On Leopards and Faces

Every week or so, a major media outlet publishes a Portrait of Trump Regret: a story about someone who voted for Donald Trump but for one reason or another has come to regret it. Usually it’s because they missed something that the rest of us would think was obvious: that Trump’s deportation regime would harm law-abiding immigrants, that federal contracts would be cut, or, as in the Washington Post yesterday, that Trump was lying when he said he’d make in vitro fertilization free.

The resulting discourse generally revolves around two questions. First, are these people morally redeemable? Second, are they politically winnable? Some of them are clearly neither. There’s an archetype of the diehard Trump supporter who finds himself the victim of DOGE’s earth-salting campaign and then hops online to appeal to Trump directly (“Mr. President sir, your righteous campaign of destruction has inadvertently hurt me! Send help!”). This person is beyond the reach of both God and campaign messaging. But there’s another archetype: the low-information voter who, persuaded by one or another of Trump’s deceptions, realizes they were duped. What should we make of them? 

It’s hard not to feel the pull of schadenfreude. We are bearing witness to an immense campaign of destruction, one that targets the most vulnerable among us, strips away investment into public life, and dismantles the constitutional order. In the midst of all that suffering, you hear that one of the people nominally responsible is suffering, too. There’s probably some powerful verse in scripture about why you shouldn’t find enjoyment in that fact, but there’s only so much room in the human heart. 

But seeing as Trump built his 2024 coalition in part by targeting these voters, it’s important to ask how they got here. How, with everything we know about Trump and his political project, could they not see this coming?

The most obvious answer is that these people are morons. Or, at least, they’re so minimally engaged with politics that they couldn’t see what was right in front of their faces. Many people find that hard to believe. Donald Trump has been a public presence for a decade. Even if you weren’t paying attention to him in particular, surely you’d be aware that, for example, the Republican Party isn’t friendly to reproductive rights. 

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