Reason and Shame Haven’t Worked on Trumpers: Is Isolation Next?
By: Sean Myers
Tags: Politics, Trump, Humor, Republicans, Fake News

Reason and Shame Haven’t Worked on Trumpers: Is Isolation Next?

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Joe Biden may have won the election, but it came with an uncomfortable truth: 47% of Americans — over 74 million of them — still preferred Donald Trump. This, in spite of the laundry list of reasons to suspect that he is either demented, criminally active, immoral, corrupt, compromised by Russia, fascist, wearing a wig, or some combination thereof.

Liberals have tried reasoning with Trump supporters, but they have proven immune to facts. We have tried laughing at them, but they have proven to be shameless.

As they rage against election results that threaten to shatter their fantasy world, Trump supporters are threatening to secede from the United States if they don’t get their way.

Maybe that isolation would be good for everyone.

Facts Don’t Matter

Does it really have to be restated?

Anyone who has argued with an ardent Trump supporter has been stopped abruptly by the hilariously dubious assertions that they make about the world. Things like:

Democrats want to abort babies after they have been born

Leading Democrats kidnap children in order to harvest their adrenaline so they can inject it and get high

Antifa secretly runs the government

Democrats want to make it illegal to become a police officer

Hugo Chavez (deceased 2013) built voting machines that threw the 2020 election for Biden

The Mueller Report completely cleared Trump’s name, so the Democrats fabricated another “witch hunt” with the same set of facts in Ukraine

Hunter Biden was actually the corrupt one in Ukraine

Her emails

Trumpers throw these lines around with the confidence that usually comes with statements like “gravity happens, sometimes,” or “the Jets are terrible at football… wait, what?” Worse, when someone who hasn’t inoculated themselves with Fox News talking points raises an objection or points to page 182 of the second volume of the Mueller Report, most Trumpers merely skip down to the next wildly inaccurate assertion about reality that they have in their arsenal and then confidently espouse that one as Truth Incarnate, as well.

For these Trump supporters, facts that don’t comply with Fox News dogma are merely things to be avoided. They then claim to have won the “debate,” in spite of the fact that they refused to actually engage in one.

For most other Trump supporters, these inconvenient facts are simply “fake news.” They can be disregarded as such with the appropriate proclamation, like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy.

GIF by devon_f on Tenor

Studies have even shown that even raising these conflicting facts can make Trump supporters dig their heels deeper into their fabricated reality.

Shame Didn’t Work, Either

Some of us, including my personal spirit animal Green Shirt Guy, took another tactic when confronted with Trumpworld:

But focusing on the lighter sight of this unhinged authoritarian movement — one that future historians will rank third in their “Scariest Eras of the 21st Century” — has produced little more than butthurt Republican voters, flocking to safe spaces in an attempt to cancel reality.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. Our Facebook news feeds have become less aggravating since Parler opened and became the comedic gem of fascism that we all knew it could be.

What I am saying, though, is that one does not need many fingers to count the number of Trump supporters they know who suddenly had the epiphany of, “everyone’s laughing at me, maybe I should at least reevaluate my position to make sure I don’t deserve this treatment.”

Instead, even when the laughing faces were those of Trump-appointed judges, chuckling at their esteemed leaders’ attempts to overthrow an election, rank-and-file Trump supporters have doubled down on their unhinged view of what is real, and what is not.

If They Want to Secede, Why Not Let Them?

The self-imposed isolation has not been confined to the newest and glitchiest of social media platforms — Trump supporters are also demanding to have their own physical safe spaces in the states that voted for Trump in the election.

Just like the South seceded from the U.S. in 1861 to “protect states’ rights (to have slaves),” Trump voters in the Red States in the South and Midwest are now threatening to secede from America because they didn’t get the president they wanted and because they want to keep their white heritage on their sleeves.

Many of these threats are, obviously, hilarious:

It’s spelled “secession.”

Others, though, should strip you of some sleep:

Obviously, convincing or shaming these “patriots” into not attacking their own country is a fool’s errand.

As much as I would pay for footage of Second Amendment fanboys discovering that a “well-regulated militia” stands no chance against the United States Armed Forces, a more workable solution would be to shrug.

“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

Liberals and Republicans, we both have our own ideas about what our country needs. Why don’t we both pursue it on our own?

You can have Trump as president-for-life. We can have universal healthcare.

We can hold police officers accountable when they shoot Blacks for fun. You can have Trump as president-for-life.

We can let women make their own healthcare decisions. Your president-for-life can be Trump.

Trumpers are calling everyone else a “snowflake” as they actively isolate themselves from dissent, online. Now they want to do it in real life by invoking their idea of cancel culture on American democracy.

If they want to kick down the door, why don’t we just open it for them?

And that is why I keep signing every online petition for secession that I can find.