Watch this clip:
Donald Trump Voter Lost Her Home, Blames Trump's Pick For Treasury Secretary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jIpkrelra0
HAYES: "You voted for Donald Trump, tell me what drew you to him and why you voted for him."
COLEBROOK: "Like many of the people I'm in touch with who were foreclosed on by Mnuchin,
we voted for Trump because we are fed up like most of America with the politics as it is. We're fed up with a government and all those elected officials who were elected to serve the people but they are really only serving themselves.They vote in special compensations for themselves, everything. They are not really working for us, its all lip service and we believed Trump would be an outsider, for the first time, who would work for the people as his campaign promised....He's quoted as saying is 'to you the American people not major donors, the party or corporations now.'
....
HAYES: "So do you feel like you were played, you feel like you were hoodwinked?"
COLEBROOK: "I think yes in some instances, I understand that he's got to you know bring in a good team, but this one? There's plenty of qualified people out there who are not Wall St. insiders who are not billionaires that were made billionaires off the backs of the working class people. The alternative wasn't great either..."
This is just one voter, but I think its fair to say that she represents millions of other voters just like her and I'm going to use her reasoning as a springboard for discussion.
Most of the commenters call this woman a naive idiot, she should have known better, you get what you voted for, etc. etc.
They are missing an important point which I bolded above which fueled so much of the anger within Trump's coalition.
For decades now, we've had career politicians come and go in our government that don't truly work for the people. We all know the Republicans only care to work in the best interests of the rich, but the Democrats also only care for a small elite group: the professional class. They've since long abandoned the working class in this country. We've since seen enormous inequality that continues to worsen which has made that precarious working class a lot bigger, and there hasn't been someone that can represent the anger and betrayal so many of these working class voters have felt until Trump came a long and gave them a voice.
You can see so many communities in America hollowed out thanks to offshoring and outsourcing, wages that don't grow, trade treaties that have only benefited business owners, corporate monopolies that have run out the smaller competition out of business, diminished public infrastructure investment, lack of adequate healthcare access, austerity, etc etc.
All of these conditions together make for the perfect storm of a backlash against the ruling establishment.
How many Americans rightfully feel their government doesn't serve them when they've used their taxpayer dollars to bailout the banks that engineered the financial crisis of 2008, while in return doing nothing for Americans who wound up homeless due to predatory mortgage servicing and other fraudulent schemes? How many financers and bankers were actually jailed due to the crisis? They got away practically scratch free and a financial system that caused this still intact. Wall Street hugely influenced how the government was going to respond to the crisis. That's why the recovery skewed favorably for them. And those on Main Street can suffer austerity in return.
Look at the measures of how much anxiety and stress Americans have lived through the past couple of decades. The world most Americans experience feels increasingly unfair and uncertain. Trump tapped into all this unease and anger that has been caused chiefly by neoliberal capitalism. Until you make radical systemic changes that decouples us from neoliberalism, the conditions your average working American finds themselves in will continue to get worse and in turn so will their anger as a voting bloc. It's very possible an even more evil version of Trump can come out of this. Biden and the rest of the Democrats have no strategy or plan to deal with this, they want a status-quo return to the Obama years and it's going to backfire against them even more than it did in 2016. Obama's (and his administration) failure to turn this country in a different direction during the financial crisis is directly responsible for Trump to have the political clout he does.