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.
We were right. We warned the world about the dangers of President Donald Trump, and yet we were mocked, dismissed, and derided. Too many people thought we were being disingenuous, crying wolf, or just being unfairly partisan. And we weren’t even making an argument beyond, “LISTEN TO WHAT HE’S SAYING!”
As a result, we now get tweets like this, where we were called:
Or this prominent libertarian, who claims that “nobody knew how bad” Trump was, and that the only people who were right were those with “clinical case(s) of Trump derangement syndrome.”
“Nobody” is a funny way of saying “millions of people who tried to warn us.”
And now that Trump has irrevocably destroyed the United States’ standing in the world and led us to calamitous economic disaster, they all shake their heads about how “nobody” could’ve known.
But I don’t want to pick on these two, because at least they’re admitting to their errors
. That’s a good thing, truly. Trump was elected. The damage is done. The question now is how we salvage anything out of this mess. And if the message voters get out of this is that Republicans are bad for the economy, that will at least set the stage for a liberal revival down the road.
Instead, I want to feature a different kind of MAGA member—the one that is willing to destroy their own life in order to hate the right people.
This was posted—and quickly deleted
by moderators—on the r/Conservative subreddit, which requires members to prove their conservative bona fides before they are allowed to post:
I voted for Pres Trump, and I’d vote for him again.
Not only does he have a proven track record, but Kamala is blatantly incompetent, was a disaster of a candidate, and would have been worse as a President. Her picture should appear in the dictionary along with the entry for “ignoramous”.
Even so, l’m not one who blindly supports all that Pres Trump is doing. I’m very happy with his having virtually eliminated illegal immigration and am ecstatic that finally the rampant fraud waste and abusive is being stomped out. I love his outright support for Israel. I greatly appreciate his attempts to eliminate males being allowed to compete in female sports. And these are huge; that’s for sure.
However, there are several things he’s doing that I am NOT happy with.
The things this person isn’t happy with? Trump’s decimation of their 401(k), love for Putin and the abandonment of Ukraine, belligerence against Canada, and imperialistic obsession with Greenland and Panama.
Despite the forum’s refusal to let the post stand—and the anger of fellow MAGA commenters who lambasted them for “fake” conservatism—it’s reasonable to disagree with your own party and the president. On the left, we don’t have a problem disagreeing with our leaders. In fact, at times, it can even undermine us.
Regardless, the issue here isn’t that this user disagreed with Trump.
It’s that they admit that their own financial situation has significantly suffered—and that was written on Thursday before the Dow dropped another 5% and the NASDAQ almost 6%—but that they would still vote for Trump because a tiny handful of trans women can no longer play sports.
As conservatives like this one inherently admit, if Trump is fucking up their finances, that means that President Joe Biden actually improved them. You don’t fuck up something that is already fucked up. But they would rather lose their shirts than have immigrants work the fields and slaughterhouses, or for trans women to be treated with dignity and respect. “Waste and fraud” is just what they call it so they can pretend that they’re not bigoted assholes.
And that’s not even getting into the obvious sexism and racism directed at former Vice President Kamala Harris.
She would have been worse as president? How, exactly? Would she have destroyed the United States’ standing in the world while cratering the global economy? Of course not. There’s only one reason they could pretend she was an “ignoramus,” and we know what that is.
But it just goes to show that the conservative movement’s embrace of division, hate, and bigotry has overridden people’s instincts for self-preservation.
They would rather vote for Trump and lose everything than support a Black woman.
On March 25, there was disturbing news from Trinidad & Tobago: the victory won in the courts repealing laws against homosexuality in 2018 has just been reversed. There were a flurry of articles reporting this from LBGTQ+ publications and organizations, though not much in the mainstream U.S. media.
That year
[2018], the High Court in the Christian-majority nation ruled in a lawsuit brought by LGBTQ+ activist Jason Jones that Sections 13 and 16 of the Sexual Offenses Act are “irrational and illegal” because they violate the rights to privacy and freedom of expression.
“What I think the judge pointed out was ‘here every creed and race find an equal place,’ and I think we must all come together now and embrace each other in true love and respect,” Jones said at the time.
But on March 25, the Court of Appeals reversed that decision, saying that only Parliament can overturn the country’s ban on homosexuality. The Court of Appeals also reduced the maximum sentence associated with homosexuality to five years in prison. Prior to 2018, the maximum penalty was 25 years in prison.
Queer people suffered an enormous and surprising setback on Wednesday when the Court of Appeal overturned the 2018 ruling
that struck down the Caribbean country’s laws banning gay sex. I’m going to try to break down what happened here.
In 2017, UK-based Trinidadian activist Jason Jones filed a challenge to the country’s buggery and serious indecency laws – the laws which effectively ban gay sex, as well as oral and anal sex between straight people. A year later, a court on the island ruled in his favor, finding that the laws were unconstitutional insofar as they applied to consensual acts in private.
