ex trump supporters, what point did you stop supporting trump and why?

Disclosure: I didn't vote for Trump.

However, I didn't hate the concept of his Presidency at first.

On paper, there isn't anything inherently wrong with a businessman being President. The actual tools needed for the job--the executive branch--is probably closer to CEO than a legislator. And I didn't think there was anything inherently wrong with Trump himself--he was crude and gross and had a huge ego and had a lot of baggage, but (believe it or not) at one point he had very down-to-earth views and had some pretty inventive ideas. And he had made some pretty positive statements regarding LGBT+ groups.

I didn't ultimately vote for him because I am very pro free-trade and I didn't like his anti-immigration stances. The sexual harassment was distasteful as well, but I also didn't like Hillary's treatment of Bill's accusers, either.

And yet I understood why people voted for him. He was the first candidate in decades that even gave a second thought to those areas of the country that free trade devastated. Democrats, for years, talked a big talk about unions and saving jobs, but then voted for free trade, while the Republicans just wanted free trade on its own merits.

I assumed that Trump would:

  1. Hate the job once he got in there, so would delegate most of the work to other people
  2. Pick other people who were good at their jobs
  3. Be a relatively pro-business centrist whose positions wouldn't be all that different than your standard middle-of-the-road Republican
  4. Prone to gaffes but ultimately harmless

All three were, of course, completely wrong.

I won't lie--for the first year or so, I thought the opposition was overreacting. When the first two weeks of his administration all of my progressive friends couldn't let the size of the inauguration crowd go--they posted about that, and only that, for far too long--I was like "who gives a shit? Pay attention to the stuff that matters. Trump's going to do a lot of bad things and you don't need to fixate or exaggerate the stuff that doesn't matter." And I think I was right; there's a lot of stuff that Trump did that got a lot of flack that, quite frankly, literally every other President has also done.

Charlottesville was when I stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt. It would have been so easy--a big win, both to condemn properly what happened and also start to distance himself from the monsters he encouraged. Instead, he ran with it.

I still think Trumpism is tricky to navigate. I've voted for Democrats ever since, but I don't like the positions Democrats have. I know we're always going on about voting for the lesser of two evils, but for the first time in 30 years I genuinely feel no one represents my interests--and my interests are basically "centrist Republicans from, like, six years ago" which baffles me don't exist anymore.

/r/AskReddit Thread