Trump voters, after the 2024 elections, during which you reelected treasonous, convicted felon Donald Trump and many of his surrogates down ballot, I am not quite certain how to interact with family and friends who are also Trump voters.  

As a 31-year veteran of both the U.S. Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, I consider your vote for Trump and surrogates as another betrayal of the United States and the American ideals of freedom, liberty and equality.  

As a military veteran, I feel your vote, for a man who disrespected the military, as commander and chief, by calling us “losers and suckers,” and exploited for political purposes the graves of other veterans in Arlington National Cemetery, sacred ground for our fallen veterans, is a big slap in the face and very disrespectful to veterans everywhere.  

Trump and surrogates have basically declared a culture war (backed by violence) on at least half of the U.S. population that opposes him. And all for what?  What do you think you are going to get for your loyalty across the last three elections?  

Since Trump’s approach to politics is based on hatred of others (liberals, women, people of color, LGBTQ, and any other group that does not fall in line with Trump’s fascist takeover of our government), I can only conclude that you consistently vote for him because you too are a hater of others.  Only you know in your heart whether or not this is true.  The number of people in the United States who still buy into racial hatred is truly appalling, and yet they make up a large part of Trump’s base; a legacy from our days when slavery was a perfectly acceptable practice.  

This election, on the Democratic Party side, we had nominated the best candidate within our ranks, and on the Republican Party side, you had nominated the worst possible candidate from the available pool.  

Why do you continue to vote for such a man?  Is it because you have always voted, your entire life, for conservative Republican Party candidates?  A poor reason, at best, when your country’s democracy is on the line and the Republican Party no longer represents your conservative values, if they ever did.

Trump voters. Let me tell you what you just did by enabling Trump to another term as POTUS.  You put the final nail in the coffin of our democracy; you enabled a narcissist and demagogue to assume the highest office in the land again, giving him control of both our nuclear arsenal and military forces.  You have terminated the American Experiment that our founders started in a world where despots were commonplace.  Our country may never recover.

By voting for Trump, you have delivered your message of hatred of others to the entire country, loud and clear, due to your extreme lack of empathy compared to liberals in this country.  

Along these lines, Trump plans to bolster the already corrupt, for-profit prison and concentration camp industry to deliver the “largest deportation program in American history.”  

Project 2025 proposes dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with other immigration enforcement units in other agencies creating a much larger and more powerful border policing operation.   

The Times of India reported that “black and hispanic male voters decamped to Trump, in large numbers in the swing states where their votes for Harris were needed most, ostensibly for economic, cultural and gender reasons. I guess defense of the patriarchy was more important to these men than voting for Harris who was very supportive of people of color like herself.  

And are these same hispanic men not worried about Trump’s “largest deportation” of their compatriots?  Likewise, for black men who may have crossed over to Trump, are they indifferent to the expected increase, again, under Trump, in hate crimes and police lynchings against the same demographic?

On the economic front, if that is why you voted for Trump, he is not going to do anything for you unless you are wealthy.  And I heard on the news that Elon Musk, who plans to become Trump’s economic advisor, will make $2 trillion in cuts to the government, I guess as a cost saving measure, and to make up the revenue lost from Trump’s extension of his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans.  

These cuts, along with Trump’s deportation of our labor force, and his import tariff policy, when he doesn't even understand how tariffs work, will completely tank, first, the U.S. economy and then the global economy causing another major depression.  

Tariffs are just passed on to the consumer by the manufacturer who has to pay the U.S. government to import goods from a given country.  That means inflation, which is nothing more than a raise in prices for a multitude of reasons, will increase, as well.  

PBS News reports that, “the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded that Trump’s main tariff proposals — assuming that the targeted countries retaliated with their own tariffs — would slash more than a percentage point off the U.S. Economy by 2026 and make inflation 2 percentage points higher next year than would have otherwise been.”

And a reminder that the increased tariffs are being levied because Trump’s government will be extending his tax cuts for the wealthy, something the wealthy don’t even need.  

The BBC reported that, “Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control — a controversial idea known as ‘unitary executive theory.’  The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.”  

All of these are steps that dictators around the world have taken to concentrate power in the executive.  This could lead to a basic shredding of the Constitution to include changing the term limits of the president to be unlimited, much as Vladimir Putin did when the Russian constitution limited his term as president of Russia.  The Republican Party platform has absorbed many, but not all, of these ideas. 

