Back in May of 2016, I applied for an open position on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the exact one escapes me now, but I believe it was for Front End Developer on her campaign’s website. Seemed like a good time to join up, for obvious reasons. On paper, I qualified as it’d been listed as “entry-level”, and the offices were only about a mile away from where I was living at the time in Brooklyn. The auto-response email said they’ll send me a coding test within the next few days and if I’d completed that successfully they’d advance me to the next stage.

Now imagine my surprise when I got this canned bullshit response “Thanks so much for applying to work on the campaign. Unfortunately after reviewing your resume there’s a bit of a mis-match between your background and what we’re looking for in this role. Thanks again for your interest in supporting our cause – we hope that you’ll continue to support Hillary and our country in other ways”. Forget the fact that the asshole never bothered to send me the coding test, which would have taken him mere minutes to review and determine whether or not I was a good candidate, there was a distinct sense of “mis-match” between the Hillary campaign’s rhetoric about working to expand opportunities in tech jobs for the broader American economy at the time and its actual practice. I was pretty close to writing a reply saying something as such capped with a “Fuck you, now I’m voting for Trump”, but I left it alone. Wasn’t worth it.

With that experience in hand, I can at least partially sympathize with a 2016 Trump voter. I still voted for Clinton anyway, but in my mind that episode pretty neatly captured the resentment that Trump appealed to – those Swampy Washington mainstream politicians just want your vote, they don’t care about you otherwise. So now after four years of more or less the exact same thing from Trump, why the fuck did you, a 2020 Trump voter, cast a ballot for him?

What did continuing to support this orange degenerate get you? What did he actually do to address your resentments? Seriously, what the hell happened for you that was good in these last four years? Are there more or less Confederate monuments in the South, pro athletes kneeling during the National Anthem, people speaking Spanish at the grocery store, or teenagers blasting rap music from the factory speakers of a candy blue Hyundai coupe?

Do more people go to Church on Sundays now? Are there less Black Americans registered to vote than there were four years ago? Did any Mosques close? Did you get your old coal mining job back? Are CNN and MSNBC still on the air? New York Times and Washington Post still printing?

What did refusing to entertain the evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in 2016 do for you? Did calling Stormy Daniels a liar put better food on the table? How did Trump attempting to coerce a foreign government to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden work out for your health insurance situation? What was it about the Sharpie map that made your mortgage payments more manageable? Is there any benefit you can discern from excusing away Trump’s self-dealing, by having taxpayers contribute to the bottom line of his company by paying for government employee accommodations at his properties?

Now maybe the response to those questions is “Who cares? I got my tax cut”. If so, you’re dismissed – for now. We’ll deal with you scumbags another time. If your answer is to dodge and go with something along the lines of “So what? It doesn’t matter who’s president anyway, your life isn’t affected by who’s in the White House” then we can at least thank you for the implicit acknowledgment that you indeed got pretty much jack shit out of the last four years.

But you also need to go further than that and consider the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died in this year’s Coronavirus pandemic. There’s absolutely zero disputing that more competent, technocratic leadership – the kind that a President Hillary Clinton would have brought to the table – could have greatly reduced the costs of this catastrophe.

All the parties, ball games, movies, theme park visits, holiday gatherings, and everything else you missed out on this year – all if it is pretty much Trump’s fault. He wished the virus would go away when he should’ve been managing it, tamping it down, and gradually reopening life the way competent leadership in places like South Korea and New Zealand managed to make happen.

So you spent a year mostly at home when you couldn’t even get ripped off at a carnival booth if you wanted to, you netted effectively zero culture war victories, your life improved in no measurable way, everybody else fucking hates you, and your Lord and Savior lost reelection anyway.

Being able to say “Well at least liberals are unhappy too” isn’t going to be true for you much longer. The vaccine will be administered, Joe Biden will be inaugurated, life will go on – and you’ll still be where you were five years ago, resentments unsatisfied, angry to an unhealthy level with everyone outside of your cult.

Must’ve felt good when Shifty Schiff didn’t get to see Trump’s taxes before the election though. Libs sure were screaming over that one. Totally worth it, right?