.. “The government never helped me, but I was OK with that,” he said. “I made mistakes, had some scary moments, and my wife worked also at the local library to help out. I paid my bills, including my doctor bills.“Now I see my tax dollars going to handouts for others who don’t want to work as hard as I did, and I can’t afford my health care. Everyone is being taken care of but me. I feel left out, and it makes me feel that I want my country back.”
.. Voters didn’t care whether he paid taxes or not — and thought he was smart to pay none. But they thought Trump’s returns could show whether he was charitable (important) and whether he was as rich as he claimed he was (more important).
.. And they weren’t worried that Trump didn’t know what was going on in Crimea, because they didn’t either.
.. It bothered them that Trump was a bully and was outrageous in his insensitivity to people with disabilities. It bothered them that someone on Clinton’s staff literally took a hammer and smashed her Blackberries.
.. He told me that he looked up the word in the dictionary, and that it meant something so bad that there is no hope, like the aftermath of a tsunami. You know, he said, Clinton ended up being the biggest bully of them all. Whereas Trump bullied her, she bullied Wilkes Barre.
.. I remember wondering whether that moment was like Romney’s 47 percent
.. a rally on Oct. 15 for Trump, along with 10,000 other neighbors. He told me that the Trump rally was “the most fun I have had in years. Trump would say, ‘What am I going to build?’ And we would scream, ‘A wall!’ He would say, ‘And who is going to pay for it?’ We yelled back, ‘Mexico!’ He thought we were smart and he didn’t talk above us. We know that he’s not actually going to get Mexico to pay for it, but it was fun to lighten up, to cheer along with everyone else, just like back in high school, when we would cheer that our teams were definitely going to win, even when they were bad.”
.. They didn’t like either candidate. They just wanted to be understood. At the end of the day, they cared less about Trump’s temperament and more about whether he “got” them.
.. instead of speaking about each other, we need to speak with each other
.. If you had asked me to describe a Trump voter last spring, I would have been largely wrong about their motivations, dreams, and even their values.
.. Empathy — trying to understand others as deeply as possible — is an important first step, whether around the Thanksgiving table or in social media