With the Supreme Court corrupted, politicized, and in his back pocket, as president, especially if the Republican Party gained control of both houses of Congress, he will be able to fulfill his entire plan in Project 2025 and create a fascist dictatorship right here in America, perhaps with overtones of a theocracy.  To appease his evangelical base he may try to bring about a Handmaids Tale scenario with his nationwide plan for monitoring women’s pregnancies.  And even though Trump has promised, before he was reelected, to not sign a national abortion ban bill, he is a pathological liar and cannot be trusted to follow through with any promises that he made to get reelected.

Since Trump is part of the rape culture that pervades our society and has been found liable for sexual abuse in the case brought by E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist, we will see a rise again in rape and sexual assault during Trump’s four-year term.  

Since the 1970s, at least 26 women have publicly accused Donald Trump, the president of the United States from 2017-2021, of rape, kissing, and groping without consent, looking under women’s skirts; and walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants.  

Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), our nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, reports that 13% of all students on our college or university campuses experience rape or sexual assault through physical force, violence, or incapacitation (among all graduate and undergraduate students), whereas, among undergraduate students, 26.4% of females and 6.8% of males experience rape or sexual assault.  

This is the frat boy rape culture that Trump is also a part of.  Your daughters and sons could very well fall victim to these violent crimes of rape and sexual assault while attending university as Trump gives the green light to men that it is okay to commit these crimes.   

Once Trump assumes office, he will withdraw U.S. support to Ukraine, allowing Russia and Vladimir Putin to complete his invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation.  He will withdraw the U.S. from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), something Putin has desired for a long time.  This will encourage Russia to invade even more countries.  He will continue support to Netanyahu’s Israel continuing the genocide against the Palestinian people to the bitter end.

Climate change prevention measures will be cast aside under Trump’s administration as they slash federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, replace our carbon reduction efforts by increasing gas and oil production, and withdraw the United States, once again, from the Paris Agreement all because Trump, in his infinite wisdom about climate science, told you that human caused climate change was a hoax.

Prepare for even more violent and destructive natural disasters such as we saw from hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024, each causing an estimated $50 billion in damages, not to mention the 249 deaths as a result of these two storms.

Before being elected by the American electorate again in 2024, Trump had the following criminal cases pending:  The Hush Money Case, The Federal Election Interference Case, The Georgia Election Interference Case, The Classified Documents Case.  

Only the Hush Money Case went to trial and Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony counts and the sentencing is now scheduled for 26 November, 2024.  UPDATE: Judge Merchan just postponed the sentencing in the Hush Money Case indefinitely!  We shall see if justice prevails in this case and he is actually sentenced.  

The other three cases are likely to be dismissed as Jack Smith, special counsel, has already requested and has been granted a pause in all filing deadlines in the Federal Election Interference Case on 8 November.  

By electing Trump president again, you have handed him a get-out-of-jail-free card to escape prosecution in the three remaining cases and set a precedent for future presidencies thus corrupting the office of the presidency evermore.  Future presidential candidates will know that once elected they can do basically whatever they please and not be held accountable by the law.  They are essentially above the law; a dangerous precedent indeed, and one that could enable future despotic demagogues. 

Additionally, Trump said on the campaign trail that he was going to pardon all the people who are currently in prison for the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol in order to overturn the election results.

Now a little post election analysis: if we look at the popular vote figures, currently 74.2 million for Harris and 76.7 million for Trump, we can glean a couple of things.  

First, Trump received only about 2.5 million more popular votes than he did in 2020; Harris, on the other hand, lost about 7 million votes from Biden’s 2020 popular vote count.  

Interestingly, this 2.5 million figure is almost exactly the number of votes that Trump is currently leading by.  I think this is why we were expecting Harris to win; because if these 7 million lost Democratic voters had shown up for Harris she would have easily won this election. 

 In 2020, the total popular vote count between the two major parties was 155,506,285; in 2024, even though counting is not yet finished, it was about 4.5 million less than in 2020.  So about 4.5 million voters who voted in 2020, did not even show up.  Apathy? Or voter suppression?  

Again, it is interesting to note that if you add the 2.5 million additional votes Trump picked up to the 4.5 million who did not show up at all, this nicely accounts for the entire 7 million Democratic Party votes lost between 2020 and 2024.  

In the 7 swing states, where our presidential elections are determined under the current system, Trump won all 7 states, increasing his vote count significantly.  The states where Harris lost the most ground were: Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.  Trump increased his overall count across all 7 states by almost 1 million votes, whereas Harris had a net loss of about 64 thousand.  I don’t know if this trend was reflected across the other 43 states. 

André Blanchard lives in Liberty