Liberals need to stop letting Trump voters off the hook

28 February

Demonstrators talk during a protest in support of U.S. President Donald Trump's stance against what he calls racist laws, land expropriation, and farm attacks, outside the American Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, February 15, 2025.

Can the Democrats win over Trump voters?

The answer depends on what kind of liberal you are.

The Postran a story this morning about a young woman in rural Michigan who believed Donald Trump’s promise to provide in vitro fertilization for free. On the strength of that, she voted for him.

Ryleigh Cooper, who is 24 years old and worked for the US Forest Service, expected to start a family after Trump’s victory. She is “normally more focused on motherhood than politics,” the Post said.

“Then came DOGE.”

As part of the president’s and Elon Musk’s purge of the federal bureaucracy, Cooper was fired. Four days later, she read about Trump’s executive order to “expand access” to IVF. It asked “for policy recommendations to reduce costs of the service, the Post said.

But it wasn’t free.

She was out of a job and out of a plan. “Delivering on promises for American families,” read the White House’s announcement. “That’s bulls---”, she recalled thinking, and put down her phone.

The story is getting attention because Cooper seems to represent just the kind of Trump voter that the Democrats are looking for – someone who feels betrayed but also looking for solutions to problems, in this case, a medical condition that prevents pregnancy by ordinary means.

The story is getting attention for another reason. Implicitly, it asks the reader to sympathize, as if she’s been duped. Critics were having none of it. She knew what she was voting for, they said. She just didn’t think it would happen to her. She’s fucked around. Now she’s finding out.

On Bluesky this morning, MSNBC host Chris Hayes said that, “people’s reactions to these stories tend to be of the leopards-eating-faces variety, but this is a great piece of reporting in part about how voters very disconnected from politics make their choices.”

“Absolutely right,” replied TPM’s Josh Marshall. “The people who get whipsawed like this were generally responding to images, impulses, momentary impressions. Also shows the poverty and incompleteness of the more general, ‘This is what people voted for. This is what they wanted.’ Well, not really a broad sea of over-determination.”

In other words, they are not lost. They are gettable.

But are they?

First, it’s important to question the premise. Is Ryleigh Cooper really that disconnected from politics? That’s certainly the impression she gave. It’s also the impression given by Emily Davies, the Post reporter. And given that she lives out in the middle of nowhere, it probably seems right to say she’s “more focused on motherhood than politics.”

But no one is disconnected from politics.

Wherever there are two human beings, there’s politics.

You don’t need to get philosophical, though. All you got to do is read the story. After getting fired, “she thought about the Facebook posts she had seen a few days earlier.” Her grandma said America is “going in the right direction.” Her high school AP government teacher said: “Any government employee who is afraid of transparency is a criminal!”

That’s not disconnected. That’s connected.

To the rightwing media apparatus.

It’s a complex subject, but for convenience’s sake, let’s say this about the rightwing media apparatus: Its goal is to make you trust Trump.

And Ryleigh Cooper did. “Trump, at a campaign stop an hour and a half south of her, had promised to make IVF free,” the Post said. “She knew that from a video clip she saw on TikTok. And she had believed him.”

Also: “She also believed him when he said that Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration that suggested mass cuts to the federal workforce, was not his plan.”

To recap: she chose to believe a documented liar and convicted fraud who said anything and promised anything for votes. Though his campaign was a vengeance movement, Cooper could overlook all of that, because none of that, for her, was reason enough to doubt him.

Trump lied. She chose to believe the lies. We’re supposed to feel sorry for her? We’re supposed to think she’s gettable by the Democrats?

There’s another question on my mind.

Why do some liberals choose to give people like this so much benefit of the doubt? Why do they choose to take what they say at face-value?

Part of the answer is rooted in the school of liberalism they ascribe to, which is to say that they are the kinds of liberals who believe that bigotry, hatred, prejudice and other forms of socially accepted sadism are a product of ignorance and fear, to wit: People are afraid of things they do not understand. Help them understand so they do not fear.

Sympathy for the devil, so the devil will be good.

The problems are obvious.

First, there’s personal accountability. To accept at face-value that Ryleigh Cooper is disconnected from politics is to treat her as if she were a child who must be protected from her own terrible choices. Second, a child like that does not want to understand, because understanding would risk being held accountable for her choices. Third, sympathy encourages willful ignorance. We shouldn’t do that.

Some liberals keep wanting to believe voters like Cooper are merely misguided – that all they need is sympathy and good information.

No, what they need is to be told what to do.

Act like a child.

Get treated like a child.

Alas, the only way to do that would be though a liberal media apparatus the size and scope of the rightwing media apparatus, such that the Democrats’ voice is big enough and loud enough to reach people like Cooper. It would not ask her to consider facts, etc, while making choices in her own best interest. It would tell her what her best interest is, and why, because she obviously can’t do that herself.

I say alas, because there’s no such thing as a liberal media apparatus.

Until then, the Democrats should probably focus on their own.

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