Half-time beers with a MAGA American*

How to change a white male Trump supporter’s vote in thirteen minutes

*The following personal encounter is fictional.

So here we are at Lumen Field in Seattle, enjoying a mid-season match between the Seahawks and Buffalo Bills. My friend and I have just joined you and your wife for beers at half time, and those two are chatting up a storm. So, what are you and I gonna talk about? Not football, that’s for sure!

I must admit, your invitation was a bit awkward. I mean, you and I are perfect strangers who only got acquainted because we’re sitting next to each other. And you just revealed something about yourself that has put a stanchion-size wedge between us. There we were, having a perfectly good time—trading jokes about my Canucks and your Kraken, comparing U.S. and Canadian football, high-fiving that fabulous Seahawks touchdown—when you had to go and ruin all the fun by turning around to those folks behind us and chatting about the election. You can’t wait to vote on Tuesday, you told them, because Trump will win and “we” will take back the country.

“He tells it like it is!” you exclaimed. “He speaks for the average American!”

When the half-time whistle blew and you invited us to join you for beers, I almost turned you down. I was going to say, “Thanks for the invite, but we’re staying in our seats,” and then of course go elsewhere instead. When you came back for the second half, my friend and I were going to just ignore you for the rest of the game before bolting for the exits, content to never see you again.

But that would have been unsporting. Impolite. Un-Canadian. Besides which, I now have a mission: I am going to change your vote in the thirteen minutes the NFL reserves for half-time. Yes, me, the Canadian. Sometimes, an outsider’s perspective is just what’s needed to see things clearly.

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Before I begin, let me promise you two things I will not do. First, I will not call you stupid, or “garbage” (like President Biden did the other day), or label you with that nasty word of Hillary Clinton’s, which in 2016 turned a perfectly good adjective into another French noun. Second, I will not list all the reasons your man is unfit to serve any public office whatsoever in 2025, never mind all the reasons that should have disqualified him in 2016 but didn’t. There’s no time for that, and the sheer length of the rap sheet for your man Donald would probably tire you out and piss you off. Then you would dismiss me as a member of the “woke” left mob, and where would that leave us? So, no, I’m not going to do any of that.

Since you’re friendlier than some of the folks at his rallies, and because you haven’t interrupted me yet, my only real hope of changing your vote is to appeal to your sense of self interest. And that means focusing on what you said to those other spectators: that Trump “tells it like it is” and “speaks for the average American.”

To take your first point, I get what you’re saying. You like the fact that your man is unfiltered. You’re sick and tired of politicians who are enslaved to their handlers and the polls, who cling to their speaking points like a baby soother to make sure they’re “on message.” That does get tiresome, regardless of one’s politics. Fair enough.

But here’s the thing about being unfiltered and “telling it like it is.” People who speak the way Donald does always communicate much more than the words they’re saying. And your man Donald is not “telling it like it is”—he’s telling it like HE sees it in his petty and vengeful little mind, which has not embraced a new idea since about the mid-1970s, when he first learned how to enrich himself by ripping off other people. Donald is the kind of guy who brags about being an author (despite his books having been ghost written) who doesn’t read books. Such a boastful disclosure should not inspire confidence in his claims to expertise on any subject whatsoever.

Even if he did “tell it like it is” (which he doesn’t), how valuable are the opinions of a tired, walking 1980s cliché who’s stuck in his little Gordon Gecko, greed-is-good fantasies of sado-capitalism while dismissing the ideas of more intelligent and better informed people who live in the present? One good sign of pigheaded ignorance is the frequent use of hyperbole to bolster one’s argument. Your man Donald is fond of using “everybody knows,” “nobody has ever,” and other totalizing phrases aimed at convincing gullible audiences. Is that “telling it like it is”? He develops his political views not from careful consideration of existing political theory but from what’s in front of his nose. It’s all about instinct. Sounds admirable, doesn’t it? Well, sure, until you realize that “instinct,” for Donald, is nothing but a means for personal gain.

When empathy for others is non-existent, it’s so much easier to swallow one’s own bullshit. Is it “telling it like it is” to say that Haitian immigrants are eating the pet dogs and cats of “good” American citizens? Is it “telling it like it is” to keep calling Kamala Harris a “communist” from “the radical left” when there’s enough evidence that she might be as neoliberal as any traditional Republican? Is it “telling it like it is” to call the entire country a giant “garbage can”? I think you get my drift here. For Donald, “telling it like it is” relies on a great deal of negative energy. There is nothing positive in his appeal to American voters.

