Trump Voters Weren't Wrong.

And the left needs to grapple with it.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

I just returned from a Trust in Media Cooperative meeting where journalists and national security experts landed on a conclusion that was, in context, surprising and (to me) deeply heartening. Trust, they said, whether in media, journalism, academia, or national security institutions, needs to be earned. Not demanded.

That stuck with me, because it cuts to the heart of something I’ve been sitting with for a long time: the progressive refusal to take seriously the grievances that fuel Trumpism is one of the primary reasons Trumpism keeps winning.

In some sense, the extremes of QAnon and the stolen election narrative gave the left permission to dismiss the entire MAGA movement as delusion. If the most visible claims were false, the thinking went, then all of it was false: the resentment, the distrust, the sense that the system grinds ordinary people down while protecting everyone at the top. Misinformation. Bigotry. Ignorance.

But that was a catastrophic analytical error.

Because underneath the conspiracism, there is a set of claims that millions of Americans recognize from their own lives.

When people say the system is rigged, they’re not wrong.
When they say the government doesn’t work for them, they’re not wrong about that either.
When they say elites and institutions have lost touch with ordinary people’s lives, they are, in many cases, describing something real.

Trump’s version of what’s wrong is almost entirely inaccurate. But the feeling that something about the American system is deeply broken isn’t a feeling. It’s not misinformation. It’s a fact. And until the left stops treating it as a deplorable delusion, they will keep losing the people whose lives confirm it every single day.

There Is a Deep State (Kind Of).

We can start with the so-called Deep State. It’s true that there’s no secret cabal of government operatives conspiring to undermine the will of the people. But there is something that functions, for millions of Americans, in almost exactly the way the “deep state” conspiracy describes: a vast, tangled, largely invisible web of regulations, policies, and institutional incentives that makes it nearly impossible for ordinary people to do reasonable things with their own lives.

In my academic work, I call this “structural hobbling.” It’s what happens when well-intentioned or even neutral government policies interact with each other in ways that nobody designed and nobody controls, trapping people who are pursuing entirely reasonable goals. It’s not malicious. It’s not a conspiracy. But the effects on people’s lives are just as real as if it were. A few examples:

Welfare cliffs that punish people for earning more money. A single mother qualifying for SNAP, Medicaid, childcare subsidies, and housing assistance can face an effective marginal tax rate above 80% if she gets a raise, because each program’s phase-out was designed by a different agency using different eligibility rules. In Kentucky, a $4,000 income increase can trigger $10,000 in lost benefits. In Colorado, 34% of welfare recipients make work decisions specifically to avoid the cliff, some turning down up to 12 hours of extra work per week.

Criminal justice fines and fees that trap people in poverty spirals. A traffic ticket becomes court fees, becomes a suspended license, becomes driving-on-suspended charges, becomes a criminal record, becomes job loss. Nationally, an estimated 11 million people have a suspended driver’s license simply because they cannot afford to pay off their fines and fees -- and in more than half of U.S. states, that suspension is automatic. (Radley Balko’s work in this area is legendary).

Zoning and housing regulations that make affordable housing nearly impossible to build. In Buffalo, after eliminating parking minimums, researchers found 68% of new homes permitted since the reform would have been illegal under the previous zoning code. That’s not a marginal difference. That’s most of the housing supply, blocked by a single regulatory requirement. (Check out Abi Olivera’s excellent Substack Positive Sum for great articles in this space.)

Immigration laws so bureaucratically dense that following the rules is not a realistic option for most people. Indian nationals applying for employment-based green cards face a wait of over 130 years. Siblings of U.S. citizens from Mexico are looking at 20 or more years. People trying to do this legally get trapped in legal limbo for generations.

Qualified immunity, a judicially invented doctrine with no statutory basis that makes it nearly impossible to hold government officials accountable for constitutional violations. No federal statute created it; the Supreme Court did. But the result has been brutal: victims of government misconduct can’t get into court unless they can find a previous case with nearly identical facts, a catch-22 that prevents new precedent from ever being established. A police officer who shot a 10 year old child while trying to shoot the family’s non-threatening dog (while investigating a completely unrelated crime) faced no legal repercussions. Many many more examples exist.

I’ve written about most of this before, in various posts over the years.

And for a lot of people, this is what a “deep state” actually looks like. Not a conspiracy, but a web of often unrelated regulations, judicial decisions, and legislation that strangles agency and privileges power. Nobody designed it, nobody controls it, and nobody is responsible for it. But it’s throttling people’s ability to start businesses, get healthcare, navigate immigration, access education, and plan for their futures. And the people it harms most are the people who are already vulnerable.

