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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

I concur, Trumps motivation is easy. That of his voters, not so much. They knew what they would get; it was on plain display for them to see.

Every single last one of them is guilty of everything that happened and will happen.

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The motivation of the voters becomes a lot more understandable when you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.

This congress and POTUS is, in fact, a good representation of their values, and they aren't ashamed of it.

(You could have given them that benefit in 2016, and somewhat in 2020, but definitely not in 2024.)

Sadly that's the conclusion I've had to come to recently. I wanted to have hope in my fellow Americans, just attributing their choices to being poorly informed or just foolish, but, no, they're just as mean and greedy as he is. They like watching people suffer, and now that they've had their first taste of cruelty, they want more, more, more. They'll be that way long after Trump is gone. They're just mean-spirited assholes. It sucks.

Their motivation seems clear from what they voted, and what they're cheering for - they want to be able to behave without consequences in the same way as well.

Blame others (dems, libs, immigrants, races, religions...) for everything that's wrong, screw the "government" whenever possible, "grab them by the ***", and treat others and the world in the same way Trump can.

It's the same in every autocracy - the leader is providing an outlet for the immoral / suppressed / forbidden thoughts, actions and feelings - they either live vicariously through him (even if they are worse off, but that's blamed on others), or can now do some of that stuff because of him.

The root cause of the current political environment is income inequality and endless funding for wars. The people who support Trump are losing the economic game and had no better representative. The reality is that both parties are owned by the investor class and support foreign funding for wars. Until we as a society figure out that the left vs right struggle is just a distraction from the investor vs labor struggle, we will never fix this problem. Note how everyone in this thread is blaming Trump and the conservative party when the Kamala and the liberal party would likely be doing the same thing, because they both support Israel and the IDF and cover up their war crimes.

All this stuff about trans rights and gun rights and freedom of speech and other random culture war issues are just a tool to keep the labor class divided. The root cause is wealth insecurity, it won’t automatically solve the other problems but it’ll turn down the temperature. I wish people would wake up to this and stop fighting their neighbors when they’re both on the same team.

> The people who support Trump are losing the economic game and had no better representative

That's not the explanation. He overperforms among middle and upper-middle incomes.

Lower and higher incomes lean blue. (Despite the lower ones being the ones truly 'losing the economic game'.)

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