Trump didn't trick America. America chose him. Twice. The second time with full knowledge of what he represented.
62% want universal healthcare. 75% know tariffs raise prices. 83% support disaster housing aid.
Then they vote for the guy who promises to gut Medicaid, bring back Smoot-Hawley tariffs, and cut FEMA.
What the actual hell?
This isn't polling error. It's mass electoral suicide. Owsley County, Kentucky: life expectancy ten years below national average, two-thirds on Medicaid, 88% Trump in 2024. Same pattern everywhere—rural counties bleeding population, hooked on federal programs, voting to eliminate those programs.
Not protest. Not ignorance.
Something else.
"Low information voters"—bullshit. Trump had 100% name recognition. Most covered president in history. Farmers in the 1890s figured out which banks were bleeding them without smartphones. Today's voters have more information access than anyone in human history, still making choices that destroy them.
Media brainwashing? In 1936, most newspapers backed Roosevelt's opponent. FDR won by 24 points anyway. Fox feeds grievances that already exist—doesn't manufacture them.
Trump's real résumé wasn't his six bankruptcies. Was The Apprentice. Playing successful businessman on TV.
Guy Debord called it in '67: life becomes representation, becomes show. Citizens as audience. Democracy as sitcom.
But the show is the substance now. Cruelty's the product. People are buying.
Cambridge polling before 2024: 90% of Trump voters believed "American values under threat." Less than half of Biden voters felt that way.
Culture dying > healthcare dying.
Men swung 9 points to Trump from 2020. Women, 4. Rural identity weaponized into a political choice: Trump won rural by 40+ points—wider than 2016 or 2020.
Poor, sick, government-dependent counties choosing cultural symbolism over material survival.
Different kind of rational. Your way of life collapses? Economic pain becomes acceptable cost for cultural victory.
Constitution written 235 years ago for a horse-and-quill world. First-past-the-post locks in two-party death match. Electoral College turns slim pluralities into mandates. Supreme Court shrugs at insurrection.
Other democracies have guardrails. America has nostalgia for 1789.
The rational-choice model is dead. People vote tribe, not wallet.
GOP registration spiked after January 6th. Not despite the coup—because of it. U.S. favorability collapsed globally in seven months. The world looks at Americans now like our grandparents looked at Germans in the '30s.
2024 turnout: 65%. Not apathy. Conscious choice with predictable consequences.
Medicaid cuts hitting Trump counties. Tariffs spiking prices in red-state supermarkets. When bills come due, they blame Democrats, immigrants, conspiracies—anyone but the policies they demanded.
The polling "paradox" isn't paradox. Polls capture abstract preferences. Elections capture bundled identity choices.
Democracy faces a problem it wasn't built for: governing people who repeatedly vote against their own survival.
System can absorb occasional tribal voting.
But as the baseline?