Welcome to the second installment of Breach the Bubble, a semi-regular column in which I speak with Tim, a working-class former Democrat who voted for Trump in 2016.
Hi Tim.
How about that shit show last night?
You know, I went out with a friend who is going through some actual real-life shit right now and got back late so I wasn’t paying attention. What happened?
If I tell you, you’re going to think I’m making it up. The Democratic Party in Iowa paid the former tech team of the Clinton campaign to develop an app to count delegates. This company also got like $100,000 from Buttigieg. These are all crazy rumors but 9 o’clock comes and there are no results. I was watching the basketball game and flipping back and forth to see and by 9:30, nothing, 10, nothing, 11, nothing. I went to bed and woke up at 1 and checked my phone and still nothing. I don’t think they officially have results yet but Buttigieg got up and said “I have the data and we’ve got this giant victory that nobody thought and nobody thought we could do it.” And Bernie’s team is going “Wait a second, our data says we won.” And Biden got blown the fuck out.
So do we know if any of them are accurate?
The campaigns have decent numbers but the only thing that is left to find out is that the head programmer was Jeffrey Epstein.
What a nightmare. But maybe it’s a good thing if we never find out. Like, why is Iowa in this position? The results from the early caucuses and primaries impact the ones down the road and they are totally unrepresentative of the American population. It’s nuts.
The conspiracies are going crazy right now.
How are you feeling about the Democrats now?
I don’t know. I’m not like this ideologue who is like, “Oh my god, the world is going to end if Warren becomes President.” She wouldn’t be my choice but I’d get over it. I feel that way about all the Democrats except for Bernie. Bernie is the only one I would consider voting for outside of Yang but I don’t think Yang has a shot. Bernie is also the one who scares me the most. Or not so much Bernie but some of the people around him.
You mean like Bernie Bros?
No, the Bernie Bros don’t bother me. I mean, Jesus, it’s like a couple thousand people on the Internet who are a little over-aggressive on the internet? Big deal. And it’s not even really about socialism. I think most people think of socialism as free healthcare and education at this point. And it’s clear we need to get there, it’s just a matter of how. I’m pretty sure that Trump is going to pivot left on healthcare during the campaign.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, I think he’s going to pivot left on that and say something about college loan forgiveness. He’s got a lot of room to pivot because his base is never going to leave him.
How are you feeling about Trump right now? What’s your sense of the impeachment?
That was a shit show.
Do you think he should have been impeached?
For what, finding out why the crackhead son of a VP was getting millions of dollars from a Ukrainian mobster?
Well, no. That’s not why he was impeached. He was impeached because he tried to entice a foreign leader into interfering in a U.S. election by withdrawing aid and then he obstructed Congress’s ability to investigate it.
Yeah. I don’t know. Is that worse than what Obama did when he investigated the Trump campaign?
I mean, yes. Asking a foreign leader to interfere in a U.S. election is way worse. But I don’t necessarily think it was tactically wise to impeach him because he’s not going to get convicted and he’s going to spin it as an exoneration.
Here’s my feeling: Impeachment shouldn’t be done unless there is a clear consensus. During the Nixon thing, they didn’t vote to impeach him until several of the Republican senators said, “Ok, we’ve lost. We have to do this.” I just don’t get the feeling that the American people are like, “Oh, this is a no-brainer. He’s got to go.”
No, I think you’re right about that. The country is basically split on this. And when I was listening to the hearings, Republicans kept saying that Democrats have wanted to impeach him since Day 1, which is true. Half the country has such a deep hatred of him that it could have been anything, this was just the thing that stuck. But did the impeachment have any impact on who you’re likely to vote for?
I honestly didn’t pay any attention to it because I didn’t think he would be removed. I kept waiting to hear that he had like five dead hookers in the trunk of his SUV but nothing like that came out.
How do you feel about Warren right now?
She’s over.
Yeah. To me, she’s the most disappointing candidate in this race. I had such high hopes for her as a reformer and then she’s just fucked this up so badly. It really seems like she’s getting her advice from woke millennials on Twitter.
The whole thing with her being a Native American and then she lied about her son going to public school and she lied about getting fired for being pregnant. And the whole thing with Bernie saying that a woman couldn’t be President. I’m not a Bernie Bro but he’s a fucking socialist who went to communist Russia. He’s not the kind of guy who’s not going to say something because it’s controversial. If he believed that a woman couldn’t be president, I think Bernie would say it.
And there’s a very big difference between saying a woman can’t get elected and a woman shouldn’t be elected. How are you feeling about Yang now?
I think he’s running for 2024. It’s very obvious that the media hates his guts and pretty much everyone who comes into contact with him loves him. I think he’s going to spend the next four years building a pretty kick-ass organization and be ready to take on Don Jr. or Ivanka.
Oh god. What kind of dystopian nightmare are we living in? Are you registered with a party to vote in the Primary?
I registered to be a Republican in 2018 but if Yang is viable I will switch.
How do you think this compares to 2016?
This might sound crazy but I don’t think people are as afraid of Trump as before.
I don’t think people thought he was a real threat before because his campaign seemed like such a joke.
Yeah. But then when he got elected there was this outpouring of terror. Like he’s going to bring back Jim Crow and repeal gay marriage and deport everybody. And other than being an asshole, what has he really done?
