He's going to let you down.
It gives me no joy to say this, but no, he won't. You've been conned. Trump hasn't come up with a single concrete proposal to create jobs. His Carrier factory deal in Indiana is likely to give away billions of dollars in corporate tax breaks in return for less than 1,000 jobs. The government could have used to billions to create a lot more than 1,000 jobs.
If you've been watching the Senate confirmation hearings for Trump's appointees, your positive feelings may have started to fade. They should. His nominees are politically extreme, most are clueless, and at least one of them should be criminally investigated.
There were many different reasons why people might have voted for a populist candidate, even one I dislike as much as Trump -- especially when the experts were telling us that Hillary Clinton had an 85 percent or even a 99 percent chance of winning. You might have thought, why not use this vote to tell the elites exactly what I think of them?
And now you're probably still thinking, "Why not give him a chance?"
Here's why: I'm pretty sure you didn't vote for a government that's run by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Streeters, people who care more about their own wealth and self-interest than they do about your well-being. (Some of them are already reaping the profits). But that's what we're getting.
By deregulating Wall Street and hiring the bankers who looted the economy, Trump could very well be setting the stage for another financial crisis. We already know that banks will be able to shaft customers like you and me out of billions of dollars more, once Trump and his team have gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
You won't hear about any of this on Fox News, the most popular news outlet among Trump voters, because they're lying to you. You deserve the truth, so you might want to change the channel.
If you're a woman, you may have been one of the female Trump voters who said "you get through the bad and you focus on the good," or the woman who wrote, "my vote for Trump was not a vote against Planned Parenthood," or the woman who hoped that Trump's daughter's prominent role in the campaign meant he wasn't as sexist as he seemed.
But his policies are going to hurt women in many ways, leaving them with less control over their bodies and less ability to provide for themselves and their families. Don't take my word for it. Tragically, you'll find out soon enough.
I don't assume that I understand you.
I don't agree with the people who want to judge or dismiss you without knowing you. Anyone who's ever fallen on hard times knows that people will do unexpected things, and will sometimes take big risks, trying to provide for their families.
I don't assume you're racist, either. To be sure, a lot of you are. A surprisingly large percentage of several candidate's voters, including Clinton's, expressed racist sentiments to pollsters last year. But Trump voters were far more likely to express those racist opinions.
Still, racism doesn't explain the shifts Pacewicz described among Midwestern voters. They weren't too racist to vote for an African-American candidate, after all, so how does racism explain their abandonment of Hillary Clinton?
I am particularly offended by commentary like this, from blogger Markos Moulitsas, who contemptuously dismissed coal miners because they voted for Trump and now stand to lose health coverage. "Be happy," he wrote of the miners, many of whom suffer from the horror of black lung disease. "They're getting exactly what they voted for."
That's indefensible and brutal, but please understand: people like that don't speak for the great majority of us. You may hear harsh things from other Americans too -- voters, not commentators or activists -- but then, a lot of people are hurting right now.
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