Howard Stern hates you for voting for Donald Trump. And once upon a time, I hated you too

Then I came to the realization that hating people for voting for this president is like hating an injured bear for attacking you

Of course the president doesn't care about his voters. But it's more complicated than that (Getty)

Trumpism is an ugly thing. It brings out the worst in people. It has even, I’m ashamed to say, brought out the worst in me.

After the 2016 election, I wrote a blog about how I hated Trump voters, and how I hated that I hated them. “I don’t like hating you,” I lamented. “It makes me feel so alienated from God. It makes me scared that I am capable of such evil feelings myself. You’ve brought that out in me.” Suffice to say, I’ve calmed down a bit. Or perhaps I’ve just been worn down. It’s hard to tell these days.

Either way, Howard Stern has not. “I don’t hate Donald,” the shock jock recently said on his radio show. “I hate you for voting for him, for not having intelligence. For not being able to see what’s going on with the coronavirus, for not being able to see what the Justice Department is doing. I hate you, I don’t want you here.” What’s more, Stern added that Trump hates his supporters, too: “The Trump voter who idolizes the guy, he despises you.”

And herein lies the tragedy. Stern is right. Trump is a charlatan. Yet, I don’t think Trump voters are stupid, and certainly not all of them are the horrible people I was so quick to dismiss them as. Yes, some of them do fit nicely in the “basket of deplorables” Hillary Clinton mentioned. (Point of information: she said some Trump voters were in that basket; note how many self-selected into it). But many more are desperate, and desperate people do drastic things.

“What do you have to lose?” Trump once asked. Turns out, not much.

When last I visited Dayton, Ohio, in 2018, I was shocked at the blight and decay. Trump narrowly won Montgomery County, in which Dayton sits, in 2016. That might not sound noteworthy but consider that no Republican presidential candidate had won Montgomery County since 1988. I was born in Dayton in 1986. When I last visited the city in 2018, it was a ghost of what it had been in 1998. It didn’t surprise me to learn that it was the opioid overdose capital of America, not because of the shuttered shopping centers where I used to eat Chinese food or abandoned and condemned houses in my grandma’s old neighbourhood, but because of the story they told — one of people who were out of jobs, who didn’t have money to shop and eat out, and of foreclosures and population decline.

While the opioid epidemic has ravaged places like Montgomery County, another epidemic — nay, pandemic — threatens the rest of Trumpland. John Prine, who last month passed away from Covid-19, famously sang about Muhlenberg County. In Central City, Kentucky, the largest town in Muhlenberg County, new coronavirus infections are up 650%. That’s not a typo—it really is a three-digit increase. Meanwhile, Trump pressures states to “reopen” and keeps insisting we don’t need widespread testing for coronavirus.

72% of Muhlenberg County residents voted for Trump in 2016.

This is the latest way in which Donald Trump has shown an utter contempt for the great unwashed. His policies are leaving his supporters across the country worse off, and that was before the pandemic. Now he marches them back to their jobs and, for many of them, to their graves. He doesn’t care — as long as you stay alive long enough to vote. Think I’m joking? He literally said this in 2016. Trumpism. Ugly thing.

Assuming his voters do stay alive — and let’s face it, that’s a crap shoot for all of us right now—Trump is likely to have their vote. In March, Vox reported that 10% of people who voted for Trump in 2016 might not vote for him in November. The inverse of that is that 90% of them definitely will. Given how little he has achieved and how miserably he’s handled this crisis, it begs the question — why?

The answer is in turns simple and complex. The long answer involves a deep dive into the American psyche, where rugged individualism and bootstrap theory still hold sway and a heavy skepticism of government, outsiders, and condescending “experts” (who too often are outsiders from the government) has roots running back to the Whiskey Rebellion — yes, a real thing — and before. It involves an utter lack of class consciousness wrought by 40 years of Reaganism convincing Americans they need not worry about the less fortunate, because the “undeserving poor,” the “welfare queens” and “illegal immigrants” — coded language for black women and Latinx people — are to blame for their own hard luck.

Make no mistake, their luck has often been hard. In places like Eastern Kentucky, the coal industry has all but disappeared, taking with it the jobs generations of Appalachians relied upon. Unions have been weakened and, in many cases, destroyed. Cities like Dayton and Detroit saw their factories shuttered as jobs moved overseas and no one — not Republicans, but also not Democrats — really did anything to attract industry. There has been a neoliberal consensus since Reagan’s re-election in 1984, and that consensus is that these people are worth leaving behind.

In exchange for their jobs, they got to be called stupid rednecks. They feel caricaturized and vilified, and in many ways, they are and have been for decades now. We have a word for this: classism.

Which brings us to the short answer. They’ve been screwed over by capitalism. They’ve realised there is a problem, they just haven’t correctly identified it. But hating Trump’s voters is like hating an injured bear for attacking you. These people are frightened, frustrated, and suffering — and they’re about to suffer a whole lot more as our president makes them human sacrifices at the altar of late capitalism.

It’s easy, maybe even tempting, to say “they have it coming.” But that’s a Trumpian way of looking at it if I’ve ever heard one, and Trumpism is an ugly thing.