In a recent post I discussed how an alienating communication environment helped elect Donald Trump. A number of other factors have been accused of contributing to the disaster, but ultimately it all comes down to one villain. And that’s the voters who marked their Xs for Trump.

That included millions of working class Americans who should have known better. It wasn’t the Democratic Party for ignoring their fears and frustrations. It wasn’t the liberals for not stroking their tender sensibilities. It wasn’t the “elites” for exploiting them or looking down on them.

They marked the ballot. They did this very irresponsible thing. They undermined their own interests. Not all working class voters did, just too many.

Joe Biden was the best president working people have had since Lyndon Johnson, if not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He reconstructed the American economy to bring manufacturing home, to rebuild the country’s decaying infrastructure, and to prepare the nation for a renewable future. And this was an economy that would create hundreds of thousands of good union jobs. He strengthened organized labour while breaking up concentrations of corporate power. He was making America great again for the working class.

Of course Kamala Harris was on the ballot, not Biden, but she was the one who offered the best chance of carrying “Bidenomics” forward, not the other guy.

But even if they didn’t comprehend all this, and Biden’s consistently low popularity rating indicated they didn’t, anyone who even superficially followed American politics knew that Biden was the champion of the working class. He embraced unions, he walked a picket line for God’s sake, the first president to do so. Everyone, even the foreigner writing this blog, knew that.

By comparison, consider Trump’s record. The last time he was president he appointed the notoriously anti-union lawyer Peter Robb as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board and then stacked the Board with anti-union appointees. Robb served as lead counsel for Ronald Reagan during the air traffic controllers’ strike. Reagan infamously fired all the controllers, triggering the collapse of the union movement. Trump would seem to concur with Reagan’s approach, praising his good friend Elon Musk for firing workers who went on strike. He packed the courts with anti-union judges, gutted federal employee unions and supported Right to Work laws. The list goes on and on.

This, too, like Biden’s record, may not have been generally known in detail, but the gist is common knowledge. Yet millions of workers chose Trump.

They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. And Trump reassures them that they are the salt of the Earth, the real Americans, victimized by the “elites” and by Trump’s favourite whipping boys, immigrants, and by the Chinese too for good measure. They got what they wanted.

Blaming others—Democrats, liberals, elites—because they weren’t shown enough respect, or love, or whatever, is treating them like children. No excuses. Sometimes good, salt of the Earth, working class people do stupid things. On November 5th, far too many such Americans did just that. And now all Americans have to live with the consequences of their foolishness.