How to Protect Trump Voters from Themselves

This is about giving till it kills.

by Rich Herschlag

There has been way too much talk among my peers and among Democrats in general about Trump voters eventually getting what they deserve. From a return to high inflation due to high tariffs, to loss of valuable workers through deportation, to potential high unemployment, to even more unaffordable housing costs, there is a definite air of spitefulness within my various overlapping circles and blue country as a whole.

I prefer a different approach. Although my countless pre-election warnings, writings, and outright pleas fell not only upon deaf ears but also upon lips that mocked and spat on me, I believe strongly it is my moral and ethical duty to expend the entirety of my resources over the remaining years of my natural life toward aiding and comforting the very people who most disdain both my identity and my values. Because I am a fucking idiot.

Fortunately, I’m nearing what some call retirement age and along with my better half have scrimped and saved enough to get us through the coming tumultuous years and from time to time even assist our grown children. Given the recent change in national trajectory, however, these same personal funds will instead be tapped and drained for a far greater purpose.

This is not just about turning the other cheek. This is about keeping the original cheek pointed directly at my most vehement critics in order to continue absorbing maximum abuse. This is about leaning in, not just to a difficult, highly objectionable task, but to the pure and utter masochism that comes with generously rewarding your intellectual, spiritual and physical enemies. This is about embracing the Golden Rule—one which has been discarded and defecated upon by the most hypocritically self-righteous among us—and leading by an example that will be roundly ridiculed, kicked, and soiled. This is not just about being Saint Paul’s “all things to all people.” It is specifically about being a compliant and holy doormat to some of the worst people ever created. This is not just about giving till it hurts. This is about giving till it kills.

I will track my detractors. I will know indirectly from social media posts and directly from phone, text, and in-person inquiries who among Trump voters in my outer circle is suffering most from Trump economic policies. I will use my best analytical skills to determine their current weekly grocery expense shortfall attributable to new draconian tariff, deportation, and energy policies. I will dutifully liquidate my 401(k) and Venmo the money to these same people.

Where there is silence I will assume my calculations and actions are correct and continue on a similar basis from week to week. Where there is an objection that the amount transferred is either too little, too infrequent, or some combination of the two, I will increase my contribution not only until apparent satisfaction is achieved but a bit beyond for good measure. Where there is an outright refusal to accept an ill-conceived, misbegotten liberal handout I will seek alternative means of transferring funds, including leaving bags of cash inside rear storm doors, cleverly masking my financial contributions as government tax rebate checks, and purchasing new snow tires in the spring from my MAGA neighbor’s failing auto parts franchise.

I will access publicly available data and apply econometric modeling to determine who is falling behind on their car payments and then close that deficit with monthly allotments drawn down from my SEP-IRA, which because I now exceed the age of 59-1/2 can be performed without penalty other than paying normal income tax. Because of the Talmudic proscription against making a show of giving to the needy, I will avoid any reference to these contributions on Facebook, Instagram, and X and will go the extra distance of allowing these same recipients to blame their mounting economic hardship on Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I will also gladly accept direct personal blame attributed vaguely and absurdly to a COVID-era general handout I may have accepted during the first Trump administration, the school lunch program, no longer operative affirmative action policies, or something I may have said in the fourth grade.

Furthermore, I will continue on these same social media platforms to play the role of willing progressive patsy to MAGA’s increasingly toxic verbal aggressions and insinuated violent threats by feigning ignorance to the true causes of their deprivation and then by offering the biggest, fattest, slowest softballs imaginable in the form of hackneyed, largely ineffective liberal tropes. I will take every conceivable online polemic bait in order to gratify the MAGA own-the-libs approach to open electronic discourse, all the while emptying my bank account on their supremely ungrateful behalf and joyfully accepting humiliation in the form of trite talking points delivered nightly by Laura Ingraham.

I will repeatedly close rightwing household and life event-driven budget gaps by way of large personal checks timed perfectly with overwhelming medical expenses avoidable had they opted for a policy under the Affordable Care Act, refrained from throwing six-figure MAGA-themed megachurch weddings, and cancelled several sprawling multi-week hunting and fishing outings where some of the spoils looked uncannily like Kamala Harris voters. As I repeat to myself, quietly over and over again, Jesus of Nazareth’s sober admonition that “they know not what they do,” I will continue to tirelessly raid my nuclear family’s own hard won war chest to ensure the belligerence of my haters is both their bliss and my shame.

Once my stocks, annuities, dividend funds, home equity, and modest family heirlooms are finally depleted; my Social Security retirement funds fully leveraged; my baseball card collection pawned; my house foreclosed; my wife of 37 years has filed for divorce; and my grown children have disowned me, my work on behalf of the unrepentant, financially stressed, information challenged new populist deluded far right will have just begun. There are still perfectly good bodily organs to sell and donate—preferably to the same folks who spray painted “communist faggot” on my since repossessed 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. There is still plenty of type-O positive blood to donate or give directly to strong Second Amendment rights advocates who have recently severed a carotid artery in an unfortunate home accident involving unsecured, unlicensed firearms.

Once living in the shadows among the vast American dispossessed, I will while away the hours and the days couch-surfing, clipping coupons from local supermarket circulars, and foraging in the forest for nuts and berries missed by hibernating bears—the entire time reminding myself ceaselessly that my impending demise, alone somewhere dehydrated and hallucinatory in an unmarked ditch, is not only well deserved for my own foolish idealism and misplaced patriotism, but more to the point is gleefully suffered on behalf of a weak-minded people so convinced of their own self-defeating, illogical, and long-ago discredited convictions that they must in the end and at all personal costs to me be shielded from both the direct and collateral damage of those same convictions. These muddled, self-deprecating notions will comfort me as my limitlessly servile soul finally escapes my failed corpse only to watch insects consume the remains and hopefully use the byproducts to provide additional nitrogen to the nearby fields of agribusinesses who this past year donated countless millions to fascist super PACs.

With any luck at all the afterlife will be dominated by dearly departed MAGA spirits whose racist, sexist, fascist inclinations on earth are ultimately rewarded by eternal obliviousness to their thoughts and actions by a Loving Eternal Being who lives in a red state and shoots squirrels for kicks, while I with my own altruistic proclivities will be subjected to an endless 24/7 loop of Sean Hannity’s election night coverage. Then and only then will my sacred self-effacing karmic mission in this universe be complete and the MAGA destiny of unending remorseless celestial validation come to fruition. Amen.