# How can anyone vote for Trump in 2020? No. But Seriously **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [August 19, 2020, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506 "2020-08-19T18:09:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/21 "2020-08-19T20:35:39Z")
Thanks for the cite. According to your article, "The [most recent FBI statistics](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/topic-pages/tables/table-1) on the rate and number of crimes are for 2018. They show that crime has declined since Trump became president " If you want to say that Trump exaggerates, and takes credit for things he didn’t actually do, no argument here. But your claim was that non-WASPs are more unsafe, and I see no evidence for that. ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/22 "2020-08-19T20:38:07Z")
Thanks for sharing your feelings with the group. We affirm that your emotions are valid and important. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/23 "2020-08-19T20:39:01Z")
And true. You forgot to mention true. ---
**Author:** ![madmonk28](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/madmonk28/32/20811_2.png) [@madmonk28](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/madmonk28)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/24 "2020-08-19T20:41:28Z")
He has pursued a white nationalist agenda and his base is made up of white nationalists. Why is this so hard for people to grasp? ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/25 "2020-08-19T20:44:26Z")
> [@madsircool](#): > > Economically Im conservative but I would vote for Karl Marx before I would vote for Trump because the only ideology Trump understands is Trumpism. [Neither Republican nor Democrat, it’s the Party of _ **ME!** _](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-trump-administration-a-clusterfuck-in-the-making-part-deux/911083/1781) ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/26 "2020-08-19T20:55:00Z")
> [@mbh](#): > > In two years, Trump reduced Black unemployment, Hispanic unemployment, and female unemployment more than his predecessor did in eight years. If he wants to hurt minorities, he’s doing it wrong. _How_ did Trump reduce minority unemployment? Did he hire a bunch of minorities? Or something else? ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/27 "2020-08-19T20:55:48Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > And the way things are going, the majority may simply vote for whoever promises to stop the violence and make the streets safe again. Crime is as low as it has been in decades. If there has been a small uptick, it has been on Trump’s watch – why would re-electing him help? ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/28 "2020-08-19T20:58:46Z")
NATO defense spending has been trending upward since 2014. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/29 "2020-08-19T21:01:48Z")
Regarding Trump’s foriegn policy mastery, I will give him this credit: He’s second only to Dennis Rodman with his North Korean foreign policy charade. That’s some tough competition. If you’re going for a rebound in the paint. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/30 "2020-08-19T21:16:39Z")
I certainly wouldn’t vote for wannabe tyrant and current criminal & traitor Trump. But here is an email I got a couple weeks ago from an 70-something friend who’s fully on the Trump bandwagon. I’ve left the spelling and formatting exactly as I received it. > [@](#): > > One last political statement from me: China per Xi Jinping does want to have global control, and only Donald Trump (that imperfect person) can provide a world balance to Jinping, whereas weak, gaffable Biden will allow Jinping to make China the totalitarian arbiter of all of us. Xi Jinping’s entire family was annihilated. How does one face that? Trump’s family wasn’t. I fear for the Democrat’s choice in preventing the ChiComs from dominating the USA. {One sentence of personal details redacted} The “actual boring complicated ambiguous reality” that you state is what gets the USA in trouble just as Obama did to us for 8 years with manipulation, shoving down our throats, and allowing the lying Clintons to milk us in millions. Everything they did ought to put them in prison. That’s how I really feel now after the good bipartisan work of long ago. There is no hope for the USA if the Democrats rule with their socialism. So there you have it. A true believer explains his rational. Only (imperfect) Trump is strong enough to stand up to Xi, and Clinton = **EVIL**. Therefore no Biden for him. I knew him well when he was in his 50s. He was a decent soul. And he was/is smart guy, albeit IQ-smart not EQ-smart. But I can vouch that he’s sincere in what he says here. Wrong IMO, but completely sincere. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/31 "2020-08-19T21:20:28Z")
> [@mbh](#): > > In two years, Trump reduced Black unemployment, Hispanic unemployment, and female unemployment more than his predecessor did in eight years. If he wants to hurt minorities, he’s doing it wrong. This has always been a pretty tiresome/questionable talking point, since unemployment rates for all races move together. Whether someone is a racist is relatively unrelated to whether they’re presiding over a strong economy. But in this case, it’s just bullshit cherrypicking. Here’s the chart for black unemployment: [Unemployment Rate - Black or African American (LNS14000006) | FRED | St. Louis Fed](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000006) Looks like it went from 12.7 to 7.9% during Obama’s presidency (a reduction of ~0.5% a year) and from 7.9% to 14.6% so far during Trump’s presidency (an increase of over 1% a year). Gosh, **mbh** , why’d you choose a 2-year timespan? ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/32 "2020-08-19T21:21:35Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > I’ve left the spelling and formatting exactly as I received it. \<… private message copied verbatim to public forum…\> > [@](#): > > So there you have it. A true believer explains his rational. That’s ‘rationale’, so long as we’re being picky about spelling. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/33 "2020-08-19T21:26:59Z")
