‘Trump won the “f*** it” vote’

For millions of Americans, 2024 was the final straw. After nearly a decade of being told by Democrats that men can become women, that all white people are ‘privileged’ and that questioning these dogmas is tantamount to fascism, voters had finally had enough. If nothing else, the re-election of Donald Trump earlier this month was a sign that Americans are sick and tired of being preached at. A vote for Trump, for many, was a vote against a Democratic establishment that they had grown to loathe – and clearly loathed them.

That was certainly what drove Bridget Phetasy, a long-time liberal and loyal Democrat, to reluctantly vote for Trump. Bridget returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss why so many Americans like her turned their backs on their old party.

Brendan O’Neill: You explained before the election that you were very reluctantly voting for Trump. What drove you to that position?

Bridget Phetasy: It was death by a million cuts. I had been living in California, but I moved my family away from a left-dominated state and its insane policies around gender and teachers being encouraged to keep secrets from parents. It got to a situation where my husband was worried he was going to lose his licence as a therapist if he didn’t affirm the gender of whoever came to see him.

When it came down to it, I decided I wanted to be part of the popular vote. It was a protest vote. I thought there had been enough of this nonsense. I was tired of being told, for example, that the only issue I should care about as a woman was abortion, when the Democrats couldn’t even define what a woman is.

It just wore a lot of people out. You can’t be the boy who cried Hitler for eight years. Now you have MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who framed the election as Harris vs Hitler, going down to Mar-a-Lago and kissing Trump’s ring because their ratings have collapsed. You can’t help but think, ‘You guys didn’t really believe any of this’.

I remember talking to my friend and saying: ‘I’m going to vote for Trump because fuck it.’ My friend said that should have been his campaign message. Vote for Trump because fuck it. Vote for Trump because fuck that.

It was really one thing after another. The Democrats gaslit us about Biden’s mental fitness and basically told us he was doing backflips whenever you couldn’t see him. They gaslit us about the ‘mostly peaceful’ Black Lives Matter protests, when in fact dozens of people were killed and billions of dollars in damage was caused. We were gaslit about the cost of groceries. When it came to basic things like the difference between a man and a woman, or when an elderly person is in decline, we were told not to believe our lying eyes. My vote was very much against that. It was a true protest vote.

O’Neill: What did you make of how the Democrats tried to appeal to men, and what do you think that told us about them as a party?

Phetasy: In one of my videos I made fun of their hilariously cringey ‘Man Enough’ campaign video. The Democrats realised too late that they had Bud Light-ed their brand. They lost the normies – normie men, in particular.

People have been hearing for the past 10 years now that America is horrible, the West is horrible. White men, especially, are seen as inherently evil. How is it a shock that the Democrats lost these voters, after years of telling them they’re all irredeemable pieces of shit?

It just became such a parody. They’ve lost such touch with reality that they thought Tim Walz was going to be the one to restore masculinity to the Democrats. Whose idea was that?

O’Neill: Did Trump’s willingness to bypass the mainstream media help connect with those forgotten voters in a way that the Democrats failed to do?

Phetasy: There’s a joke that Joe Rogan is Oprah for dudes. His podcast is a little bit self-helpy. But he has millions of listeners, and a lot of those are working-class men. I was listening to Rogan when I was working on farms and waiting tables. It was the only place, during those first Trump years, where you could hear people talking the same way we spoke at work. I think he really held the line for people just to be able to talk like normies.

Trump going on Rogan was genius. If you’re trying to get to the independent voter, the person like me who doesn’t watch CNN or MSNBC, you need to go on the podcasts. That was a no brainer. Appearing on Rogan especially is mentally exhausting, so it was impressive that Trump didn’t crumble. If you know what it takes, you can understand why Kamala Harris didn’t want to do it.

A lot of Democrats didn’t show up and vote, because Harris just didn’t give them the opportunity to get to know her. Trump was at least willing to put himself out there. There was his hilarious video with Theo Von, where Theo talked about his coke addiction. It went viral, and he stole a news cycle that the Democrats should have had in the bag. They were having their big Democratic National Convention, and here was Trump going viral thanks to a silly interaction. The mainstream media demean the podcasters and the YouTubers, but they have real power.

Bridget Phetasy was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: