No, Trump Supporters Aren’t All Evil
There are a hundred different reasons why people supported Trump. We do ourselves a disservice in labeling each of his voters Nazis.
Watching injustices unfold across the nation, I’ve seen more and more voters on my side of the aisle fall into a similar line of thinking. “All Trump supporters are bad people. They voted for everything that our country is going through now.” It’s not difficult to see why this dour perception has taken hold.
It’s become harder for Democrats to resist pain and anger as we observe the rapid devolution. I don’t fault all those on the Left who are so appalled by what they’re witnessing that they’ve arrived at such sweeping conclusions.
Absolutism is understandable. There’s a certain comfort that many have found in stamping the same scarlet letter onto each and every person who voted for Trump. But it’s a dangerously reductive way to view our political moment. It removes our capacity for change from the equation when we dismiss our nation as so hopelessly overflowing with evil that there’s nothing we can do to pull ourselves from this abyss. To change minds.
Looking at voter data, most Trump supporters weren’t casting a ballot for an ideological blueprint or an authoritarian form of government. So much of their impetus for voting Republican was rooted in economic and border-related grievances. In 2024, Pew found the economy was the top concern for Trump supporters. 93% said it was a critical deciding factor for them while immigration was a close second, according to 82% of respondents. Whether those motivations were ill-informed doesn’t negate the intent behind them.
When we surrender to the idea that everyone who voted for Trump is an unequivocal Nazi, it corrodes our spirit. The truth is far more complicated. Looking at the nation through such a fatalistic lens incapacitates us in our ability to even converse with those we disagree with. And conversation will be a critical part of our path forward.
Evidence supports this. “Deep-canvassing” experiments — 10-minute, story-based, face-to-face talks — produce enduring attitude shifts on hot-button issues that can stand tall against counter-messaging. Dialogue won’t be a magic cure-all, but it’s far more likely to yield the results our nation needs than hurling epithets, or throwing up our hands and prematurely concluding that all attempts at understanding one another will prove fruitless.
Not all votes for Trump are defensible. But the inspirations behind them were more diverse than many believe. They weren’t all anti-democratic in nature, even if Trump is using them as grounds for trying to impose an autocratic form of government. Separating Trump supporters from all of the ills that have stemmed from their votes is no easy task. For some of us, it may be impossible.
Yet in every fellow Harris voter who falls back on the, “All Trump supporters are sub-human” line of thinking, I can’t help but see people who’ve forfeited their ability to recognize nuance — who refuse to acknowledge the extent to which many Trump supporters were conned and misled. I see people who would rather curse our circumstances than fight in good faith for better ones.
Trump and his allies waged one of the most extensive misinformation campaigns the nation has ever seen. It’s by design that such a large subset of his voters don’t understand exactly what they’ve ushered in with their votes.
It’s hard for many to believe, but there’s such thing as a decent person who voted for Trump. The truth remains that a significant portion of our right-leaning electorate are the kinds of people who would stop at the side of the road and help a stranger if their car had broken down — only to turn around and vote for the man that Democrats view as the spitting image of indecency. The contradiction is a lot to reckon with.
Not every Republican is privy to that picture of Trump that Democrats see as plain as day. And it’s counterproductive to act as though the seventy million people who voted for him can all neatly fit under the same umbrella.
Some wanted what they see happening to the country, it’s undeniable. But it’s not every vote for him that was rooted in the hope that Trump would impose white Christian nationalism on all of us.
Even among Trump supporters, Project 2025 was never popular. Only 4% of Americans wanted what’s now being implemented. In fact, that far-right to-do list was so abhorrent that Trump felt that he needed to distance himself from it in order to ensure he could win the election at all. And huge pockets of his constituency believed him when he said he had nothing to do with that playbook. His careful adherence to it is a flagrant violation of their trust, even if they don’t yet believe they’ve been lied to. Even if the fallout has yet to hit them where they live.
The concerns that so many Democrats live with are hardly baseless. I have days myself where, even as a white man in Trump’s America, I can’t help but feel that my safest course of action is to flee. Given the way that this administration treats dissent, and just how many anti-Trump sentiments I’ve shared online, my paranoia is well-founded. I doubt that I’m at the top of their watchlist, but if the day comes when these ICE sweeps reach my neighborhood, I can’t pretend to be shocked if I should hear sudden bangs at my door. It’s an eventuality that scares me a lot, and one that I’ve obliquely begun to prepare for.
But it’s reassuring to know that half of the voters in this country didn’t vote for this political turmoil or the suppression of dissent. Even Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson spoke out against Jimmy Kimmel’s politically motivated suspension from the airwaves and admitted what such an attack on free speech could portend.
Trump’s base voted for him, yes, but an idealized version of him. A portrait that rests more on faith than fact. What many of his supporters earnestly believe is that their ballot was a vote against crime and inflation. They believe that they used their voice to advocate for a safer, more prosperous country.
To look at the chaos in Chicago and the constitutional crisis we’re quickly approaching, it’s easy for Democrats to see just how misguided that belief is. “Of course the ‘felon-in-chief’ isn’t the one to lead this war against crime!”
But many on the Right have bought into the narrative that the charges leveled against our president are more a product of a weaponized justice system than evidence of actual wrongdoing. They believe that Biden used his executive authority to go after his political enemies, and Trump’s actions in office are merely a means of turning the tables back on his opponents. They’re convinced that Comey’s indictment was a necessary action to take against the man who led the charge against Trump rather than an act of retribution.
Biden didn’t weaponize the justice department, but the investigations Trump faced for his breaches of the law have made it easy for him and his allies to push that narrative.
