Donald Trump bet on stupid, and he won.
A long line of voters regretting their votes for Donald Trump seem to be coming from two camps: those who actually took Donald Trump at his word, and those who believe he was play-acting to get elected. His true believers seem to be shocked that he really doesn't plan on building that big wall or that he really doesn't plan on putting Hillary Clinton in jail. Those who believed he was playing a part to get elected are terrified that he might be the caricature he presented on the campaign trail after all as continues to send out horrifying tweets and brings the world on the brink of a nuclear winter.
Incidentally, one may note that these two camps make up almost the entire universe of Trump voters aside from the economic elite who are already making plans on what island to stash their Trump tax cuts into. Both camps believed, however, that Trump would dismantle what they saw as the political and economic elite power structure, and that ain't happening.
Newt Gingrich evidently has been disciplined for letting the cat out of the bag that Trump is no longer talking about draining the swamp, but really, did anyone need the Right's grandpa-hypocrite to confirm what everyone can see? Trump's cabinet picks range from "friend of Russia" oil tycoons and bailed out billionaire bank executives to a sworn enemy of Social Security.
Some panic is starting to set in as Trump voters are beginning to realize they have voted to cut their own social security, Medicare, and even Obamacare. With the top enrollment numbers for Healthcare.gov enrollment this cycle all going to Trump states, Medicare and Medicaid in House Speaker Paul Ryan's crosshairs and Trump's team promising to open back up all the gambling doors for banks that helped cause the Great Recession, there seem to be Trump voters who now see their candidate's promise to take a wrecking ball to the elite of America slipping away.
If Donald Trump is successful in repealing Obamacare tax subsidies in the exchanges, it will result in one of the largest tax increases on the middle class along with leaving tens of millions of Americans - in "red" states - suddenly without health insurance. If Trump and Republicans are successful in dismantling Medicaid - which Obamacare strengthens and reforms - millions of poor white people who Trump successfully conned won't be able to take their sick children to he doctor. If Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are successful in privatizing and dismantling Medicare, the effects would be disastrous across the country, but particularly calamitous on red states. Three in four Medicare recipients are white, and the share is typically above 80% in states Donald Trump won.
With Donald Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary-designee Tom Price's cut and privatization scheme against Social Security, many Trump voters can look forward to working longer and getting fewer benefits (about $2,000 less a year, to be exact). If Republicans succeed in setting the banks free and wild on us again, the most vulnerable will be the poor and middle class and elderly folk living in states without their own strong banking and consumer protection laws. Any guess which way those states voted this year?
So, the fear spreading among Trump voters that their vote to "drain the swamp" will end up their willing selves to the alligators is real, and it's also realistic. But it should hardly be a surprise.
Trump voters - if they are to be believed themselves - voted for the most unqualified candidate for president in history because they somehow believed that a man who literally lives in a golden tower and sits for his interviews on gold chairs gives a hoot about the middle class. They voted to - at the very least - ignore his abhorrent racism, sexism, xenophobia and every other form of bigotry because they bought the idea that a man who has made a carrier swindling unsuspecting people of modest means out of their money was somehow authenticity personified on the campaign trail. They were so disgusted at the New York elite that they willingly voted in one of them president.
We will fight Trump's attempt to dismantle every law and policy that seeks to give the poor and the middle class a hand up. We will resist his every attempt to rob from the middle class and give to the rich, and his willing surrender on the international stage to Vladimir Putin.
But we no longer live in a time when progressive resistance alone will be enough to keep Trump and Republicans from doing their damage. We no longer live in an era when the "white working class" can simply break things and expect the rest of us to put it back together for them to break it again.
Donald Trump bet on the prejudice, ignorance and yes, stupidity of the white working class to occupy the Oval Office. Now is a time when these same people must join the fight against him. Simply realizing that they have been had is not enough. Simply becoming disgruntled and feeling disenfranchised is not enough. Simply feeling like the swamp is getting fuller is not enough.
It's time the white working class Trump voters joined the fight against the alligators, starting with Donald Trump himself.