"What's a nice boy like you doing voting for Donald Trump?"

I went in search of a Trump voter among my college classmates.

I found one.

I learned that Matt Naitove had voted for President Trump twice. I asked him to write a guest post explaining his reasons. I thought it would be an easy assignment for a journalism school graduate with a 51-year career as a writer, editor, and managing editor, in Matt's case for a trade magazine, Plastics Technology.

I suggested he start by writing what was wrong with Democrats and then switch to why he preferred Trump. Twenty-four hours later I got this. He never got to the Trump part; 1200 words into his post, he was still talking about how bad Democrats are.

He told me he watches Fox News "maybe 12 hrs a day." He said he pages through the entire New York Times six days a week, "a chore I perform like school homework." He said he gets emailed headlines from the New York Times, New York Post and Washington Post, but rarely reads Washington Post stories. He said he has a Fox News app on his phone.

I told Matt I would publish what he wrote verbatim. I decided that readers would benefit from hearing directly from an unfiltered source. Democrats cannot win elections if they dismiss the concerns of Trump voters. Readers don't need to agree with Matt. But they need to hear what issues matter to him and other voters made the political journey away from Democrats to Trump.

Naitove, 1967, a freshman in the Harvard Register, the original Facebook.

Naitove, recent

Guest Post by Matt Naitove

Why I Can’t Vote Democrat Anymore

Writing this post was not my idea. I don’t feel a need to explain myself. But a certain Inquiring Mind asked me to tackle this question: How could a child of two New York Jewish Democrats, raised in New England, educated at Harvard and Columbia Journalism School, stray so far from his roots as to become a Trump voter?

It didn’t happen all at once. In college, I regarded SDS, YPSL (Young People’s Socialist League) and the Young Republicans with the same casual disdain. In the summer of 1970, I collected petition signatures for Eugene McCarthy’s “Amendment to End the War.” My first presidential votes were for McCarthy in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in ’76. Then I voted for Reagan (twice), both Bushes, Bob Dole and Mitt Romney. In 2016 I held my nose and voted for Hillary, but was not the least perturbed when Trump won. I later voted for him twice, without hesitation.

I’m still a registered Democrat – voting in that party’s primaries is the only way to have any say at all in NYC politics. But I vote solidly Republican. Why can’t I identify with Democrats today? Could it be:

•   Open borders that allow in millions to bankrupt our cities (like NYC, where I live) and overcrowd our schools and hospital ERs -- not to mention free entry to hordes of cartel operatives, drug and human traffickers, assorted other criminals, suspected terrorists, spies and other national security threats (sleeper cells?).

•   Sanctuary states and cities (like mine) that welcome in these illegals with free cell phones, food, lodging and work permits not available to “home-grown” paupers and homeless. And most recently, an evident lust to recreating the civic chaos and disruptions of the George Floyd riots by opponents of ICE removal of dangerous criminals. And willful blindness to the fact that deportations of “honest illegals” is simply collateral damage for their non-cooperation with Federal law enforcement.

•   Speaking of homeless, welcoming disgusting encampments of drug addicts, mentally ill and social dropouts that disfigure and endanger cities like LA and SF.

Photo by Matt Naitove, sent as symbolic of the Democratic party, a  ruined Colossus, like these fragments of the giant effigy of Roman Emperor Constantine.

 •   Appalling economic illiteracy that threatens to bankrupt the richest country in the world with profligate spending on “feel-good” programs, blatant pandering and give-aways to favored constituents, donor industries and pet projects with willful blindness to waste and fraud.

•   Equally appalling historical ignorance that adopts “socialism” as a banner for utopian dreams of a just society, when the historical record since the term was invented in the 19th century is of socialist experiments that ranged from abject failure to regimes of unprecedented cruelty, repression, murder and extreme inequality between elites and the masses of subjugated people.

•   An unending stream of mind-numbing lies and hypocrisy from Congressional Democrats who assume everyone forgot what they said in the last year or last election cycle. Cries for “affordability” from those who created the worst inflation in 40 years; criticism of the Maduro capture from those who taunted Trump for inaction on Maduro 4 years ago; denunciations of Trump’s border policy after Bill Clinton, Obama, Hillary Clinton and even Joe Biden all insisted that illegal migration must be stopped; condemnation of Trump’s contesting the election of 2020 when numerous Congressional Democrats have stood up to contest electoral college results when Republicans won: Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Jamie Raskin—member of the Jan. 6 Committee and lead of the first Trump impeachment, Pramila Jayapal, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Boxer, etc. Repeated examples of Democrat mayors and governors who locked down their citizens for Covid and violated their own rules to dine out in fancy restaurants, get hair styling, etc.

