We’ve all experienced that empty feeling you get when you get your hopes up about something only to have them crushed and your spirit broken. You feel used, beaten, stupid.
MSNBC host Joy Reid noted in an op-ed she wrote for The Daily Beast this week that white working class voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump in the hope that he would be their champion are already being betrayed by the President-elect. Reid writes:
“You voted for Donald Trump, thinking that he was on your side; that he will save your jobs and your way of life, whatever you imagine that is. Well, you got played.
“When he tore down the old Bonwit Teller building—where my Jamaican godmother was one of the few black women allowed to work as a cashier in the 1960s to build Trump Tower, Trump used undocumented white laborers, mostly Polish, to do it. When his company forced them to work in deplorable, dangerous conditions and even failed to pay them the meager wages they were promised and they complained, Trump threatened to have them deported.”
Reid also makes sure to let the gullible working class Americans who bought Trump’s bullshit that he is already showing his true collars with his attacks on the union which represents workers at Carrier in Indianapolis:
“Now, your supposed hero of the working class, the ‘blue collar billionaire,’ who, you insisted, both during the campaign and afterward, heard you, understood you, spoke to you, and cared about you…Used his Twitter account this week to savage United Steelworkers 1999 of Indiana and its president, Chuck Jones, an ordinary working man, who dared to tell the truth about the phony Carrier deal that the media shamefully allowed Trump to ride to glowing headlines and boosted poll numbers.”
Despite their faith in a man who should be in prison instead of the Oval Office, Reid says she hopes one day Trump’s supporters will realize they’ve been conned and demand change:
“I hope at some point you realize what’s happening and fight back. Your choices, unfortunately, do affect us all, and they will until we wake up and junk the Electoral College, which puts rural states’ zeal for Christian rule ahead of blue states’ desire for good government.”
The only plan Donald Trump has for working Americans is to cut their wages, take away their health insurance, jack up the price of everything they buy, and further enrich himself and his billionaire buddies. These people didn’t just get played, they got screwed.
Here’s Reid discussing her op-ed with fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes:
This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org