If You Voted for Trump

What happens next is up to you.

Trump’s re-election is, by basically any measure, a remarkable achievement. One does not have to like him to admit that. He’s not only a felon, he’s a guy who incited a riot on the Capitol. Coming back from that to actually run the Capitol? I mean, come on. I’m not even trying to hand it to him here, I’m just saying he’s had one of the wildest lives in all history, and that’s not even a little bit hyperbolic.

And he couldn’t have done it without you: the person who voted for him. Statistically, some of you reading this helped get his campaign over the finish line. That’s who this post is for.

On Friday night, Trump fired some eighteen independent investigators general without telling anyone, which is against the law. This is in addition to ramming through Pete Hegseth as his pick to run the Department of Defense. Hegseth is, as a matter of legal record, a deeply compromised alcoholic sexual abuser whose ex-wives were terrified of him¹. This is not the guy I would have picked to run our nation’s military during an administration that is threatening to invade other countries. Heck, it sounds like his own mother doesn’t think he’s up to the job. But he’s got it and, again, he couldn’t have done it without some of you.

Now, I know that just because you voted for Donald Trump doesn’t mean you love the idea of an alcoholic abuser calling the shots of our military. Sure, some people who voted for Trump love the idea of trolling our nation’s institutions by placing them in the care of guys you wouldn’t trust to park your car. But my understanding is that a lot of you aren’t crazy about Trumpism as a whole, but prefer it enough to the Democratic Party establishment to give the Big Guy a shot.

So here is my charge to you: It’s on you to put a stop to all this.

You got what you wanted. Four years after trying to take Capitol by force, Biden and Co. welcomed Trump into unified leadership of all three branches of government. Dems are out of power and will be for the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court will likely have a MAGA bent for the rest of my life. Your vote may have been hesitant, qualified or simply in protest of the other options, but that sort of stuff isn’t tallied at the ballot box. All they know is that you wanted Donald Trump and everything that comes with him to be in charge of everything, and that’s what they gave you. He is treating his narrow win like a national mandate, and he is bulldozing every possible speedbump between him and Project 2025. You only wanted more conservative Supreme Court judges but now you’re getting mass tariffs, racial diversity bans, global warming on overdrive, polio 2.0, a threatened annexation of both Greenland and Canada, the end of birthright citizenship and, oh yes, the alcoholic wife abuser in charge of the military.

I can’t say I’m thrilled about any of this but there’s not much I can do. I’m a woke lib! I have been definitively and irrevocably consigned to the woke lib labor camps, and I really don’t think anyone who voted for Trump cares what I have to say about the issue. I’ve been talking about how much I don’t like Trump for the better part of my adult life at this point and I have to assume it’s just static for most of my Republican friends and family. “There goes Tyler, railing about Trump again. Just let him get it out of his system, this usually passes in a few minutes.”

So, yeah, nobody’s going to care what I have to say about Trump who isn’t already on board. But that’s where you, the person who voted for Trump, comes in. My thinking is that if you voted for Trump, you have an extra measure of responsibility to hold him accountable. I don’t necessarily mean on a cosmic, spiritual scale, but on a purely practical one. A Trump supporter is much more likely to take someone who voted for Trump seriously than someone who voted for Biden. If I say I’m concerned about something Trump does, it gets written off as delusional paranoia. But they might listen to you.

I tried to live this out over the last four years of the Biden administration. I voted for Biden in 2020 and while he definitely did some good stuff, he made a lot of really awful decisions and I was very vocal about how I felt about those decisions. I was so vocal that a few people suggested I tone it down a little: “Maybe save your criticism for later. You don’t want to hurt his reelection chances.” That sort of team sport political praxis drives me crazy. It’s not my job to run cover for any politician. My responsibility is to vote for the ones I like and pressure them to fulfill their obligations to the public. I did my best, and now it’s your turn.

Because I’m going to be real honest with you: If you voted for Trump, people around you are going to be associating you with all of his actions over the next four years — both the ones you like and the ones you don’t. Maybe you don’t think that’s fair, but that’s the reality. The person in your neighborhood with undocumented relatives is not going to see you as someone to turn to for help and advice. The person in your church who doesn’t know what to make of their sexual orientation or gender is not going to trust you with their questions.² You might be able to regain some of their trust, but you are going to have to do the work of extricating yourself from this presumed endorsement of Trump and all his actions. The only way to do that is to be loudly and vocally opposed to his craziest and cruelest actions.

