Roseanne is back, and so are the excuses for Trump voters
The timing couldn’t have been more exquisite. Just when the focus on the much-empathized-with Donald Trump voter waned, along came a reboot of the sitcom “Roseanne,” with the title character a Trump supporter portrayed by an actress who supports the president in real life.
With the return of Roseanne has come a revival of the bevy of excuses and explanations about why 58 percent of white Americans, particularly those in the much-discussed working class with blue collars, chose a man who rose to national political prominence on the back of open bigotry and was caught on video bragging about how he routinely sexually assaulted women to whom he is physically attracted.
A short tweet storm by conservative writer Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner is indicative of the predictable phenomenon.
“Roseanne Reboot has resurrected the debate over who the Trump voter is. The key bit of data everyone ignores: The trump voter is not more likely to be poor, he is more likely to live in a poor area,” Carney tweeted. “And in America of the 21st century, poor areas mean areas with lower rates of intact families, lower rates of church attendance, generally lower social capital. So these people are living in civil-society deserts, lacking the social infrastructure you and I use to make it through life. And they turned to a guy who (A) said what they felt (the American Dream is dead) and (B) said ‘I alone can fix it.’ So while the Vox interviewers of the world say ‘they chose not to keep up,’ they don’t have the institutions that serve as the handrails that allow us to keep up.”
It is one of the most baffling, misleading, yet enduring depictions of the Trump voter, as though because they were poor, downtrodden and unheard they had no other choice but to have gleefully rushed to packed Trump rallies, where people of color were beaten, and then to the ballot box, which empowered Trump to turn back the clock on civil rights protections, police accountability efforts and pull the rug from beneath the feet of DACA recipients.
In the general election, Trump won the white vote at every income level, from the poorest to the richest, not just those struggling with a series of social maladies. Though apologists claim Trump voters, particularly white evangelical Christians, did this because they believe Hillary Clinton was an even worse option, we should not forget that Trump won the Republican primary long before he faced Clinton. Each of those Republican candidates was pro-llife, so they also would have appointed pro-life Supreme Court justices had they the chance.
It is reasonable to remind people of the full, complex humanity of every Trump voter and to urge people to not give into bitterness and hatred. That’s what we should be doing for everyone, including flawed young black men too many Trump voters are quick to condemn.
It’s not reasonable to ignore facts and spin our way out of a discomforting reality, that more than 60 million Americans saw a top politician in 21st century America baldly and repeatedly play upon people’s worst fears and worsen racial divides like few modern politicians have - and decided he should lead a country that is fast becoming majority-minority.
We can’t reboot our way out of the consequences of that choice. We must own it. And face it.
This story was originally published March 30, 2018 at 12:30 PM with the headline "Roseanne is back, and so are the excuses for Trump voters."