Letters We Wish We'd Written Dept. -- Safaris To Trumplandia Edition

In this morning's Washington Post (serial curator of Trump voters' exquisite sensibilities and Real Americanism):

Thank you for the incisive front-page, above-the-fold coverage of Alabama evangelical Christians on the same day as the Washington Post Magazine feature about the next generation of Trumpian Republicans. Clearly this is the coverage we benighted elitist Post readers need to remind us that the only relevant Americans are people who are not benighted elitists. 

Would The Post be so kind as to point me to similar coverage of Democratic voters not couched in terms of “Hillary vs. Bernie,” “mainstream vs. insurgent,” or “can the Democrats win with their scabrous attacks on the only relevant Americans”? 

Jeff Porten, Philadelphia

Whether it's the Post or The New York Times, we've all seen enough of these safaris to deep, dark white Trumplandia to last us a lifetime. Media outlets need push- back when they, consciously or not, portray Trump voters as the only ones worthy of consideration and coverage.  We already know what those voters are.

BONUS:  This --

I’m not supposed to say that someone like this is ignorant. I’m supposed to engage with them as if what they said made any sense. I’m not supposed to be condescending to them, and I’m supposed to believe that they’re open to dialogue.
Yeah, no. https://t.co/UVpcXIgb57

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 26, 2018

(h/t M. Bouffant/ Web of Evil & Ennui)

The Media's Ridiculous Obsession With Trump Voters

(click on image to enlarge)


(Jen Sorensen, via Daily Kos)

We're Hackwhackers and we approve this message:

Holy mother of god, I'm tired of reading quotes from people who live in places where the local economy went to hell or Mexico in 1979, and who have spent the intervening years swallowing whatever Jesus Juice was offered up by theocratic bunco artists of the Christocentric Right, and gulping down great flagons of barely disguised hatemongering against the targets of the day, all the while voting against their own best interests, now claiming that empowering Donald Trump as the man who will "shake things up" on their behalf was the only choice they had left. You had plenty of choices left.

There's a media cottage industry that's been pumping out Trump voter stories from the hinterland since well into the primaries (and up to and including this week in one of the worst offenders, the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle). Early on, it was all about those voters' "economic anxiety," and now it's largely about doubts creeping into the dim recesses of some of those Trump voters' minds.

As Charlie Pierce and others have said, we empathize, but we don't sympathize with folks who've not bothered to inform themselves and/ or escape the right- wing media bubble and who voted for the manifestly unfit shitgibbon. They own what's going to happen to them under this emerging plutocratic kleptocracy. As the old saying goes, they've made their bed, now let them lie in it.