest of your days in the very kind of fascist dictatorship your grandparents sacrificed to prevent.

But, maybe none of that matters right now, because having a white guy in the White House soothes whatever fictional nightmare fears about gays and migrants and Muslims and Democrats that Fox News, your parents, and your church have pumped into your brain.

Maybe the cheap high of a political win, the perverse joy of watching dark-skinned people being deported regardless of the reasons, some culture war lip-service pandering, and the middle-finger flex you throw to people like me mean that none of these other things really matter.

Maybe seeing the Constitution tossed aside and the Rule of Law ignored and the teachings of Jesus urinated on are less important to you than pissing-off Liberals.

Whatever story you’re telling yourself right now about helping create what the entire rest of the world knows is an abject disaster on every level, I sure hope this was worth it.