'everything Comes At A Cost': 5 Trump Voters Are Feeling The Pain

This is an occasional roundup of people who voted for Donald Trump and are shocked to find out no one is immune from the damage and pain he causes. Many are now grappling with the consequences of their choice as it affects them and their loved ones—and possibly regretting their vote.

As we sample the latest batch of regretful Trump voters, just note the theme: ”I didn’t know it would impact me!” 

This is a core difference between us and them. They happily voted for President Donald Trump hoping he would hurt other people. We voted against him because he would hurt other people. 

So the question becomes, how do we build a society in which we are all in this thing together and vote for candidates who uplift rather than destroy? 

In the short term, sure, let’s pick up people who have been burned. Their votes matter. But as long as peoples’ motivation to vote is to hurt “the other,” we’re going to have a hard time building the caring, supportive, and progressive society we all deserve. 

Let’s start in Michigan, where the battle against the invasive and destructive sea lamprey is about to take a serious blow after the firing of 14 workers of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, including 33-year-old Graham Peters. 

“Peters feels betrayed by politicians he helped put in office. He voted for Trump in November, impressed by his vows to bolster the economy and slow immigration across the southern border. ‘If I had known that this was going to happen,’ he said, “I wouldn’t have voted for him,’” Great Lakes Now reported.

Imagine being impressed by his xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric. Peters was happy to vote for that! But had he known that he himself would be impacted, it would’ve been totally different. 

But alas, he voted to let Elon Musk, worth almost half a trillion dollars, eliminate his $36,000/year job. 

Next up is a disabled veteran working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Northern Virginia. 

“I voted for Donald Trump. But this is not what I was expecting. We didn’t think they were going to take a chainsaw to a silk rug,” he told WTOP News.

Trump promised to cut trillions from the federal budget, but the only way that was going to happen was with a chainsaw … along with a wrecking ball, a lot of dynamite, and the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. 

“I recognize there are a lot of cuts that need to be made, but this is not the one that you think will happen to your family. I encouraged him to take the job there, because he loved working for the agency, and I think it has a good mission,” his wife added.

You see, any other cuts would be totally fine. But not something that impacts her and her husband. That cut isn’t fair because he loves his job. Other people surely don’t love their jobs! 

Weirdly, many government employees seem to have a similar story, like former IRS employee Robert McCabe of Philadelphia. 

“You know when he talks about government waste and all that, yes, I’m behind it. I believe there is a lot of stuff in the government that needs fixing. And that’s part of the reason why I actually wanted to work for the government, actually. To help change. Help change the things that are wrong in the world, you know? I thought that someone with his business acumen would have come in with a fine-tooth comb and actually found it instead of coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason,” McCabe told NBC10 Philadelphia.

Of course he isn’t government waste, unlike, say, the disabled veteran in Virginia, or the guy helping save the Great Lakes from the economic devastation wrought by the sea lamprey. Their lives had a good reason to be destroyed, surely!

Next up is Trump voter AJ Ruggieri, a former employee of the U.S. Agency for International Development in central Illinois. He penned an insufferably long and self-aggrandizing editorial for his local newspaper, where he responds to a mocking text he received from his liberal brother.

“Is America great again?” the text read.

“Everything comes at a cost. The only thing constant is change, but my question is not whether we can make America great again, but how do we do so? There is no civility in this, no courage, no honor, no consideration for the citizen employee. Just the bottom line cloaked in a technicality of a federal regulation,” Ruggieri wrote.

Then he went on to end the piece by failing to even answer his brother’s original question.

“And so I am left with my brother’s curious words: Is America great again? I guess I really don’t know,” he said.

Ruggieri voted for an administration that offered cruelty and incivility, thinking that it would affect other people—not him directly. He talks of honor, yet voted for Trump—a man with zero honor. 

One last remorseful Trump voter shared their thoughts on a MAGA forum: 

Was not expecting this mistake from Trump and Elon

My cousin's beautiful 30 year old daughter has been battling glioblastoma, a horrible malignant brain tumor. Most people with this do not survive a year. After undergoing surgery, she entered a clinical trial funded through NIH and has survived almost 5 years … unbelievable really. 

My cousin is devastated and today is frantically searching universities everywhere across the country that may be able to continue to help his daughter. 

I voted for Trump, I believe in his agenda, and I want to reduce the size of government. 

But these rapid mass firings are out of control. The idea that every person he is firing is expendable is ridiculous. The people at NIH helping my cousin were likely brilliant, dedicated, compassionate professionals and probably underpaid as well. 

I wish Trump and Elon had been more careful and left them alone.

“More careful,” he writes, as if Trump or Musk have shown any care toward the lives they’re ruining. 

This one hits home because my father died of glioblastoma four months after his initial diagnosis. This is the same cancer that killed former Sen. John McCain. I didn’t realize clinical trials had extended life expectancy to this extent—a triumph of government-funded science. 

But this guy voted to hurt other people’s daughters, not his cousin’s. Now he’s upset, but only because he has been affected.  

No matter the government program, it benefits someone. That’s why past efforts to shrink the size of the government have had limited results at best. 

I would be happy to significantly shrink the Pentagon, eliminate farm subsidies, kill all fossil fuel subsidies, and so on—just like conservatives want to kill Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, drug subsidies, and other programs. 

Ultimately, government spending is a mutually assured destructive compromise between everyone’s priorities. You keep your hands off of mine, and I’ll keep my hands off of yours. 

Sure, administrations have tinkered around the edges, but the broader contours of the federal budget have generally remained the same. That’s why Republicans fight new programs like the Affordable Care Act so strongly. Once up and running, they are almost impossible to kill. 

Conservatism once understood this. Talk about abortion, but don’t actually kill it. Complain about government “waste and abuse,” but don’t actually try to eliminate any programs. Talking a good game once won elections, but those days are gone. 

Republicans are increasingly discovering that a systemic attack on the government they were indoctrinated to hate is, actually, problematic. Turns out a lot of it affects them personally.

Trump’s poll numbers are already tanking just a month in, but that is little consolation as he leaves a trail of wrecked lives in his wake.