Think about it, Mr. MAGA. For someone who’s supposed to represent success, your man Donald sure is a total bummer. He never speaks of beauty, about what truly makes America great, of what ceiling for achievements your citizens can aspire to. His plain talk never lifts people up or tries to bring different people together. On the contrary, he is always bringing people down: denigrating or badmouthing others, especially those who disagree with him. The way he talks, all of America seems to be in the shitter unless you’re at Mar-a-Lago or one of his golf courses. Since he doesn’t read, Donald wouldn’t know what Abraham Lincoln meant, in his inaugural speech of 1861, when he referred to “the better angels of our nature.” Nor what Steven Pinker meant by it in his book of the same title. But it’s a safe bet that your man Donald would never appeal to those angels, if he did know what it meant.

Then there’s the notion that he “speaks for the average American.” Again, you probably think all his plain talk, his disregard for common courtesy, his contempt for diversity, equity, and inclusion, make him some kind of champion of average Americans who don’t like all this “woke” stuff. But all your man Donald is really doing with his demonizing of trans people and non-white immigrants is stoking your fears about things you don’t understand or find perplexing. But let’s not get into the culture war. Instead, let’s consider a test on what speaks for the average American: what kind of president would do nothing while allowing hundreds of thousands of average Americans to die during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic? What kind would separate migrant families by keeping children in cages, refer to U.S. armed forces as “suckers and losers,” or defend neo-Nazis as “fine people”?

But never mind the trainwreck of his first term as president, of which those were just a few lowlights. What kind of champion for the average American would promise, as your man Donald has for his second term, to prosecute political enemies, order mass deportations, use soldiers against U.S. citizens, and strip away women’s reproductive rights while promising to be women’s protector “whether they like it or not”? What average American thinks it’s acceptable to suggest that Liz Cheney should be shot because she supported Trump’s impeachment? (That’s some “protection,” isn’t it?)

Then there’s his economic policy. Your man Donald is all for authoritarian capitalism, which is where state institutions become the servants of the governing elite. How do mass firings of civil servants and the gutting of public services help the average American? Donald plans to jack up tariffs, interfere with the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and offer unfunded tax cuts for the rich. Borrowing costs will go up as a result, along with consumer prices, meaning that people will have less money to spend. How does that help the average American? Your man Donald will also get rid of Obamacare and has nothing but “concepts of a plan” to replace it. No plan at all.

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A few days ago one of your fine citizens was up in Canada, a guy named Timothy Snyder. Really smart guy. He was at some writers festival in Vancouver, being interviewed by our public broadcaster about the meaning of freedom. This Snyder fellow was saying that a lot of Americans, especially those who support your man Donald, think of freedom as a negative thing: that it’s all about every man for himself against the world, the system, the government. “In a world of negative freedom,” he said, “where you think freedom is just about yourself and your impulses, you don’t identify with other people and their predicaments. And as you don’t identify with other people and their predicaments, you end up making yourself less free because you don’t see the things that you could do together…But if you think of freedom instead as what kind of person you want to be, or if you think of freedom in terms of something that has to be created together, then you get off on a completely different foot. We don’t know who we are unless we have other people in our lives, and if we don’t know who we are then we can’t be free.”

I don’t know what you think about that, Mr. MAGA. And the true meaning of freedom, and how we determine “who we are,” is a long discussion. But let me just leave you with one last thing about your man Donald. The truest thing he has ever said—and it says everything you need to know about him—is contained in a quote from one of his rallies: “I love the poorly educated.” What do you suppose he meant? It’s a fair question, because most people would never say something like that. I mean, no one should be blamed or shamed for being poorly educated. But it’s not a virtue, either. So was he saying that the poorly educated are the salt of the earth, the essence of America, and that’s why he loves them? No. Donald Trump loves the poorly educated because they don’t argue with him or question his motives. They do what he says. He is their Pied Piper: he entertains and distracts them by “telling it like it is.”

Donald loves the poorly educated because they put money in his pocket by buying all those MAGA hats and Trump bibles. He loves them because they attend his rallies (at least, until they’re too bored to stay), and because they promise to vote for him. He loves the poorly educated because, without them, he would be in trouble. When Donald Trump says he loves the poorly educated, what he really means is that he thinks they are stupid. And he really, really loves them for that.

By the way: he probably includes you among the “poorly educated” because you don’t have a college degree. Even though you’re a qualified tradesman with marketable skills, you earn a decent living and you’re proud of your union job, Donald lumps you in with all his other MAGA supporters (the “poorly educated”) because you seem on board with all he’s promising to do. Even though he has screwed you before and will screw you again if elected on Tuesday. He will fire striking workers, he will make everything more expensive for people who aren’t billionaires, and he will make it harder for the less affluent to have health insurance. Oh, yes, and he will “protect” women. Can you trust a man like Donald to protect your wife? Go ahead, ask her. Has she told you she’s voting for him? Don’t be too sure.

It’s one thing to be called stupid by the woke left, but that’s no surprise and you don’t care about them, anyway. But to be seen as stupid by the very man you have anointed as your saviour? That, to me, seems the ultimate betrayal.

And you’re not going to take that lying down now, are you?

Oh, the second half is starting. Go, Seahawks!