Trinidad became part of the leading edge of a wave of legal challenges that saw laws banning gay sex struck down across the region. Belize had preceded it in 2016; shortly after the ruling, a coordinated set of legal challenges were launched in all of the other former British colonies in the Caribbean islands. By 2024, activists had won challenges to sodomy laws in Antigua and Barbuda, St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Barbados – with cases still pending in Grenada and St Lucia. Around this time, these rulings were mirrored in court decisions striking down anti-gay laws in other former UK colonies, including Mauritius, Botswana, and India, making them part of a larger global trend.
Erasing 76 Crimes editor Colin Stewart wrote about how these anti-gay laws are part of a growing trend
:
The slow, decades-long progress toward recognition of the human rights of LGBTQ people has encountered a setback with the March 25 decision by the Trinidad and Tobago Court of Appeal to reinstate that Caribbean country’s laws against homosexuality
.
Before those reversals, the number of nations with laws against gay sex had fallen to 64 from more than 90 at the beginning of the 2000s. The latest countries to end the criminalization of same-sex intimacy are Namibia
in Africa and Dominica
in the Caribbean in 2024, Mauritius
in the Indian Ocean and the Cook Islands
in the South Pacific in 2023, following in the footsteps of Singapore
in Southeast Asia, Antigua & Barbuda
, Saint Kitts & Nevis
, and Barbados
in the Caribbean — all in 2022.
The Trinidad and Tobago case is now being appealed to the Privy Council in London, UK, Trinidad and Tobago’s highest court.
One of the strongest voices fighting for LBGTQ+ rights in the Caribbean is that of Jason Jones, profiled in January 2025 for the Caribbean Collective
by Tiara Jade Chutkhan:
Jones, who was born in Trinidad is the son of an English mother and Trinidadian father and playfully refers to himself as “Tringlish.”… With Trinidad’s anti-gay environment, in 1985 at the age of 21, Jones relocated to London where he studied theatre and acting. […]
It was in 2017 that Jones would take on his largest project yet. He began working on repealing all legislation in the Caribbean that discriminated against the LGBTQ+ community. Jones explained that many Trinidadians didn’t realize these laws existed or could be used against them. Some of the laws included members of the LGBTQ+ community being denied entry into Trinidad and two people of the same sex not being allowed to rent a hotel room.
On April 12, 2018, he won a landmark legal challenge at the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago which decriminalised adult same sex intimacy. This win guaranteed freedom for nearly 100,000 Trinidadians and set a precedent. The case was also cited in a recent case that led to a decriminalisation victory in India.
Come 2025, Jones will stand before the UK’s Privy council for LGBTQ+ decriminalisation. His victory there will assist decriminalisation in at least 10 other countries across two continents.
“The only way to change hearts and minds is to change laws. Unless you have laws that protect minority communities, there’s no way you can break this deeply-entrenched-hundreds-and-hundreds-of-years of homophobic ideology,” Jones says.
Michael K. Lavers, the international news editor of the Washington Blade
wrote:
Court of Appeal Justices Nolan Bereaux and Charmaine Pemberton overturned it on March 25. The Daily Express newspaper reported
Justice Vasheist Kokaram dissented.
“As an LGBTQ+ citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, this regressive judgement has ripped up my contract as a citizen of T&T and again makes me an unapprehended criminal in the eyes of the law,” said Jones in a statement he posted to social media. “The TT Court of Appeal has effectively put a target on the back of LGBTQIA+ people and made us lower class citizens in our own country.”
Victories still stand in other nations in the Caribbean and there are other activists, like Orden David
, who have also fought hard for those changes.
For years, Orden David was persecuted in his native Antigua and Barbuda — a frequent complaint by many LGBTQ people who fear for their safety across the conservative and mostly Christian Caribbean, where anti-gay hostility is widespread. […]
Facing ostracism and risking his life as the public face of the LGBTQ movement, David took his government to court in 2022 to demand an end to his country’s anti-sodomy law.
Last year, a top Caribbean court ruled that the anti-sodomy provision of Antigua’s sexual offenses act was unconstitutional. LGBTQ-rights activists say David’s effort, with the help of local and regional advocacy groups, has set a precedent for a growing number of Caribbean islands. Since the ruling, St. Kitts & Nevis and Barbados
, have struck down similar laws that often seek long prison sentences.
The ruling said
Antigua’s 1995 Sexual Offences Act “offends the right to liberty, protection of the law, freedom of expression, protection of personal privacy and protection from discrimination on the basis of sex.”
Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne told the AP that his government decided not to challenge the ruling: “We respected the fact that there should be no discrimination within society,” he said. “As a government, we have a constitutional responsibility to respect the rights of all and not to discriminate.”
