The Challenge for Liberals Is to Convince Americans to Take Governing Institutions Seriously: A Post-Election Analysis with Walter Olson
Inflation will reverse but the damage of strongman rule might not
Last week, Aaron Ross Powell sat down with
, senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, to discuss the 2024 election, alternative electoral models like ranked-choice voting, and where liberals go from here. The following Q&A has been adapted from their conversation on Aaron’s ReImagining Liberty podcast.
Aaron Ross Powell: Welcome, Walter. You, like me, like many of us, had thoughts and expectations leading up to Election Day ... and then Election Day happened. What did you think was going to happen that didn’t end up happening? What did you get wrong?
Walter Olson: Well, quite a bit.
I thought Kamala Harris was going to win. And I thought that the results would match the polls. So I was expecting Congress to split. If you had revealed to me one card from the hand, and it was that Trump was going to win, I would not have predicted that he also would carry both houses of Congress. After all, he has not had strong coattails in the past, but this time it looks as if he did. Nor would I have predicted that the national shift in Trump’s support would be so uniform across regions. I stay in touch with New York enough to realize that there have been rightward trends there, but this was a broad, nationwide shift—one that can’t be chalked up to local governance matters in any one place being particularly bad.
So I was left humbled by the fact that voters’ thinking turned out to be very different from what I thought it would be.
Powell: And we should note that a major narrative in the days immediately following the election was that Harris was done-in by depressed turnout—the idea that a significant portion of the Biden coalition had just stayed home on Election Day. But our friend
and others kept stressing the need to wait until the numbers are in—since, for example, California takes an unreasonably long amount of time to count its ballots—and it turns out that the story of the election wasn’t turnout. This election legitimately was a shift to the right.But what caused that shift? Specifically, how much of that shift, of voters who went for Biden in 2020 but Trump in 2024, was powered by voters being won over by Trump’s 2024 campaign versus voters remembering his prior time in office positively? It tells us something important if the shift was because former Biden voters were persuaded by the Madison Square Garden rally, the mass deportation scheme, and the rest of Trump’s extreme rhetoric during the campaign or whether they were effectively voting for a return to a time they look back on more fondly than they do the last four years. Was the rightward shift produced by voters wanting to return to a time when food was more affordable and people felt more financially stable or was it about the particular rhetoric and promises of the 2024 campaign?
Olson: Setting aside my spotty prediction record, and the fact that the Trump voters that I’m exposed to in my very purple area of Maryland are not nationally typical, one rationale that I came across among voters who switched allegiances this election was that they filtered out what Trump would say on a daily basis, his inflammatory rhetoric and antics, and attributed all of that to him being a showman and playing to his audience, and they went for him based on what they understood to be his actual results in office.
Of course, their perceptions of his actual results are themselves filtered through the rosy haze of memory. But that memory is of an economy that was doing great. When it comes to the hardest challenge he faced during his final year in office, Covid, he is remembered by these people as trying his best and doing about as well as anyone could have done under the circumstances. They remember that he cut taxes—that he would often talk about growth and making sure that America wouldn’t be taken advantage of. They remember a vague feeling that he was in favor of free speech or against cancellations or something. Those of us who did a lot to try to dispel this stuff, to explain why it’s just not an accurate recounting of his time in office ... we just didn’t get through to them.
On the Democratic side, Harris never did shake the idea that she was going to deliver a second Biden administration. That resonated with the voters I spoke to, who worried that a Harris administration would be a continuation of a presidency they did not have a lot of faith in. We know that inflation was a topline concern for many voters. But there were also these other, subtler aspects of the election that deserve consideration too. Take the disarray of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Peace, as a rationale for voting for Trump, came up fairly often in the voters I heard from. Trump’s voters often credit him with four years of peace in a way that they don’t credit Biden. And it’s interesting to me to see a Republican-leaning electorate that is voting Republican for reasons of peace. That’s not the old Republican electorate that I grew up knowing.