As a Democrat, I’ve found solace in understanding that a vote for Trump can be separated from a vote for all of the suffering and disenfranchisement that’s happened in the short time since he’s taken office.
The social media algorithms that his supporters have been swept into and the news they follow keep them from grappling with the most dismal realities that this administration has wrought. They’re mired in the belief that their vote continues to do good for this country — that the immigrants and U.S. citizens alike who are being detained and deported in ICE raids were here illegally, or were seasoned drug dealers who made their livelihoods by pouring narcotics onto our streets. Much of Trump’s base doesn’t know that so many of the people being dragged from their homes are grandmas who’ve lived here for decades and have become beloved parts of their communities, or are upstanding citizens who’ve never even left the United States in their lives.
MAGA members don’t consume the same media that we do, and many rank-and-file Republicans’ votes were products of fear, habit, or incomplete information rather than malice.
It’s contentious to build the case that many in the Trumpian movement are victims, too. For the people most deeply wronged by this administration, it registers as offensive to talk about the myriad ways that their aggressors were deceived. How, through a twisted set of circumstances, many of the people who voted for these national hardships never intended to. As our conditions continue to deteriorate, it grows challenging for many on the Left to believe that so many of us still want the same things: freedom, security, food on our tables, and roofs over our head.
I won’t dispute that there are frighteningly notable exceptions. It isn’t every Trump supporter who was duped into voting against their interests. There’s a significant contingent of his voters who looked over Project 2025 and liked what they saw. They wanted minorities to live in fear, the “woke agenda” to be eradicated, trans people to be erased, and Christianity to become the state-sanctioned religion of the land. But it’s useless to argue that everyone who voted for Trump did so for such odious reasons. The MAGA movement holds different appeals for different people, and there are any number of reasons why people have embraced it.
There’s a faction of Trump supporters who were so discouraged by their economic downturn under Biden and the price of eggs when he was in office that they voted for whatever candidate they believed might make their groceries more affordable.
There’s a faction of Trump supporters who were so viscerally opposed to both real and perceived overreaches from “cancel culture” and its proponents that they voted for the leader with no filter instead.
Some follow the news so little that their decision was based off no more than the few podcasters they follow, and the YouTube videos and TikToks they watched in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
Some keep up with sports more than they ever did politics and simply enjoy the excitement of rallying behind the same team as their geographic neighbors.
Some are such avid churchgoers that the political affiliation of their congregation was more than enough reason to vote for the same leader they did. Some are so pro-life that the only aspect of the election they followed was which candidate claimed an opposition to abortion.
Some have been so deeply victimized by criminals in their lives that their votes were reactionary products of which candidate purported to be anti-crime.
Some romanticize the past so deeply that they were persuaded by the leader who promised its reprisal. Not everyone wanted a return to the ills of segregation when they thought back on the halcyon days of their youth; even I’m guilty of glorifying my past and believing the summer of 2009 was brighter than it really was — that the cerulean skies of my earliest days belonged to a more innocent place in time. It’s in human nature to deflate the boogeymen of the past and perceive our formative years as something more idyllic than they ever truly were.
Some were so fed up with the status quo that they did whatever they could to ensure a new standard would finally take hold. For both Democrats and Republicans, our distrust of elected officials crossed that threshold years ago. We’ve long been in agreement that our system is broken and that change is needed. Our visions of how to accomplish those changes varied widely, but few would argue that change is unnecessary.
Each time the Democrats have made “protect Democracy!” into their rallying cry, I’ve felt growing reservations about continuing to echo it. It’s an argument that’s lost much of its punch as our system has become broken to the point of disrepair. And in Trump, many of his voters saw an opportunity to start anew. To commence the overhauling of our institutions that many on both sides of the aisle craved.
Even as a Democrat, I’ve derived a bleak sort of optimism from the notion that Trump will push this broken system to its breaking point, and that whatever system our country might have 20 or 30 years from now will be one that better represents us than the one I’ve known throughout my life. The one where we’re forced as a country to decide between two candidates that huge swaths of us quietly know are undesirable. Where we rally behind them all the same because we’re so fearful of what the opposition represents. Where we cause our two-party pendulum to swing back and forth with an ever-growing intensity as both Democrats and Republicans force each other to further and further extremes.
If we can look past the notion that seventy million people are an unshakeable embodiment of evil, we might start seeing the common ground that exists between us for what it is. It doesn’t require that we excuse cruelty, or deny the dire stakes at hand. But it does demand that we refuse to surrender the belief that persuasion is still possible, even in our fractured state. That enough of the people who were pulled in by Trump’s lies and distortions are still receptive to reason. That our nation’s survival rests on our willingness to talk to one another and not be consumed by the anger that so many of us feel.
Nazis , not all
Misguided , probably
Conservative ? Definitely
Homophobic ? Mostly
Transphobic ? Very likely
Short sighted ? Very likely
Trump loves the poorly educated and it’s clear why that is. They are easily manipulated and duped. Most of the MAGAs saw Trump as a way to get the libs. People who were previously given little attention were themselves “weaponized” by Trump and his fascistic mob. I do agree that not all Trump supporters are Nazis. But they sure like to vote for them. The Republican Party has thoroughly disgraced themselves; those who retain the label are fascists. Someone saying they are a Republican still wears the shame of their part in destroying a country. I’m sure there are people who object to my assertion. But it’s equivalent to someone saying they belong to the Ku Klux Klan but they’re not a racist. I don’t know how to react to the repentant MAGAs. I do know I want nothing to do with them. They not only fucked up their own lives but they dragged the rest of us down with them. If they voted for Trump, I have no interest in trying to psychoanalyze them. Whatever their motives they have caused this country to be “occupied”. The reset, if it comes, will not be seen in my lifetime.