David’s case was also covered in this video by the Associated Press:
This is an issue we’ve covered here in the past
. It is important to note that members of the LGBTQ+ Caribbean community here in the states also face challenges, for example, this news story documented by CBS News in New York last year:
To be Indo or Afro Caribbean immigrants, children of immigrants here in the states, and to be openly LGBTQ+ under the vile Trump anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion and deportation campaigns isn’t easy. It’s up to all of us to fight back, and to be more aware of battles being fought both here and in our neighboring countries.
Please join me in the comments section below, and post links to activist groups you are aware of, are part of, or you support.
President Donald Trump has gone from mocking Canada as “the 51st state” and demoting its prime minister to “governor,” to threatening military invasion of Greenland, to siding with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin over Ukraine’s fight for freedom, to insane tariffs that are making a mockery of international order.
Trump even said he wants to sell allies nerfed versions of U.S. warplanes.
“We’d like to tone them down about 10 percent, which probably makes sense because someday maybe they’re not our allies, right,” he said
on March 21.
Just imagine how that was received by U.S. allies.
In short, the United States is, at best, an unreliable ally and, at worst, a global threat.
So it makes sense that Europe has decided it won’t depend on the United States as a military backstop for its security, committing nearly $900 billion
to its massive military spending spree.
But Europe does want to work with committed allies, so it’s pulling in Japan and South Korea while shunning the United Kingdom and the United States. Makes sense, right?
The UK left Europe in its ill-fated Brexit gambit (though there is currently work on a new partnership agreement between them), while the United States is literally threatening military action against NATO member Denmark in Trump’s bid to annex Greenland.
Furthermore, the Trump administration threatened to block
the transfer of U.S. parts for F-16s during the president’s hissy fit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It’s standard in weapons contracts for a buyer to get approval to transfer weapons systems to third nations.—no one wants to see their weapons end up in the hands of hostile nations.
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have a heated exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Yet the mere threat is a challenge to Europe’s sovereignty, particularly as the U.S. government has broadcasted that it no longer shares Europe’s values.
No one is interested in working with a United States that can turn on a dime depending on the whims of idiot voters in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, and the GOP is certainly not interested in preventing crazy despots from flying its banner.
Which leads to no weapons deals for the United States. And would you believe that Trump is pissed?
According to Reuters
, U.S. officials told European allies that they want them to continue purchasing U.S. arms, despite recent moves by the EU to limit U.S. manufacturers’ participation in weapons tenders.
And in a meeting on March 25, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia that the United States wants to continue participating in EU countries’ defense procurements.
Well, no shit the United States wants to keep participating—but this is the consequence of turning your back on your allies. Trump thinks he can bully the world into submission, but the world has other plans.
Canada is seeking tighter military cooperation with the EU, while the EU is seeking closer ties with Australia, New Zealand, and India. Meanwhile, the United States is making kissy faces at a pathetic Russia, now relegated to assault Ukraine with donkeys
and golf carts
.
Europe’s justified shunning of the U.S. arms industry is already having consequences.
According to the Washington Post
, a Lockheed Martin F-16 fighter jet manufacturing line in Greenville, South Carolina, services the export market and pumps $1.3 billion into the local economy annually.
Now Greenville County, which Trump handily won in 2024, is bracing for the fallout as U.S. allies call for boycotts against U.S. weapons.
Perhaps nothing foreshadows the economic consequences of Trump’s belligerence better than the state of the U.S. stock market.
Let’s start with Lockheed Martin, which makes F-16 among other weapons:
Meanwhile, this is German weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall:
As usual, Trump has an uncanny ability to hurt his own supporters.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell delivered a speech
at a conference for the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing on Friday, warning that President Donald Trump’s disastrous tariffs
will lead to higher inflation.
“Looking ahead, higher tariffs will be working their way through our economy and are likely to raise inflation in coming quarters. We face a highly uncertain outlook with elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation,” he said. “While uncertainty remains elevated, it is now becoming clear that tariff increases will be significantly larger than expected. And the same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.”
Powell mentioned inflation more than 36 times
during his speech, suggesting that he and the Federal Reserve don’t have any to lower interest rates, which are currently at about 4.3%. Traditionally, higher borrowing costs can help slow economic growth and reduce inflation.
Meanwhile, Trump took to Truth Social
to put the onus on Powell, pressuring him to cut interest rates.
While Trump is the one who appointed Powell to the Federal Reserve, the two have butted heads
numerous times. But Powell has been clear that he has no plans
to resign, and the president cannot legally remove
him either.
Powell’s tenure at the reserve is up in 2026, but according to an April 2024 Wall Street Journal
report, Trump’s goon squad has been secretly working up plans to “blunt the Fed’s independence,” in an attempt to give the executive branch control over interest rates.
And while stock markets around the globe plummet for a second day straight
, Trump has ditched the honoring
of fallen U.S. soldiers to attend a billionaire Saudi-funded golf tournament this weekend.