Powell: You mentioned that Trump’s voters remember his presidency as having delivered a good economy, but of course the economy was good for a part of his tenure, not for the whole of it. His first two years maintained the upward trend that we saw in President Obama’s final year in office, but the Trump economy crashed when Covid hit. That latter part seems to get left out of some voters’ recollections.
At the same time, the Biden administration has seen a pretty good economy in terms of the numbers, especially in light of the fact that he started his presidency amidst a world-halting pandemic. Under his tenure, inflation went up but has meaningfully come down, growth is up, unemployment is down. Many indicators suggest that this is a successful economy and that it’s arguably more successful than Trump’s.
And yet we got a rightward shift—not in spite of but because of economic considerations.
Does this mean that this was an election, that this was an electorate, comprised of low information voters? I always remind people that if you are the kind of person who is reading this conversation or who is on social media talking about politics, you are particularly weird in your degree of knowledge and engagement. People this involved wildly overestimate how much the typical voter knows and how much they pay attention. On Google on the day of the election, there was a huge spike in searches in which people were asking whether Biden had dropped out. Was this low information problem widespread enough to be a major factor in this election? Do we have a low information electorate? How much of a role did these voters play?
Olson: Well, let me back up and discuss a factor that may help explain some of this, although it doesn’t explain all of it: post-Covid, the governing parties in virtually all of the world’s democracies faced a surge of voter anger—left-of-center governments got thrown out in favor of right-wing challengers and right-wing regimes got thrown out in favor of left-of-center challengers. The U.S. happened to change administrations during the first year of Covid’s impact. Although it’s not exactly clear to what extent the government’s Covid response factored into Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020—after all, it’s possible that Covid was simply too new of a phenomenon to definitively function as a referendum—voters chose to shake things up and entrust the future of our Covid response to the challenger, not to the incumbent. And now, at least partly based on a factor that derives from our pandemic response—inflation—voters have replaced the governing party with the challenger yet again. At this point in our post-Covid era, it’s broadly unclear, in voters’ minds, which president or party is more associated with the fullness of the American Covid response. Trump is more associated with the lockdowns and the vaccines; Biden with the economic fallout. But what’s clearer is that Covid and the pandemic have destabilized our politics to the point where we have had two one-term presidencies in a row.
“As one who was monitoring and championing ‘democracy issues’—issues of rule of law and constitutional adherence—the people in the middle who were undecided didn’t treat those as the deciding factor. So that’s grounds for possible deep concern if you believe that those issues are ones that will still be important to America long after the cycles of tariffs have been forgotten. Damage to the institutions through which we are supposed to govern ourselves, the realization of a strongman-led government, could last far, far longer than that.” — Walter Olson
But I want to point out something that perhaps has been a raw deal for the Biden administration. Research shows that the U.S.’s economic recovery has been stronger than the recoveries in other democracies in Europe that have also shaken things up politically. Even though Covid behaved similarly throughout the world, we have objectively done better in economic recovery than most other advanced democracies. But if the U.S. has done—and is doing—economically better than comparable democracies, why didn’t Biden and the Democratic Party get credit for that? This is where your low information thesis comes in: I do think there’s a lot of people, a lot of voters, who have not grasped the economics in detail. Recall how popular price controls were in the days of Richard Nixon all the while the economic facts about what the real sources of high prices were, and how disastrous price controls are, just would not break through to the public.
The Democrats actually had internal disagreements about how to politically manage the inflation concerns. Some economists wanted Democrats in office and Democrats running for office to be realistic and explain that some degree of inflation was necessary in order to flood the economy with substitute wages and other steps meant to head off recession, and to stress that the Democratic economic response was a risk worth taking and the country got moderately better results out of it than if Trump would have been managing things. That didn’t seem like a powerful enough campaign message. They didn’t want to run on that. They wanted to run on making a sharp distinction between the Democratic and the Trumpian approach to the post-Covid economy. But here’s the problem with emphasizing how vast the differences are between the two parties on the economy: when inflation happened, voters were encouraged, by Democrats’ own messaging, to imagine that it might not have happened under Trump. If, instead, the public got the sense that inflation would have happened no matter what, it might have cut into the rationale for voting for Trump. Democrats effectively maximized people’s opportunity to blame them for the bulge of inflation.
