Trump is pulling $2.2 billion from the presidency, and the political class taught our generation to shrug.
Half the voters in an NPR focus group of Pennsylvanians looked at the news that Donald Trump’s family businesses reported $2.2 billion in revenue last year, mostly from cryptocurrency ventures, and said they were not troubled by it. They were not confused. They were not uninformed. They were, in the words of the moderator Rich Thau, “extremely cynical voters whose expectations for politicians are remarkably low.”
But low expectations are not a personality flaw. They are a curriculum. The political class has been teaching them for forty years.
The math first. My household pays $2,400 a month for two kids in daycare, which works out to $28,800 a year. Trump’s windfall, divided by my daycare bill, is what my family would pay for childcare for 76,388 years. It is the median rent in Philadelphia for 110,000 households for a year. It is 62,857 average student loan balances, paid clean. It is 733,000 expanded Child Tax Credit payments of $3,000 to families with kids — the version that briefly halved child poverty in 2021 and was allowed to expire. It is the IDEA shortfall for special education that the federal government has owed the country’s public schools every year since 1975.
It is not an abstraction. It is a number that could have paid for a specific list of things, and it went into one family’s business instead, while the family ran the country.
Now the transcript.
Todd A., a 62-year-old independent voter, said what the half who shrugged were all saying, in one form or another. “I think that just about every politician is corrupt. So, the fact that he’s a known huckster — I mean, we’ve known that for years about him.” Betsy D., a 48-year-old Republican, said Trump was exhibiting “typical behavior” from a businessman and a politician: “I’m just not troubled by it because I just think it’s typical for politicians to increase their wealth while in office.” Ken J., a 44-year-old Republican, said it didn’t seem to him that Trump’s money was made in an “illegal way.” “He’s a businessman,” Ken said. “He openly admitted it.”
And then there were the other six. Bhavana G., a 54-year-old independent, looked at the same number and saw “abuse of power.” Margaret M., a 58-year-old independent, worried that whoever Trump was doing business with would have “his ear a little bit more.” These are voters who have not yet accepted the premise that all politicians are the same, who still believe the difference between a president governing and a president looting is a distinction worth making.
The divide in the focus group is not the divide the headlines will draw. It is not informed versus uninformed. It is not Republican versus Democrat. It is the divide between voters who still believe the system can be held accountable and voters who have been burned so many times that they have decided not to risk caring again.
The voters who shrugged are doing what Taylor Swift named on TTPD — performing normalcy while something inside has given out. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is the song for what Betsy D. and Todd A. are doing when they say “typical” and “we’ve known that for years.” They are showing up. They are reading the news. They are answering questions for an NPR focus group on a Tuesday. And they are performing a shrug, because the cost of performing the alternative — caring about a system that has failed them, again, in a way that was specifically designed to be unsurprising — is a cost they have decided not to pay.
But here is what the political class has been teaching that voter, and what it has been teaching me, and what it has been teaching the mothers I know in Philadelphia. The teaching is the truce. The teaching is: all politicians are corrupt, so stop expecting anything different, and you will not be disappointed. The teaching is what got us here. The teaching is what made Betsy D.’s “typical” feel like weather. The teaching is what made Todd A.’s “we’ve known that for years” feel like a final verdict instead of an opening indictment.
The teaching is the betrayal. Not Trump being corrupt — Trump being corrupt has been the public story for forty years. The betrayal is that both parties taught us the truce and now expect us to keep it while one of them literally loots the office. The Republican Party told the Pennsylvanians in the focus group to shrug. The Democratic Party told them to be outraged, and the Democratic Party’s version of outrage produced no accountability, no prosecution, no Child Tax Credit that lasted, no paid leave, no universal childcare, no IDEA full funding — none of the things that would have given those voters something to be outraged about that wasn’t another round of performative grief. We were taught to be cynical about politics by the very system that was supposed to be the alternative to cynicism, and when the cynicism arrived, that system had nothing to say back.
The voters in the focus group who are still troubled — the Bhavanas and the Margarets — are doing what folklore called, in another song, “this is me trying.” They are still trying. They still believe the difference between a president governing and a president looting is a distinction worth defending. They are the voters any honest political project has to reach first, because they have not yet stopped hoping, and they will not stop hoping if the hoping is met with something that is not another betrayal.
The voters who have stopped being troubled are not stupid. They are protecting themselves. They have made a calculation. The calculation is: I cannot afford to care about this, because caring costs me something I do not have, and the system has not given me evidence that the caring will be met. That calculation is the truce working as designed.
The mothers I know in Philadelphia are running that calculation every month, in a different form. I run it. The question is not whether the daycare is worth the money. The question is whether the email from the pediatrician’s billing office is worth opening, and whether the school-tax notice is worth reading, and whether the student-loan letter is worth a response, and whether the effort of caring about the political system that produced all those bills is going to be met with something that is not another round of being told that this is just how it is. The voters in the focus group are running the same calculation about the $2.2 billion. The shrug is the answer.
The task is not to shame the shruggers. The task is to give them something to care about that will not betray them. Name the $2.2 billion. Name the business entanglements. Prosecute the corruption. Refuse the bipartisan frame that lets “all politicians are corrupt” stand as a final verdict rather than as the opening indictment of a system that was designed to produce exactly this result.
Until then, the cynicism is exactly the response the system built the cynicism to produce, and the children asleep upstairs are the ones who will inherit both the bills and the truce.