When Trump voters say the system is rigged, this is what they’re feeling. They may not be able to name it. Trump certainly can’t diagnose it. But they’re not making it up.

Trump voters aren’t wrong when they say the system is rigged, just not for the reasons Trump claims.

Our Elections Are Broken, Not Stolen.

The same pattern holds for the “stolen election” narrative. No, the 2020 election was not stolen. But our electoral system is, in fact, profoundly broken, again, just not in the way Trump claims.

Our primary system requires candidates to appeal to the most extreme and active parts of the electorate. The structural incentives actively encourage polarized and tribal thinking. The candidates who survive primaries are increasingly selected for their ability to terrify their base rather than govern effectively — in part because, as research shows, legislators believe primary voters are far more likely to punish them for compromising than general election voters are. While there’s interesting research suggesting that primary voters are not actually more ideologically extreme than general election voters, candidates believe they are and that perception fuels partisan and polarized candidate behaviors.

Add gerrymandering, which allows politicians to choose their voters rather than the other way around. And after the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, federal courts can no longer police it. After the 2020 census, only 13% of newly drawn congressional districts were considered competitive.

Add the way voter ignorance interacts with media incentives to spread negativity and fear: one study found that each additional negative word in a news headline increases click-through rates by 2.3%, and a cross-national study in PNAS confirmed that humans across 17 countries and 6 continents are more physiologically activated by negative news than positive news. The result is a feedback loop where the most frightened voters are the most likely to vote and the most frightening politicians are the most likely to win.

When voters feel like elections don’t matter, it’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because the structural incentives of our current system do not reward the kind of governance that would make their lives better. They feel like their votes don’t count because, in profound and real ways, they don’t. “The game is rigged” describes something real. Trump gives them a story about stolen ballots and corrupt officials. The truth is both less dramatic and more damning: the system itself is structurally incapable of producing responsive governance.

Trump voters aren’t wrong to not trust our elections, just not for the reasons Trump claims.

Elites Do Live By a Different Set of Rules (Sadly).

Related to the Deep State is the claim at the heart of populism: that elites operate under a different system than the rest of us. Populists get elite immunity right, even when they get the details wrong: the system genuinely does protect powerful people in ways it doesn’t protect ordinary ones. This isn’t paranoia. It’s documented.

Jeffrey Epstein is the example that won’t go away, because it shouldn’t. A man with connections to politicians, royalty, celebrities, and financiers across both parties trafficked children for years. He was arrested in 2006. Federal prosecutors had identified more than 30 victims and drafted a 60-count indictment — which was set aside. Instead, Epstein got a non-prosecution agreement that a former federal prosecutor called “completely unprecedented” and “completely indefensible.” He served 13 months in a county jail with work release privileges that allowed him to spend up to 16 hours a day outside the facility, and continued his life largely intact while his victims received almost nothing. The deal also granted immunity to unnamed co-conspirators. The prosecutor who negotiated it, Alexander Acosta, later served as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration and resigned in July 2019 when Epstein’s arrest renewed scrutiny of the deal.

When Epstein was arrested again in 2019 and died in federal custody under circumstances the DOJ Inspector General attributed to a “combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures” — guards falsifying logs, cameras not recording, a required cellmate never assigned — the official story asked us to trust the very institutions that had already failed his victims twice. Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison, serving 20 years. The Justice Department has said no new prosecutions are expected.

I want to be clear. There is no evidence of a coordinated cover-up in the sense of shadowy elites conspiring in a room somewhere. The DOJ’s own review found no evidence that Acosta’s decision was based on corruption or on Epstein’s wealth, status, or associations. What there is evidence of is something that functions identically to a cover-up from the perspective of the victims: a set of institutional incentives that protected a powerful man’s network because reporting on it and prosecuting it fully would have been expensive, politically complicated, and damaging to a lot of important people. Nobody had to coordinate. The system just worked the way it works for powerful people.

That is structural hobbling in reverse. Most of the time, the web traps ordinary people trying to do ordinary things. Here, the web protected a predator and his network. One critical facet of various kinds of structural hobbling is that the rich can buy themselves out of the effects. Not with direct bribes, but with the realities of money and power: better lawyers, more friction for journalists, police, and prosecutors, more people with incentives not to dig in because they have things to lose. It’s a similar mechanism, just pointing in a different direction. And the people who noticed, who said “this is not justice. This is not equal protection. This is a system that plays by different rules for different people,” were not wrong. They were just handed a conspiracy theory instead of an analysis.