•   Outright criminality in pursuit of the Trump-Russia hoax by the FBI and Hilary Clinton campaign abetted by Biden, Obama and others.

•   Suppression of free speech – censorship – under the guise of preventing “misinformation” through government agencies set up for the purpose (like Biden’s abortive misinformation monitor) and badgering of social media by the FBI over the Hunter Biden laptop, and by White House operatives over Covid reporting. Not to mention strong-arming J.P Morgan Chase and Bank of America into “debanking” Trump while out of office under threats by Federal bank regulators.

•   Blatant suppression of conservative groups by the IRS denying tax-free status under “no-scandals” Obama. (Remember Lois Lerner?)

•   Corruption, politicization and discrediting of science and scientific institutions through lying, deception and incompetence regarding Covid, climate change, and gender reassignment.

•   Discrediting of the court system through Dems’ “lawfare” campaign against Trump with shambolic cases like the civil fraud case that valued Mar-a-Lago at $50 million, and the novel (or fanciful) application of little-used laws in the N.Y. criminal trial and aborted Florida documents case. 

•   Discrediting the processes of Congress, like trivializing impeachment through two frivolous Trump cases (which were prefigured by calls for impeachment of Trump before he even assumed office in 2017), and use of obstructionist application of traditional Senatorial “privileges” to simply delay Trump’s cabinet appointments in a manner never seen in Congress before. And don’t forget it was Harry Reid who decided that so-called traditions like the Senate filibuster were really fictions that could be ignored when inconvenient, such as confirming cabinet and most judicial nominations. That was after Reid excoriated this “nuclear option” as dangerous, radical, reckless when a Republican recommended it.

•   Denuding the civic landscape of not only trusted institutions but also of language through Orwellian misuse and overuse of terms that eventually lose any useful or commonly shared meaning: racist, fascist, nazi, “threat to democracy,” socialism, even “science.” (Note: Before Trump, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan & G.W. Bush were also called fascists or Hitler-ish.)

•   Denying the reality of biological sex, insisting on (trans) men invading women’s sports, enabling fake-trans criminals to exploit female prisoners, maiming and disfiguring and permanently damaging the health of children through “gender-affirming” (read sex-denying) surgery and hormonal regimens. None of that supported by real science and mainly serving the greed of hospitals and physicians.

•   Pursuing a largely imaginary – at least greatly exaggerated – climate “crisis” with the effect of denying freedom of choice in the marketplace for cars, appliances, home heating, and more; imposing drastic increases in electric power costs and threats of blackouts and brownouts (a looming near-certainty in NY City and State) through fanatical pursuit of falsely labeled “cheap green energy” and irrational early closing of nuclear and fossil-fuel generation sources; and murderous disregard for violations of wildlife and marine-life protection laws when it comes to wind-power stations, while a fuel pipeline gets stopped by a rare butterfly or salamander.

•   Absurd coddling and financial support for the Islamo-fascist regime in Iran by Obama and Biden, coupled with a general weakness in their approaches to foreign policy, especially Russia and China.

•  Dems in Congress constantly fulminating about actions of the Trump Administration that are “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” in doing so broadcast their ignorance of both the law and constitution. The vacuousness of their pronouncements can be exposed by anyone with the internet research skills of an average sixth grader.

•   Last, but certainly not least, attempting to infuse DEI precepts (I won’t dignify them as “principles”) throughout government, corporate governance, academia and entertainment/culture has been the most divisive influence on our society through slicing and dicing the population into micro-identities and “intersectionalities”; promoting racism through persecuting “whiteness” and “white privilege” and race-base “reparations” for past sins of society. The very term DEI is an Orwellian inversion of meaning: “Diversity” really means uniformity of speech and outlook. “Equity” is the inverse of equality in promoting unequal treatment of different groups in the interest of someone’s definition of “fairness.” And “Inclusion” is all about exclusion of some groups from certain economic or academic opportunities or social benefits.

Even though a few Dems occasionally speak with common sense (John Fetterman and Ro Khanna), when it comes to voting they inevitably fall in line with their party’s lemming-like (or sheep-like) practice of voting as a bloc. There’s no Joe Manchin or Kirsten Sinema (Dem-aligned Independent) today.

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