He’s packed the courts. And some of his executive orders are really shameful, like the Muslim ban. He just added six more countries to the list. I think that’s really fucked up. I think a lot of this immigration stuff, like separating families, is really fucked up. And he’s done nothing for climate change and the environment except make it worse. They just rolled back part of the Clean Water Act. Those are the two issues—immigration and the environment—where I think he’s been a total disaster. But yes, we are not in World War 3. There have been no nuclear attacks.
One other thing is, you can hate him all you want but he’s not as dumb as he appears. I think it’s all a big act. He appears like a dummy and I’m not saying he’s a deep thinker but he clearly knows how to use power.
Does he ever scare you or make you regret your vote?
The stuff with the kids in cages at the border. That was probably the worst. But even there I kind of understand it because you just don’t want to have kids coming over the border because it’s dangerous and they die.
It’s not like Obama was great on immigration. If you believe in robust immigration, Obama was terrible, but separating these kids from their families was just willfully cruel. Why do it except to terrorize people?
Well it used to be that most of the people crossing the border were single men looking to work and then they made this catch and release thing so that if you come over with a kid, they would release you and give you a court date but most people didn’t show up to court. Apparently you could rent kids in Tijuana to cross the border. I mean, this is all from Republican news sources so who knows how true it is.
On another subject, how do you feel about UBI?
It’s a big unknown but we have a lot of people in this country who work full time and aren’t making enough money to live a decent life and UBI isn’t enough for people to live on, but it’s enough so that if you are a couple and you’re raising kids and you’ve got two full-time minimum wages jobs, you can comfortably raise a family. That would be the goal.
It does seem kind of insane to give it to rich people.
Yang’s got a good point on that: Once you stop giving it to somebody it turns into a big political football.
What’s your media consumption like?
I listen to NPR. I watch Tucker Carlson on Fox. I find him entertaining as hell. And he’s a populist. He takes on Jeff Bezos, he takes on the Koch brothers, he takes on politicians.
He doesn’t actually talk about Trump that much. That’s not usually his focus. And I listen to Rogan, which is another hilarious thing that came up in the last couple of weeks.
Oh yeah, the drama over his very mild Bernie endorsement. People were so mad at Bernie for that, although I doubt they listen to his show.
Yeah, it wasn’t even an endorsement. He said, “I think I’ll vote for him” and people freaked out. It’s like, if you’ve got a problem with Joe Rogan, you’re not going to win elections. He’s basically a decent person who says naughty words at times. And if you explain to him why the words he says are naughty and not appropriate and you can actually make sense to him, he’ll change his opinion on things. I spend a lot of time in the car and I’ve probably listened to him for hundreds of hours so I have a pretty good sense of who he is. He’s basically a good guy who is kind of a meathead but he was in favor of gay marriage since probably 15 years ago. There was someone who was looking for things he did wrong and found a tweet from 2011 where Rogan says, “Call me romantic but I love seeing men kiss each other in public.” That was supposed to be a gotcha! Like, “gay people are not here for your entertainment, Joe Rogan.”
Ha! So many of these controversies are so dumb and should really not be national stories.
That’s why I don’t freak out about Trump. So many of these stories are just tiny. He’s not like an FDR-type making massive changes to the government. The next president will be able to reverse just about everything he did in the first six months.
Not the courts. That will have generational impacts, although it’s really less about Trump than it is Mitch McConnell.
I’m not freaked out about the judges because I think with the pace of change in society right now it might not be so bad to have conservatives.
What do you mean by that?
Some of the crazy woke shit you see. It creates a lot of resentment. It’s bad for Democrats because people just don’t think that way. My son is friends with a kid in Philly who is black and his brother and they are both hardcore Trump supporters. I had breakfast with them and the three of them spent the whole time making fun of liberals and their excesses. They have no time for any of that stuff. I’m going to make a prediction here: I think that Trump is going to double the percentage of black male votes he gets. I’m curious, what do you think of Bernie?
I’m very torn about Bernie. I supported him in 2016. I voted for Clinton in general but I caucused for Bernie because I didn’t think Clinton could beat Trump. This time around, I think I know a little more about him and he’s gotten very little accomplished in his decades in Congress. And maybe that’s because he’s so far outside of the political norm but I don’t find it particularly inspiring that he’s gotten like three or four pieces of legislation passed in his career and one was renaming a Post Office. And I’m afraid the socialist label will turn other voters off. It might be this positive buzzword for young people but it’s not for old people with some historical perspective, and they vote. The problem is that if you get Bernie, you’re going to mobilize leftist young people and that’s great, but it’s not going to be the millennial vote in Seattle that takes this race, it’s going to come down to a few districts in swing states. So my fear is that in the places where it really matters, Bernie is too far to the left, but if you get someone like Biden, which seems less and less likely, young people won’t show up because they’re pissed Bernie didn’t win. It’s such a bad system.
Bernie had the potential to reach people like me. The socialism thing will stick with hardcore conservatives but I don’t think it’ll stick with people who are reachable. I can see myself voting for Bernie. He’s the only one of the democrats I can see myself voting for outside of Yang.
What is it about Bernie?
I think Bernie is on my side. Whether not he would actually be able to do anything, I think he’s on my side. He would try to make my life better. If it came down to Bernie versus Trump, I’d probably still vote Trump but I could be persuaded to vote for Bernie. They’re both populists. I like that.