Trump voters aren’t wrong when they say elites live by a different set of rules than the rest of us. They’re just not getting an honest account of why.

Medicine Has Always Been Political.

Nowhere is the failure of the left more obvious (and more infuriating, as someone who does work in health policy) than in medicine. Throughout the pandemic, I watched yard signs from progressive neighbors blaring “I believe in science” as though Trump supporters were scientifically illiterate, while the people holding those signs ignored the fundamental truth that science thrives on contestation. The scientific method is not about a final truth called Science. It’s about challenging narratives to see if they hold.

More to the point. MAHA taps into something real: the American healthcare system was not designed to keep people healthy. Paul Starr documented this in exhaustive detail in The Social Transformation of American Medicine. The system we have was built by the medical profession to protect the medical profession. Physicians in the early 20th century spent decades consolidating authority: defeating alternative health systems, capturing state licensing boards, shaping employer-based insurance structures specifically to ensure that money flowed through doctors rather than around them. The patient was never really the client. The patient was the revenue source.

That design logic is still running. The U.S. spends nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare as comparable wealthy nations and has the lowest life expectancy among them, currently 78.4 years, against a peer-country average of 82.5. Obesity, diabetes, and metabolic disease are at historic highs. The response from mainstream medicine has largely been to prescribe medications that manage symptoms and send patients home. The idea that food, environment, and lifestyle are primary drivers of this crisis — which is not a fringe position, it’s well-supported in the literature — has been systematically underprioritized because there’s no billing code for “eat less processed food.”

Then there’s women’s health, which the system treated as a subspecialty of men’s health for most of its existence. The FDA formally excluded women of childbearing age from early-phase clinical trials from 1977 until 1993, and women weren’t required to be included in NIH-funded research until Congress mandated it that year. Heart disease presents differently in women. Drug metabolism differs by sex. Autoimmune diseases, which affect women at dramatically higher rates, were chronically underfunded. Endometriosis, which affects roughly one in ten women, went undiagnosed for an average of seven years — because women’s pain was systematically underestimated and undertreated. Women who pushed back on inadequate diagnoses were (and still are) labeled difficult, anxious, or drug-seeking. This is not ancient history. It’s ongoing. Just ask any exhausted middle aged woman about her most recent experiences with the medical establishment. I can guarantee most aren’t great or even remotely helpful.

The pandemic made these problems both worse and more visible. The official guidance was frequently confusing, inconsistent, and handed down with an authority that did not match the underlying uncertainty. Concerns about school closures were dismissed as anti-science. Long COVID, which affects women at roughly twice the rate it affects men, was initially treated with profound skepticism. People with genuine and reasonable questions about specific interventions and tradeoffs were lumped together with flat-earthers in ways that made public communication worse and trust harder to rebuild. The scientists were often right about the core things. But the communication was often arrogant, often denied the very contestation that’s at the heart of medical progress, and dismissed people’s real experiences. The people who noticed were not wrong to notice.

MAHA is offering bad medicine for a real diagnosis. The diagnosis — that American medical institutions have been paternalistic, dismissive of patient experience, financially captured, and systematically worse at treating women and economically vulnerable people — is not wrong. Starr showed us the blueprint. The system was built that way on purpose. The answer is not to abandon evidence-based medicine. The answer is to build medical institutions that actually deserve the trust they’re demanding, which means taking seriously the structural failures that left millions of people feeling like the system wasn’t built for them. Because for a lot of them, it wasn’t.

Trump voters aren’t wrong to distrust the medical establishment, but their skepticism is being weaponized by people who don’t care about their wellbeing either.

Trust Needs to Be Earned.

I could honestly keep going.

Academia: built on the backs of trillions of dollars of student debt and a broken incentive structure that keeps elites elite.

Journalism: protecting powerful narratives at the expense of truth.

Nonprofits: absorbing billions in donor dollars to sustain the organizations themselves, while the problems they exist to solve (often) get worse.

Finance: socializing losses when the bets go wrong, privatizing gains when they don’t. (The 2008 bailouts are still sitting there.)

Tech: harvesting personal data at industrial scale, monetizing attention and addiction, then funding congressional campaigns to make sure nobody regulates it.

The legal profession: gatekeeping justice behind hourly rates that only corporations and wealthy individuals can afford, while public defenders handle 500 cases a year.

Licensing and credentialing: ostensibly protecting the public, actually protecting incumbents from competition -- in everything from hair braiding to interior design to medical specialties.

The progressive instinct when institutions come under attack is to defend them. And there’s a lot in the American story worth defending. Even with all the failures above. But that defensive crouch prevents the left from acknowledging a basic truth: many of these institutions have become bloated, self-serving, unresponsive to the communities they claim to serve, and increasingly captured by internal incentive structures that have little to do with their stated missions.

