For GOP voters feeling the pain of Trump’s cuts, a realization dawns: We’ve had our pockets picked
But they shouldn't just focus on their own distress. They must also reject the bias, xenophobia, bigotry, and race-baiting at the core of the MAGA movement.
It has become a frequent occurrence in the weeks since President Donald Trump’s inauguration — voters in majority Republican districts voicing their displeasure with the administration’s policy decisions at sometimes tense town hall meetings around the country.
The gatherings — at which some lawmakers have been widely jeered and angry attendees removed — have become so charged that GOP officials have discouraged members of Congress from hosting them.
While Democrats, too, have felt the wrath of their constituents in public meetings during the last several weeks, the pushback by GOP voters is especially significant because their discontent threatens lawmakers where it matters: at the ballot box.
But with midterm elections still two years away, what’s much more important at this moment is the decision Trump voters feeling the pain of the last two months have to make: that they’re either going to speak up for the suffering being experienced by Americans as a result of the president’s executive orders and cost-cutting, or remain silent for the sake of their party.
In other words, these voters must choose between advocating for the rights of all people or continuing to embrace the partisanship that has led us here.
For conservative voters, choosing the former hasn’t been the easiest decision. And make no mistake, by continuing to endorse Trump’s actions despite the discomfort they may be feeling, those same voters are also cosigning on the bias, xenophobia, bigotry, and race-baiting at the core of the MAGA movement.
While Trump made inroads with Latino and Black male voters in November, the election didn’t differ sharply from recent trends; white, noncollege-educated voters remained the core demographic for Trump. He was able to secure his base’s support by stoking racial division among white voters on the campaign trail.
While he used a similar playbook when he won the presidency in 2016, Trump — who last year questioned Kamala Harris’ racial authenticity and baselessly suggested Haitian immigrants were eating dogs — continued to demonstrate he knew which dog whistles would resonate.
Voters, polling shows, also believed in Trump’s ability to address their economic angst at the supermarket and the gas pump because of the “wealth” he’s amassed for himself (never mind the half dozen times his companies have filed for bankruptcy).
Yet, through the first two months of Trump’s second term, the administration has caused severe distress for its voters — and everybody else — by cutting government jobs and slashing programs. For Trump’s voters, the president’s policies were supposed to be aimed at those they were told were a drain on society: immigrants, people of color, the “deep state,” and the “woke mob.”
For Trump’s voters, the president’s policies were supposed to be aimed at those they were told were a drain on society: immigrants, people of color, the “deep state,” and the “woke mob. ”
President Lyndon B. Johnson once said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Some of these voters are starting to realize they’ve had their pockets picked. Sadly, others are either too ashamed to admit it or remain ignorant of what’s happened.
What Trump voters, and others, may not realize is that none of this is new, it is part and parcel of the nation’s contract with its people. W.E.B. DuBois, in his opus Black Reconstruction in America, spoke of the racial bribe: the deliberate and strategic method of the planter elite class to extend special privileges to poor whites — particularly in the postbellum South — to drive a wedge between them and formerly enslaved Africans.
Building on the work of DuBois, the Black studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly calls the contemporary expression of that dynamic “superexploitation,” which allowed the capitalist class to get richer and white consumers to get a share of “wealth, power, and luxury” at the expense of Black people domestically and internationally.
However, economic precarity for all is the chicken that came home to roost as a result of neoliberal policies — that Trump says he can solve (but really can’t), and offers racism to distract his voters from his true aim: the deconstruction of the administrative state, something Steve Bannon warned us about during the first Trump term.
Pushback against this is what’s needed. But these voters must understand that they can no longer have their cake and eat it. They can no longer claim ignorance of systemic racism while adopting it as part of their politics and only fight back on behalf of people who look like them. It’s all or nothing.
In the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we “must learn to live as brothers” — and sisters, I might add — “or together we will be forced to perish as fools.”
Rann Miller is an educator and freelance writer based in South Jersey. His Urban Education Mixtape blog supports urban educators and parents of children attending urban schools. Miller is also the author of “Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids,” which was reissued in 2024. @RealRannMiller