1932

But in that statement, for it to be reasonable, if the candidate says they will do y, then voting for then at least means that you don’t CARE if they do y. Maybe you don’t have some major drive to support Y, but you don’t care about it enough to stop it.

1933

Or you care about something else more, and hope that you can convince the candidate or others who agree with you about Y that it’s not the right thing to do. You are saying to me that if Hillary won you would have said that you actively support and/or don’t mind every single one of her policies?

1934

Her real idiocy is thinking that Trump could do some vaguely-defined thing that a president has no real power over “fix the economy” and letting that override her concern for the other thing that is both within his power and trivial to accomplish with no special skills.

I don’t understand why anyone decided Trump would have some magic effect on the economy because he’s “rich”. Actually wealthy people don’t pull scams like Trump University.

1935

I was willing to accept the consequences of what she claimed she was going to do, yes. I cast my vote for her policies, despite not agreeing with them.

1936

[quote=“ravenight, post:1931, topic:126890, full:true”]
Again, all you are saying here is that you must be a True Believer or you are an idiot. [/quote]

No I’m not saying that at all. At all.

We vote for people in this country, not policies. If a candidate promises to do something and you vote for that candidate, you are tacitly endorsing their promises. You may not agree with all of their promises, but votes don’t come with disclaimers (“I only want the “Making America Great” part, not the “Defund Planned Parenthood” part, please”). A vote Trump was a vote for, at least, not caring if PP loses federal funding.

I kind of suspect that part of the reason that Trump got elected is that Americans have convinced themselves that politicians don’t really mean it when they promise things, since they’re so rarely able to follow through on their promises (Obama and health care reform being a notable counter-example). It’s kind of a toxic and ultimately self-fulling cynicism.

To the contrary, I think politicians do try to keep their promises. It’s just that most of the time, they can’t due to all the chokepoints in the American system. And what we’re seeing now, with the Trump buyer’s remorse, is that a lot of his voters didn’t think Trump would get elected, and even if he did Congress would be able to slow his roll. Now with unified Republican control of government, the President’s power is amplified rather than muted and even moderate Republicans are concerned about this man having this much power…as they absolutely should be.

1937

To me, his cowardice is in his fear of responsibility. Most of it manifests in laziness, but it ultimately boils down to him being terrified of making any sort of informed decisions.

1938

Those sentences contradict each other. Voting for Trump the person is not voting for any specific policies. I don’t understand why you think people’s hands should be tied once they vote, and that any and all criticism of the person they voted for is hypocritical. That is just a description of hyper-partisanism.

Actually, most politicians manage to keep most of their campaign promises (about 2/3). Presidents do, at least. Trump was so vague and scattershot that he will be hard to judge, I think, but the end result is as you say - people projected their own idea of what he stood for onto his rhetoric and voted for (or against) that. I don’t think it’s true of all politicians, though. For most of them, what they say is taken seriously, even if people believe that it’s half truths and occasional outright lies.

That might be true, but again none of that is a reason to say that this particular example of someone criticizing a policy of the person they voted for is somehow evidence that the person is dumb, or was duped, or anything like that. If people voted for Trump thinking he stood for X and are now realizing he stands for Y and feel they were duped, it’s fine to say, “I told you so!” It’s also true that many people seem to be coming out of the woodwork and going, “Hey, I didn’t realize Trump wanted to do these things I disagree with!” But aside from folks who are saying, “I wouldn’t have voted for him if I’d know he was going to do this thing that’s been on his website and in many of his speeches,” I don’t think people are being dumb or hypocritical by criticizing him for not focusing on the things they liked about his message.

Whether you truly would have chosen not to criticize anything she had promised to do, I’m not sure of - I know I would have been criticizing some of her stated policies, even though there was no question in my mind that she was the better candidate, and I had less of a fundamental ideological conflict with her than you did going in, since I’m much more sympathetic to government-led solutions.

