Shoutout to the two coworkers today who casually announced that they were voting for Trump, then asked me who I was voting for. I told them “I did early voting, and I voted for the candidate who isn’t going to make it harder for me to exist as a trans person” and both of these women had to awkwardly try and assure me that it wasn’t personal, and it’s not like they hated Harris or anything, they actually do like some things about her, and they definitely don’t hate me, of course not, it’s just that, you know, well, it’s like, well, you know, it’s just, like, and no matter how many times they tried to pass the shovel off to me, I just let them hold onto it
What. (and I mean this from the bottom of my enraged heart) the FUCK
Sadly, a lot of my co-workers are under-informed Trump supporters.
You know the kind, they just have a very surface level understanding of him as a candidate or person. They don’t really care about the actual
concepts ofpolicies he’s suggesting or the overt racism/sexism/everythingism he flaunts. They’ve just decided there’s something they like about him that makes him worthy of their vote and they choose to ignore anything they don’t like.Not indoctrinated, just poorly informed. Not brainwashed, just kind of uncaring. Not part of the cult, just following it from the sidelines.
A conversation I had with one of these women today:
“Jonah, do you know how a tariff works?”
“In, like, very broad, general terms, yes. Why? Do you need it explained?”
“I was reading something yesterday about it, and I’m not sure if it was right. The article was saying we pay it?”
“Yes, that’s how a tariff works. It’s a tax on imported goods.”
“Okay, but that’s a good thing, right?”
“If you’re trying to discourage foreign trade, yeah. Or pull in more money for the government.”
“But how do we pay for it?”
“Uh. We don’t pay for it directly. The company that imports pays the tariff, and then they usually raise the prices on their own shit to make up for the loss.”
“But that’s going to make shit more expensive. Tariffs are supposed to make shit cheaper.”
“They’re not. They’re supposed to make imported shit more expensive. They’re supposed to discourage imports.”
“I don’t understand this. This was gonna help the economy.”
“Well, it might help some parts of the economy, but I don’t think you’re involved in any of them, so you may not see any of the benefits of the tariffs.”
“Okay so. I thought China was supposed to pay them.”
“Remember during his first term, when there was all that talk about a big, beautiful wall that Mexico was gonna–”
“Okay, look–”
“No no, hear me out. Remember how there was going to be a big beautiful wall that Mexico was going to pay for? China is going to pay the tariffs in the same way that Mexico paid for the border wall.”
OP, I don’t know how you managed to keep a straight face when letting them figure out they fucked up. I avoided someone today who’s an immigrant but anti-immigrant because I knew I’d have no chill.