One of the recurring themes this election cycle is a sense of betrayal: There are a growing number of constituencies that backed Republicans two years ago, only to feel abandoned by Donald Trump and his party.
Farmers, for example, voted for the president by lopsided margins in the 2024 race, and many have been let down by an administration that’s repeatedly made matters worse for the agricultural industry. Latino voters also shifted to Republicans in large numbers two years ago, confident that Trump would focus his deportation agenda on violent criminals. They now know better.
Similarly, many Muslim voters also took at enormous risk in 2024, moving toward a GOP nominee who championed a Muslim ban in his first term. Two years later, it’s a community that feels used and betrayed by a party that has seized on Islamophobia as the foundation for its closing message in the midterm elections.
But it’s also worth sparing a thought for those who believed Trump when he promised he was committed to “making America healthy again.” An overwhelming body of evidence leaves little doubt that he didn’t mean a word of it. The New York Times reported on the findings of a devastating investigation:
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
