“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting”

A lot of what you need to know about the mentality of Trump’s base appears in the final sentence of this New York Times article on the government shutdown’s effects on people who voted for him:

“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” That person voted for Trump to not to bring themselves up, but to bring others down — a particularly toxic, violent, and even deadly form of “crabs in a bucket” thinking. The Atlantic was right: The cruelty is the point.

Recommended reading

• Vox: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be”: a Trump voter says the quiet part out loud
• Anil Dash on Twitter: “The wild thing is, for all their exhortations to listen to Trump voters, major media almost never actually reports on the fact that they consistently, loudly, unapologetically want violence. They think hurting people is good, and somehow all the sympathetic profiles won’t say it.”