Stop the Votewashing

The media are trying to make Trump's voters look more virtuous than they are. Here are 10 reasons they ACTUALLY voted the way they did.

Photo by InOldNews | Martin Morard

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In the final weeks of the 2024 election, critics on the left identified a media phenomenon dubbed “sanewashing,” which in fact has been going on for the entirety of Donald Trump’s political career: Reporters take his barely intelligible ramblings and paraphrase them in a way that makes them sound coherent and even reasonable, leaving audiences with the impression that Trump is far more sane than he actually is. 

Something very similar is happening in the news media right now, but the subject of this cleansing is not Trump but the electorate itself — or more specifically, the 51% or so of the electorate that cast their ballots for Trump. Call it votewashing. In the name of understanding why a majority of voters chose Trump, the media are putting the best possible spin on that choice, describing it in ways that make it seem far more sensible, informed, and virtuous than it actually is. 

In many cases it’s the explicit argument that what really mattered wasn’t Trump at all, but a series of substantive and strategic failures by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In other cases it’s a renewed attention to the emotional “connection” Trump forged with voters, or an exploration of the different ways people might be less than happy about the American economy.

So we are told that the election turned out the way it did because Harris didn’t offer a compelling enough policy vision, and that Democrats aren’t paying enough attention to the working class, and that voters believe elite institutions have failed them, or simply that people are still upset about the cumulative inflation of recent years. These assessments are not necessarily wrong in their particulars. But they leave out some of the most important messages that 51% was actually sending with their votes.  

Since nobody else seems to want to say what those messages were, let’s go through them:

1. We hate foreigners, especially non-White ones. Trump ran the most xenophobic campaign in memory if not in all of American history, which included some of the most repulsively racist rhetoric imaginable, spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, among other things. Nothing was more important to his campaign, and if you voted for Trump, that’s what you voted for.

2. We’re not so hot on women either. Trump, JD Vance, and their surrogates traded in naked misogyny of a kind we’ve sadly gotten used to. By all accounts, Trump voters not only were okay with it, they cheered it on.

3. We don’t mind being lied to. As usual, Trump lies at a rate that is utterly mind-boggling, about matters large and small, and there is zero evidence that his voters have any problem with it at all.

4. We hate society’s most vulnerable and love punching down at them. Execrable attacks on transgender Americans were second only to immigration as the centerpiece of the Trump campaign, and that of other Republicans as well. Democrats did not believe these attacks would be effective, but they clearly found an eager audience. 

5. We don’t want leaders who bring us together, we want leaders who hate the same people we hate. See above; the tag line of Trump’s ads was “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for us.”

6. We don’t actually care if you address our material problems. This has been evident from Trump’s entire political career: He promises to solve every problem people have — especially working-class people — solves none of them, then returns to promise to solve them all over again, whether it’s restoring manufacturing jobs or giving everyone health coverage or rebuilding American infrastructure. Meanwhile, Joe Biden actually made enormous progress on all those fronts, and voters neither know nor care.  

7. We are wildly misinformed about conditions in the country. Among the falsehoods Trump told voters was that crime is increasing, inflation is still high, jobs are scarce, and conditions overall have never been worse. These things are all false, but Trump supporters believed them. 

8. We don’t care if our leaders have any public or private morality at all. Trump voters simply don’t care that he’s a con artist and a fraudster and a serial sexual abuser and generally a walking collection of loathsome character flaws.

9. It’s OK if you try to overthrow the government. In any sane democracy, plotting a coup to overthrow the government would be disqualifying. Not for Trump voters.

10. Fascism sounds awesome, let’s do that. Whether the average voter has a keen grasp of the definition of fascism and how perfectly Trump embodies it, he made no bones about his nationalism and xenophobia, his scapegoating of minorities, his valorization of violence, and his desire to use government as a tool to punish out-groups and his personal enemies. No voter could claim they didn’t know. 

But oh, look at how condescending I’m being! This is why Democrats lose! 

First of all, I’m not a politician, and this post has nothing to do with what strategy Democrats should or shouldn’t employ. Second, tell me which of the above descriptions is untrue. Do Trump voters actually value honesty in politicians? Do they abhor racist appeals? Do they have a firm grasp of economic reality? Were they shocked and disgusted at his role in the January 6 insurrection? Of course not. 

To repeat, I’m not arguing that economic anxiety or distrust of institutions or doubts about the Democratic Party didn’t play a part in the outcome of the election. They did. But the other factors I’ve listed did as well, and if you ignore them, you’re votewashing Trump’s supporters. If someone is upset about high grocery prices and their solution is “Let’s try fascism,” it doesn’t mean they don’t care about grocery prices, but it also means they’ve chosen fascism. And that’s a choice that shouldn’t be excused. 

I want to understand Trump voters; understanding why people make the choices they do is a central part of analyzing politics. But I refuse to apologize for them or paint their choices in the best possible light, especially when they are voting for the most corrupt, dishonest, and morally repugnant president in American history. And that’s exactly what much of the media is doing right now.