1939

I don’t buy that it’s legit to vote for someone then get caught flatfooted when that person does exactly what they said they’d do. The fact that Trump is a nincompoop that said all sorts of random things isn’t an excuse otherwise you get drawn into a spiral of logic puzzles. “I knew that he knew that he wasn’t going to really do X because he knows that we know that blah blah blah.” Trump and his party said they would dismantle the ACA and defund PP, so when his administration moves on that, you don’t get to clutch pearls and act aghast if you voted for him.

1940

Since we love these examples around here… so you’re saying we could all vote for Hitler for his patriotism and just telling it like it is, but just step back and say the mass murder really wasn’t our thing… so we really hope he doesn’t do that?

1941

Yes, that is what I’m saying. Mass murder is either OK or it isn’t. To use that absurd example, if one candidate was like, “I’m going to do all these great things to make our country better at what it believes in, and also murder all the Jews!” and someone else was like, “I’m going to dismantle all of our corrupt institutions, and also murder all the blacks!” and somehow those were the two candidates you had to choose from, I would expect people to choose the one who was promising to murder fewer people they care about, and then speak out about how they would prefer no murders at all.

But you can definitely speak out about how that isn’t helpful to workers, goes against the positive aspects of the candidate’s ideology, and just isn’t a good thing to do. Is this point really not clear at all? Is the hive mind here really settled on the idea that you are not allowed to criticize the stated policies of someone you voted for?

1942

If you were critical of a policy proposal before, sure you can continue to be critical of it later. But if the policy is one of huge importance to your life, one that you feel really strongly about, then maybe you should’ve considered that before voting against it, and then writing an op-ed crying about the move. Remember, this op-ed is what kicked off this discussion.

[quote]
I’m hopeful that Trump will see that defunding Planned Parenthood is the kind of campaign promise he shouldn’t keep. I did not vote to send him to the White House to take away health care from people struggling to get by. People like myself at 25. I’m grateful that Planned Parenthood was there for me, and I want it to be there for every woman who needs it.[/quote]

This person is dumb. Defunding Planned Parenthood wasn’t some off-the-cuff remark. This was a big part of Trump’s campaign, and more importantly, the whole of the GOP. If you voted for this Cheeto, you voted to defund Planned Parenthood. I don’t know how much more obvious that can be.

1943

To be halfway fair, the woman writing the op-ed doesn’t say anything like “I didn’t believe Trump when he said he’d defund PP”, she is simply saying that she (a) voted for Trump but (b) is against his anti-PP policies.

It’s possible that this woman is very anti-abortion and is all-for continuing to ban Fed funds going to PP for the explicit use of abortions, but wants to continue to continue to fund them for the other services (she more-or less says this, but doesn’t explicitly say she’s not pro-choice).

As much as I find the op-ed childish and embarrassing (for her), what she is basically saying is “Hey Trump, a lot of the people who voted for you are actually very fond of Planned Parenthood; now that you’re elected you don’t need to continue pandering to the pro-life guys; consider backing off of that promise.”

1944

Then she’s still dumb. Sorry I can’t be charitable about this. Unless you were stuck under a rock for the last eight years, you should know that defunding Planned Parenthood - not defunding the abortion bit, not reigning them in, but all out destruction of the organization - isn’t some idle threat by the GOP. Like repealing the ACA, they’ve continually harped on it throughout Obama’s presidency and have attempted to do it in various ways.

This wasn’t some vague thing like Hillary Clinton’s campaign promise to “fight for equal pay”. Nor was it some goofball rhetoric like Trump’s own promise to prosecute Clinton once he was in office. Defunding Planned Parenthood is an actionable, clear goal that only requires the votes to get it done. Voting for Trump and hoping the GOP didn’t move to defund PP either says you’re an ignoramus that doesn’t understand how the process works, or you’re just a straight-up dumbass.

