Us versus Them: How an intelligent person can vote for Trump

Imagine this election reversed.

Imagine we’re fresh off of a Ted Cruz presidency in which he did all sorts of things we hate. Healthcare is more expensive and more restricted and almost impossible for anyone in the middle or lower class to afford. Gay marriage is being banned in more and more states. Our borders are closed and immigrant families are getting split up by deportation in startling numbers. Women’s rights are at an all time low with birth control almost impossible to get and abortion made increasingly illegal. Climate change is getting worse, but denial about it is stronger than ever and the Cruz administration has made it financially impossible for renewable energy to get good footing in the marketplace.

Jeb Bush wins the 2016 republican nomination. He is running against Democrat nominee Marc Kewban (like Mark Cuban, but a grosser version of him). Marc Kewban is an ‘outsider’ to politics as usual and is running primarily on how he is going to reverse course on everything mentioned above…He’s going to repeal the Cruz Healthcare Act. He’s going to legalize gay marriage, force all pharmacies to carry birth control, make abortion legal again, and create a path for immigrants to gain citizenship. His policies are everything you like, but there is one problem. This guy is kind of a creep.

Marc Kewban is a rich reality television star that is known for his loud mouth, “telling it like it is”, and kind of a dicey past (multiple marriages, some questionable financial dealings), but he’s charismatic and there is a charm to his bluntness that people respond to. He’s also the only candidate that’s provided any real excitement in your party in a while, with John Kerry and Al Gore types losing your last couple elections, and there is something fun about someone shaking things up a bit.

Jeb Bush is clearly much more of a traditional presidential nominee. He is respectful and seemingly intelligent, but he is also a Bush. And while it isn’t his brother or his father running, he comes with all of that Bush baggage. He is also vocal about his support for the Cruz-era politics, and vows to not only uphold all of the damage he has done, but take them a step further…bigger tax cuts to the top 1% to the point they are basically tax exempt, a federal ban on gay marriage and abortion, getting rid of alternative energy sources and refocusing the economy on foreign oil.

You watch MSNBC and they show you all of the things you like about Kewban. He’s talking about what a disaster Ted Cruz was as a president, and how he’s going to make America great again. And you buy it because you hate the direction the country has been going, but they aren’t showing you comments he has made that are clearly sexist. He’s rich and clearly hasn’t paid his fair share of taxes, but you tell yourself that maybe we COULD use someone in the White House that knows how to work the system a little bit…if he does that for our country, maybe we’ll all benefit the way he has personally. Every now and then he goes way too far…maybe he says something like “every time an unarmed black man is shot, a member of the black panthers should get to execute a cop”. And he says it in kind of way where you don’t totally know whether he is just getting people fired up, or whether he really believes in that sort of thing. These comments start to pile up and it’s getting uncomfortable. You tell yourself it doesn’t really matter all that much what this guy says, because the feeling is that he probably won’t even really be that involved in the day-to-day presidential stuff that much. He’ll put trusted democrats in his cabinet and they’ll basically run the country like a traditional democratic president, just with a loud mouthed asshole as it’s public speaker. And there is one more factor…

The Supreme Court Justice nomination.

This election isn’t just about Marc Kewban, it’s about nominating a Supreme Court Justice that will potentially swing the court in favor of your personal political leanings for decades.

And then a “grab them by the pussy”-esque bomb drops on Kewban. It’s clearly devastating, and it eventually leads you to state that your vote for Kewban isn’t really a vote for Kewban, you are voting for the Democrats and for the general policies of the party. He does terribly at the debates and is completely outclassed, but those debates also feature Jeb Bush touting all of the politics you hate. How bad would things have to get before you turned against voting for him, and instead voted for Jeb Bush? For me, I think it could get pretty damn bad.

I think there is tremendous power behind the “us vs them” mentality. We’ve all mostly drawn a line in the sand and said we’re on this team or that team. We only watch news coverage that talks about how our team is so great and the other team is going to ruin the world. All of our friends on Facebook talk about how bad the other candidate is and we filter out anyone whose opinion differs. We get so deeply entrenched that it gets pretty hard to see things from the other side. I think Trump is human garbage, but I can understand how intelligent people are still planning to vote for him. To them, they probably aren’t voting for him, they are voting for their team, and I think democrats would do the same thing a lot more easily than we would like to admit.

If you are a sports fan, you should understand this even better. What would a player on your favorite team have to do to force you to stop cheering for your team? I recently had to deal with this question as a Chicago Blackhawks fan when Patrick Kane almost definitely—yet allegedly—raped a woman last offseason. What do you do as a fan of a team when a player does something reprehensible? I’ve cheered for this team since I was a child playing little league hockey, and I’ve put in countless hours of time into following them since then…it’s more than just a casual interest of mine. I didn’t cancel my season tickets in the wake of the Patrick Kane incident. I refrained from clapping when he was introduced last season. I had an uneasy feeling when he scored a goal, but by the end of the season I still cheered, because it benefitted my team, the team I’ve loved for decades. I don’t like it and I’m embarrassed that the Kane incident wasn’t enough to get me to abandon the team, but it wasn’t. And now it’s one year later and the whole thing is mostly forgotten.

Donald Trump will lose November 8, and we’ll all be relieved and relish the superiority we feel for making history a second consecutive time, with Obama as the first African American president, and now with Hillary as the first Woman president. We’ll gloat over how twisted the Republican party has become and how much damage Trump has done to them. But I don’t think we’re all able to acknowledge how easily it could happen to us under similar circumstances.