Americans don’t trust elite institutions because they haven’t deserved to be trusted. In a long time.

Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke and his excellent Symbolic Capitalism Substack documents this with uncomfortable precision. The “symbolic capitalists” who run education, media, and nonprofits are (maybe) sincerely committed to equality in principle. But the institutions they lead have developed incentive structures that reward performative commitment to social justice while actively perpetuating the inequalities they decry. The language of justice becomes a tool for elite status competition, and the people who are supposed to benefit see little material change. This isn’t simple hypocrisy. It’s structural hobbling applied to institutions themselves: the same pattern of systems producing perverse outcomes, operating at the level of organizational culture rather than regulatory code.

The progressive assumption that we just need “the right people in charge” fundamentally misunderstands this problem. You can put the most brilliant, well-intentioned people in the world into a system with bad incentive structures and they will produce bad outcomes. That’s not a moral failing. That’s how systems work. And when the people inside those systems believe most fervently that they’re on the right side of history, the blindness becomes self-reinforcing.

This is exactly where the left’s blind spot becomes Trump’s best weapon. When progressives defend the executive overreach of Wilson, FDR, and Obama on the grounds that “the right person should have the ability to make these decisions,” they’re making two catastrophic errors. First, they’re building tools of power that their political opponents will eventually wield, as we are now seeing in spectacular fashion. Second, they’re relying on a theory of history that says the other side will eventually disappear.

It won’t. Political pluralism will always be with us. Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians aren’t going to be absorbed by some Historical force pushing toward inevitability. That’s not pessimism. It’s a statement about the irreducible pluralism of human nature. When the left builds governing structures that assume that progressives are permanently in charge and that don’t work for the people they claim to be helping, they’re not building resilient institutions. They’re building weapons that will be turned against them.

So What Do We Do?

If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know I’m not going to pretend any of this is simple. It’s not.

The starting point for a better future is an honest reckoning with the fact that the grievances fueling Trumpism are rooted in real structural failures, even though Trump’s diagnoses and solutions are almost uniformly terrible.

The “deep state” is real if you understand it as structural hobbling rather than conspiracy.

Electoral brokenness is real if you understand it as perverse institutional incentives rather than stolen ballots.

Elite immunity is real if you understand it as a system that bends toward power rather than justice.

Medical arrogance and self-protection is real if you look at the actual record.

Institutional failure is real if you understand it as the natural entropy of complex systems rather than the work of shadowy elites.

Until the left takes these truths seriously, they will keep ceding the narrative to people who offer worse explanations and far worse solutions. And the populist impulse to “hit back” at a system that doesn’t work will keep finding its outlet in strongmen who promise to burn it all down.

What we need instead are people willing to do the boring, complicated, unglamorous work of reforming the systems that actually hobble people’s lives. That means taking regulatory reform seriously, not as a right-wing talking point but as a justice issue. It means acknowledging that our electoral system’s incentive structures actively undermine responsive governance and pursuing reforms like open primaries, ranked-choice voting, or redistricting commissions. It means building medical institutions that listen to patients, including women who have been dismissed for decades. It means that institutions, including the ones I work in, need to earn the trust they’re asking for rather than just demanding it.

And it means building cross-partisan coalitions to address the most critical failures. Principled conservatives and libertarians have been saying some version of this for decades. They have real expertise in understanding how government activity itself can cause harm. The fact that MAGA has completely abandoned principled conservatism doesn’t mean those insights were wrong. It means we’ve lost the people who used to make those arguments in good faith, which makes it even more urgent that the rest of us pick up that work.

But until we have an honest reckoning with the real failures that populism feeds on, we will not be able to build the resilient systems we need to fight back against the authoritarianism we’re seeing right now. The left’s refusal to look at these problems clearly isn’t just an intellectual failure. It’s a strategic one. And the people who pay for it are the ones who are least able to afford it.

Your Turn

The grievances rooted in failing institutions are not going away. Neither is the political force they're generating. The question isn't whether these systems are broken. It's whether the people who care about democratic institutions are going to take that seriously before the next election hands power to someone who will use real problems as cover for fake solutions. I’d love to hear from you all about where you see these failures in real time. Tell me where you've hit the wall. Tell me what reform you'd actually fight for. And if you know someone who still thinks MAGA is all just misinformation and resentment — send this to them. I’d love to hear the counterargument. I wish there was one.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments! And if you like what you read, please (as always) subscribe and share (and share again).