Edit: In fact, I have more sympathy for the poor fools that voted for Trump to repeal Obamacare without realizing that it’s the same thing as the ACA they’re currently depending on for their healthcare. At least those poor souls can fall back on the excuse that they didn’t know or care to know the names meant the same thing before they voted. The woman that wrote that op-ed apparently cares (enough to write an op-ed) and knew full well what she was doing. She voted for someone that she hoped wouldn’t do what he said he would. Madness!

1945

Except you’d have to cast your vote not only knowing but expecting that person to carry through with their often repeated threat. It doesn’t make much sense to cast your vote and then say hey not me, I didn’t support those deaths. We’re talking in extremes here because Trump himself is extreme, and extreme examples are often used here.

1946

I don’t like to be int he position of defending this woman, who I agree doesn’t seem to be the brightest bulb.

But that said, Trump is not the GOP and that was one of the things that his supporters liked about him… he was neither “Establishment” Republican or Tea Party Whackjob. He was this guy that was simply… “Not Liberal”.

But here’s an analogy for this woman’s position. She was offered two cakes. A chocolate cake…

And a red velvet cake…
<img src=‘http://www.recipetineats.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Red-Velvet-Cake-with-Cream-Cheese-Frosting_landscape.jpg?w=450’’>

She said, “Man, I really hate red velvet with a passion! I can’t stand it! I’ll take the chocolate!”

Then, once they hand her the cake, she says: “Hey, I’m not a big fan of Skittles, could you just pop those off for me?”

It doesn’t mean she didn’t like the chocolate or that her previous hatred for red velvet was an act.

Now, my analogy could use some work since I doubt that “chocolate” and Trump go together too well. And his son’s hatred of Skittles is well-documented.

1947

Trump took a strong position on abortion with the Supreme Court nomination spiel. Planned Parenthood has been a battleground for abortion since I’ve been alive, I think. In this, he’s sided with the GOP with that stance on multiple occasions.

1948

I likely would have criticized those things, but I would not have acted surprised, or acted like I didn’t vote for those things.

I think the difference between my thoughts on this, and how some Trump supporters have tried to justify their actions, is perhaps subtle.

While I may not have liked everything that Clinton would have gone on to do, I was willing to take responsibility for it. I would never have said, “Well, I didn’t vote for THIS part.”

This is why, even if Trump had said good things (I honestly can’t really recall him making me think that ANY of his policies would have been well implemented, but pretending that there were some…) I could never have voted for him. Because some of the things he said were absolutely morally abhorrent to me. Even ignoring that the man himself is a cesspool of vile filth, his actual stated plans included things like restricting first amendment rights, or rounding up millions of people with a police state, or a foreign policy “platform” which seemed sure to have devastating impacts on US trade relations, not to mention possibly plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust.

Even if Trump said, “I’m going to give everyone a free puppy!” and even if I believed him, I could never vote for that because he was ALSO saying things which I found so repugnant that I could never assume responsibility for helping them come to fruition.

With Clinton, no such terrible things existed. While I may disagree with her policies, I found none of them to be morally abhorrent. I did not feel that they would result in the same kinds of errosions of constitutional rights and the strength of the Union that we are almost certainly going to see under Trump.

And every single person who voted for Trump is going to be responsible for those things, because Trump said he was going to do them. If Trump said he was going to do something, and you vote for him, and then he does that thing? You are responsible for it.

Maybe some people don’t like that responsibility. Too fucking bad. Welcome to the real world, where your actions have consequences. And those people are going to be held accountable.

1949

That analogy doesn’t work, no one is going to take a chocolate cake over a red velvet cake? Red Velvet is sooooo much better.

1950

Plus, if the Skittles were your objection, it would be no big deal because you’d just pluck them off yourself.

Let’s amend the analogy to she was offered two cakes, but the baker said “The chocolate cake has peanut butter in the middle.”

He response was “I’m allergic to peanuts, so I hope this peanut butter thing is a bluff!”

Ten minutes later, she’s going to ER.

1951

Aren’t those M&Ms?