A word on moderate Republicans

[Willie Pep]

During the Republican primary a number of my Republican friends talked about how much they disliked Trump, how they thought he was riling up all kinds of nasty sentiments, how many of his followers were crazy racists and sexists, how he seemed to have backing from Putin, but by the time the general election was in full swing they were all aboard for Trump. Why? Tax cuts. They were able to look past all of Trump's massive negatives just so they could get tax cuts. These friends of mine are all affluent white guys. They really don't have much to worry about when it comes to fallout from a Trump administration.

Now I know this is just anecdotal evidence, but I suspect that there were a lot of people like my friends who would have preferred a different Republican candidate but voted for Trump anyway even knowing all of the terrible things about him just because they wanted to get tax cuts or liked his talk against a higher minimum wage or against regulations. So why did we ever think we could win these people? In my experience, even moderate Republicans mostly vote based on their pocketbooks. They will never support a Democrat unless they are very conservative on economics.

I notice that we bash the blue-collar people who voted for Trump because he promised to bring back manufacturing jobs, but why not bash the affluent folks who are probably more informed and should have seen that Trump and his supporters were dangerous but voted for him anyway? If we are going to castigate white working-class people for voting for Trump based on selfish economic interests, we should do the same to the affluent suburban Republicans who also ignored all of the warning signs and voted for Trump just to get some tax cuts.