And if enough of you do that, well, maybe things won’t be as bad as many of us are fearing. You’re our only hope. We’re all counting on you.

Applecore: Our Journey Through Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time RETURNS

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of All Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen and twenty.

Nas: Illmatic

In the summer of 2014, I was at Lollapalooza in Chicago where Nas was doing a 20 year anniversary performance of Illmatic. I remember being surprised at how early his set was. Nas got billed below guys like Skrillex, Foster the People and the Avett Brothers — who aren’t necessarily bad bands, but none of them have a cultural footprint that comes anywhere close to Illmatic.

The mysterious politics of music festival lineup schedules isn’t really worth getting angry about, but that sleight has stuck with me because I think it actually kind of makes sense. When you think about Nas, you don’t think about his entire body of work the way you do with other rapping all-timers like, say, Outkast or Eminem. You think about Illmatic. Nas is a good rapper and his feud with Jay-Z will go down as one of the great hip-hop battles of the ‘00s, but Illmatic is so big that it almost eclipses the artist who made it. He’s never come anywhere close to dropping anything as good. Not many people have.

I recently watched Some Like It Hot and it’s an almost out of body experience, to see the next 50 years of cinema unfurl before your eyes, to see how obvious it was that this movie was writing the new blueprint on the fly. Listening to Illmatic now is like that. It’s the bridge between East Coast rap as it was and East Coast rap as it was going to be, as it still is today.

He was born Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, a Queens kid raised in the projects by a jazz pianist dad and a mom who delivered mail. “Nasir” is Arabic for “protector.” His parents split up and Nas dropped out of school in eighth grade, but he started picking up his own education, studying African culture and fiddling around with the trumpet. He and his best friend Willie “Ill Will” Grama starting hanging around music studios, where they connected with a local artist named Large Professor, who introduced them to guys like Rakim and Kool G Rap. Large Professor was involved with the legendary New York hip-hop collective Main Source, and they gave Nas a guest spot on their debut album Breaking Atoms. His verse turned enough heads that he got invited to record a full album. He recorded Illmatic. Sometimes it’s that simple.

Nas had the talent and the pen, but he was also connected to a slew of the most exciting producers in the world at the time. New York in the mid 90s was fecund with young hip-hop talent, and Nas was smart about who he brought on board. In addition to his mentor Large Professor, there’s also established legends like DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, as well as L.E.S., who wasn’t a known quantity yet but was about to be huge. This was an Avengers of 90s rap producers and at a tender 19 years old, Nas had a gift for getting them all on the same page about his vision for Illmatic.

It starts out with “N.Y. State of Mind,” with Nas fumbling at the mic, muttering “I don’t know how to start this” before launching into his first line: ““Rappers, I monkey-flip ‘em with the funky rhythm I be kicking / Musician, inflicting composition.” OK, maybe he did know how to start this. From there he starts dropping bar after bar, some of them so deeply embedded in the cultural lexicon you could be forgiven for not knowing where they came from. “I never sleep cuz sleep is the cousin of death” was birthed right here, in this song, and Nas tosses it off with the same deliberate, unflappable flow he does everything else. He doesn’t sound gobsmacked by the wordplay coming out of his mouth, but I sure would be. And then he just keeps that energy up for all ten tracks, including all-time displays of East Coast hip-hop’s signature chill braggadocio like “The World Is Yours” and “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.”

Illmatic set the tone for the next era of New York rap, and even Nas’ archenemy Jay Z couldn’t deny its gravity. Even when Nas and Jay were going at each other like cats and dogs at the turn of the millennium, dissing Illmatic was off limits. Jay accused Nas of a “one hot album every ten year average,” which is pretty mean but even he knew he couldn’t accuse Nas of never dropping a hot album. Illmatic is undeniable. Nas may not have had top billing at Lollapalooza but, without looking, how quickly can you name a Foster the People album?

1. He’s also, obviously, a serial cheater — his first wife said he admitted to five affairs, and his current wife had his child while he was still married to his second wife — but that designation is so widespread among our political leadership that it hardly bears mentioning.

2. These people are definitely in your life, whether or not you know it.