The Nihilism Election
Nothing mattered except hurting someone else.
In the end, the majority of voters that turned out just wanted to punish someone.
The vice president, having run what was believed to be a nearly flawless campaign, fell fourteen million votes short of President Biden’s 2020 turnout. Donald Trump, a convicted felon and insurrectionist who refused to peacefully leave the White House four years ago, got two million fewer votes than his 2020 turnout. All of the claims of high turnout somehow vanished, and there will be questions about what happened for years to come, but the cold facts are that Democrats utterly failed, again, at turnout.
The day seemed to be going well for Democrats early on.
Trump’s team was clearly getting reports of turnout not being in their favor. Early voting had been heavily in favor of women, and in an America where women were dying for lack of access to abortion when it was needed, it seemed inevitable that those women would be voting for Kamala Harris, who had loudly, proudly made reproductive rights the centerpiece of her campaign. With the exception of Florida, who rigged the proposition rules to require a 60% threshold, every state with reproductive rights on the ballot passed it into their state constitution. Arizona. Missouri. Nebraska. New York.
And then many of them voted for Donald Trump. Donald Trump, the flagbearer of Project 2025, which is the fascist gameplan to dismantle American democracy and reproductive rights. Donald Trump, the man found guilty in a civil trial of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll. Donald Trump, the man who said in the last days of the campaign, “We will protect women, whether they like it or not.” A federal abortion ban is likely in the offing, which will override every single one of those state constitutions. The mind boggles at the enormity of the cognitive dissonance required to vote this way.
The Associated Press does a sweeping nationwide exit poll of over one hundred thousand voters, and this answer jumped out. The Republican Party spent $215 million on attack ads targeting the very existence of transgender people, and sickeningly, it took this time.
I took the time to do some research, proper research, not the “I researched vaccines and decided that ivermectin will save me from COVID” type. Although, along those lines, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a disgrace to his father’s good name and a cocaine-addled, brain worm-infested lunatic, is probably going to run the FDA and/or HHS, so enjoy that raw milk and uninspected food! I digress, though. Back to the reality about transgender people in America.
Here’s some facts:
Transgender people make up approximately 0.4% of the American population.
The top ten states with the highest rate of transgender people per 100k residents are North Carolina, Delaware, Arizona, Hawaii, Alaska, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Oregon.
The top ten states with the highest rate of child sexual abuse per 100k residents are Arkansas, Vermont, Mississippi, Alabama, Utah, Ohio, Tennessee, Maryland, Indiana, Oregon.
Arkansas and Oregon are the only two states with overlap, HOWEVER...
Arkansas's Department of Public Safety has a breakdown of registered offenders by gender. ZERO of those are transgender.
Oregon only publishes information about their level 3 [most dangerous] offenders on the public registry, which is 1,471 people, with all but a scant few being heterosexual men. I know because I visually went through the list and tried not to vomit at the disgusting collection of white trash that inhabits it.
Trump, like all authoritarians in search of a distraction, put a vulnerable minority population out in front to be a punching bag, with hideously photoshopped images to make transgender women appear to be a grotesque threat to children. What’s astonishing is that the other minority group that he threatened with horrific violence, Hispanic migrants, did not hurt him. Trump scored a huge uptick amongst male and female Hispanics. Trump swept Lyndon Johnson’s old stomping grounds in south Texas, a Republican first and a heavily Latino populated area. Clearly none of them are aware that Stephen Miller, Trump’s own Heinrich Himmler and the most antisemitic Jew alive, has denaturalization amongst his immigration plans. They will not care if the Hispanics they arrest and throw into the camps are citizens or not.
The same can be said about Dearborn, the largest Arab community in the country. Angry at the Biden administration for arming Israel despite its numerous war crimes committed against the Palestinians and the Lebanese, having threatened Democrats for the entirety of this year with a loss of votes for not standing up to Bibi, many of them voted for Jill Stein or just stayed home. Democrats did not do nearly as well in Dearborn as they had before, helping to throw the state to Trump. It was only due to Trump’s cult of personality that Mike Rogers, most likely illegally on the ballot to begin with, did not win the Senate race. 10,000+ voters in Oakland County voted for Trump and ignored the Senate box on the ballot, handing Elissa Slotkin a narrow victory.
Her old district, meanwhile, was a resounding GOP flip. Such is 2024.
I’ve had a day to sit with this, to try and process, and it’s not enough. The overwhelming magnitude of what has happened, what will happen, is impossible to take in. It’s been all I can do to not burst into tears. While people I once considered friends are performing victory dances and revelling in being the ugliest of Americans, it is my queer friends, my disabled wife, my South Asian colleagues, and so many others that I am terrified for. When you love people and care about them, when you want to be happy and thrive, and their very existence is going to be at risk, tears are a real and expected reaction.
I called this the nihilism election for a reason. The core of Trump’s support, the so-called evangelicals who lack any and all understanding of the Christian faith and only hold it because they crave authority over others, they don’t care about anything else. They don’t want to build anything. They want to tear down. They want to tear down equality, rights, freedoms, labor laws, healthcare, you name it, they’ll destroy it. They enjoy hurting people. The way in which they treat those around them, demanding we “not let politics get in the way,” even though political decisions are the difference between life and death for millions of Americans, is shallow and cruel. The excitement they derive from watching a president bullying everyone around him betrays their lack of conscience. The celebrations they’re throwing, meme-ing the Democrats or pop culture figures they think are going to be raped/killed, is a damning indictment of Trumpism that nobody will care about until the earth becomes uninhabitable because every environmental protection is torn down so some billionaire can purchase their very own dick-shaped rocket to fly into space when it happens.
Donald Trump is the ultimate nihilist. He has no fear of an afterlife. He never faces any consequences for the violence he inflicts upon others. He does not care about how the actions he takes affects others. He is a selfish asshole with terrible spray-tanning. The people who voted for his madness and all of the horrific results that are going to follow are also selfish assholes who looked at record-low unemployment, massive infrastructure investment, and the best consumer protections in decades and decided that wasn’t enough. They wanted some spice. They wanted to watch vulnerable people get kicked some more because they have been fully brainwashed into believing that they’ll benefit if they kick someone else down, instead of looking up at a Bezos or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg and wonder why these fucking hacks hold all the wealth and power without putting in any work.
Nothing matters anymore in Donald Trump’s America. The cruelty, once again, was the only point.
Thank you .