I Voted for Trump, and I’m Not a Racist

“But I had never voted in a presidential election until this year. So why did I vote in 2020?”

Much of the Left still does not get it: Even as President-elect Joe Biden keeps making a welcome—though likely, empty—show of calling for the type of unity that most of his voters never gave this country for a moment after President Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral triumph in 2016, many of those who voted for President-elect Biden continue to caricature and demonize both President Trump and his supporters. Rising black and especially Hispanic support for President Trump in 2020 should have proven to anyone who was paying attention that monolithic racial voting blocs are on the wane and that President Trump’s support—at least for some significant proportion of his voting base—may have been driven by something other than race. Yet one after another of the mainstream media pundits’ postmortems on this election have voiced shock and awe that so many Americans were revealed to be unapologetic racists by virtue of having voted for President Trump once again.

As it appears at this juncture that in the absence of some dramatic revelation of actual fraud, Joe Biden is our next President, and on the admittedly tenuous supposition that those who desperately wanted President Trump out might prove to be more open-minded and gracious as victors than as combatants against the President they hated with every fiber of their being, I want to explain why I voted for President Trump and why simplistic racism had nothing to do with it. My goal is not to convince you that I am a wonderful and virtuous human being; it is, rather, to try to bring you one tiny step closer to appreciating the fact that—perhaps—we, Trump voters, are complex individuals capable of being motivated by a complicated array of considerations. In that way, we are not that different from most people…and maybe even a bit like you yourself. If the healing President-elect Biden has called for is ever to take place, understanding that much is an indispensable step.

First, I am not a low-information voter hoodwinked by right-wing conspiracy theories. I graduated summa cum laude as an English major at Yale in the 1990’s and then graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School. Today, I am a partner in a boutique New York City law firm in the demanding field of general commercial litigation. I point this out not to tout my educational and professional pedigree but to give readers a sense that I am unlikely, on the face of it, to be someone you can easily dismiss as a complete and total moron. More important—in my estimation—than any of my earlier laurels or any of my career achievements, however, is my practice of lifelong learning, without which any mind stagnates. To that end, I make an effort to stay educated and informed. I continue to read a wide variety of serious books, both classical and modern literature and timeless and current non-fiction, as well as publications representing all corners of the political spectrum.