They vote for Trump because they don’t see the cost to themselves. I believe we need to do something about that. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/34 "2020-08-19T21:34:44Z")
Can you be more specific? Gonna hunt down the MAGA-hatters and beat them? Riots if Trump is re-elected? Maybe you can find a nervous smiling high school kid to torment or something. Remember when Obama was elected and suddently ‘civility’ was the mandate? Oh, those crazy days when a woman could be accused of having blood on her hands because a campaign mailer said that Republicans had to ‘target’ several swing districts. That was ‘hatred’, and she was accused of getting Gabby Giffords shot. Now you can pummel effigies of public figures in their driveways, burn and loot stores, beat people unconscious in the streets, burn police stations, threaten Trump supporters with retribution if they vote the ‘wrong’ way, and all is good. It’s just speech. Any bets that if Democrats get elected we will start hearing the ‘civility’ drumbeat agajn almost overnight? And dissent will immediately stop being ‘the highest form of patriotism’. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/35 "2020-08-19T21:35:51Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > That’s ‘rationale’, so long as we’re being picky about spelling. :smack: Thank you. In fact, other than a couple of neologisms Chrome didn’t recognize, the man’s spelling was perfect. Could have benefited from a couple of paragraph breaks maybe. My point, like using (sic) wasn’t that he’d done anything wrong, but rather that I hadn’t lost any formatting in the copying. ---
**Author:** ![Lamoral](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lamoral/32/16078_2.png) [@Lamoral](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamoral)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/36 "2020-08-19T21:42:42Z")
> [@madmonk28](#): > > He has pursued a white nationalist agenda and his base is made up of white nationalists. Why is this so hard for people to grasp? It was certainly hard to grasp for my half-black, half-Jewish, weed smoking, metal guitarist friend who voted for Trump in 2016 (though he says he won’t be voting for him again.) His reasoning: he hates political correctness and SJWs, and relishes the idea of a president who will send all those people into fits of apoplexy. It is NOT, in my estimation, a socially responsible way to participate in democracy. At all. But let’s not kid ourselves that lots of people still did it. Trump was the middle finger to a cultural orthodoxy that they hated. And still hate. You don’t need to be a white Christian to do that. In fact, if you’re not, you get to enjoy favored status among the Trump base as “one of us”, that they can point to and say “see?! Does this guy look like David Duke to you?!” Let’s not pretend that some non-white non-Christian non-heterosexual people with idiosyncratic politics wouldn’t relish the opportunity to have favored status and be that token minority. ---
**Author:** ![BippityBoppityBoo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bippityboppityboo/32/5745_2.png) [@BippityBoppityBoo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BippityBoppityBoo)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/37 "2020-08-19T22:05:55Z")
> [@furt](#): > > But your claim was that non-WASPs are more unsafe, and I see no evidence for that. I said I’m not male, I’m not Protestant and I have felt less safe since 2016. White and Anglo Saxon I will cop to. I don’t doubt that **you** don’t see any evidence of feeling less safe. That is why privilege is clung to so forcibly. Again, this is not GD and I don’t have to provide a cite for describing how I have experienced reality. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/38 "2020-08-19T22:23:24Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Can you be more specific? Gonna hunt down the MAGA-hatters and beat them? That would be a good start. ---
**Author:** ![pkbites](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pkbites/32/204_2.png) [@pkbites](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pkbites)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/39 "2020-08-19T23:12:40Z")
Nobody loathes Tump more than I. And he stabbed gun owners in the back and the NRA rolled over and played dead over it. But that is nothing compared to what will happen if Biden is POTUS and the Democrats gain both sides of Congress. They’re not going to fuck around like they did when Obama was in office. Plus there will probably be at least 1 SCOTUS appointment in the next 4 years. Eventually they are going to take a hard core Second Amendment case. As a gun owner and gun dealership owner what choice do I have? ---
**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2020, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506/40 "2020-08-19T23:26:52Z")
> [@pkbites](#): > > As a gun owner and gun dealership owner what choice do I have? Stock up? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-anyone-vote-for-trump-in-2020-no-but-seriously/918506.md?page=3)