I still wonder why professional political messaging can’t seem to train people to better understand economic distinctions like the price level versus the inflation rate. You and I have got an economics background, we learned all this stuff and have never lost it—but for a lot of voters, the way that they perceive the fact that prices continue to go up, even if at a very low rate, ends up having a political salience that a basic awareness of economics would have disabused them of.
Powell: And it’s not just that prices continue to go up but at a slower rate—for a lot of people, the concern seems to be that they never went back down. They remember food prices being lower and don’t know why they haven’t returned. In Denver where I live, restaurants saw something like 25% inflation for a short while, and I can remember when restaurant prices were a lot lower and taking a family of five out was a lot easier. I think that for a lot of people, inflation going away meant prices returning to what they remember.
Olson: Part of it also is that most of the electorate, aside from the oldest couple of quintiles, lacks a memory of the inflation that peaked under Jimmy Carter and was then ironed out under Ronald Reagan. And if you don’t remember that, if those differences between a rate of 10% or more and a rate of two or three are not fresh in memory, our current progress on inflation can’t be appreciated as easily.
Powell: Sticking with the election but shifting gears a bit, I remember a lot of talk in the run up to November 5 about how there was going to be election malfeasance. Of course, a lot of that was coming from Trump and his followers as preparation for a narrative in case it was close or he lost. But some of it was coming from Democrats who were warning that red state governments had had four years to manipulate the system to either create conditions favorable to Trump or to outright ensure he would win. Did we see any of that? How did this election fare on the integrity question?
Olson: We’ve arrived at the issue I’ve focused on the most in recent years. The 2024 election was remarkably honest with very few integrity problems—just like the 2020 election, which was also remarkably honest with very few integrity problems. The difference was that in 2020, you had Donald Trump personally leading a massive campaign of falsification in order to get people to distrust what had been a trustworthy process. And this time you didn’t.
Some of the theories this time around were colorful but inconsequential. Take the one about Elon Musk’s Starlink manipulating votes. Starlink was used by a few jurisdictions to transmit the data for their polling books. If you know elections, polling books have nothing to do with tabulation of the vote. They’re simply a continually updated directory—like a phone book—of who the voters are that you can let in. So even if you somehow hacked them through Starlink, you could not change the outcome of anyone’s votes. You might be able to cause problems of looking someone up when they weren’t in the directory, but people would quickly figure out that there was a problem in the database. So, no, there was no such hacking.
Then there’s the complaints about how slow West Coast states are at counting votes. I mean, I could go on about how they should report votes faster—but that’s all we can say. There’s no conspiracy.
The two elections, 2020 and 2024, largely involved the same personnel under the same laws, using the same procedures, and they produced two different outcomes. The most economical way of explaining that is that some voters changed their mind, not that a serious amount of massive illegality appeared or disappeared between the years.
Powell: On Election Day, I remember that there were bomb threats called in to some polling places. There was some talk that those might have been related to Russian operations. But then nothing seemed to come of it.
Olson: Those threats can be hard to pin down because they can come from Russian domains on the internet, but may not even involve Russian individuals, let alone the Russian state. Perhaps at some point we’ll learn more. But the threats we heard about were aimed at polling places in swing states and might have been part of a scheme to lay the groundwork for some further election fraud narrative. But the votes weren’t close enough, so that never materialized.
There are so many ways in which these contests are a tribute to the largely volunteer workforce that makes American elections happen. Some of these workers have been put through such vicious treatment—MAGA “Stop the Steal” types routinely harassed them. And yet they had a public job to do. They are by and large very idealistic, and they did not allow the threats against them to stop them from helping to keep our democracy running.
Thankfully, there wasn’t much violence. There were a few fire bombings of drop boxes for ballots in the Pacific Northwest, probably done by one person who had some specialized equipment that ordinary arsonists would not have and was able to do more damage than expected. But overall, not much damage. I believe he incinerated 100 votes—but they were able to get word out in time so that the voters who dropped off their votes at those particular boxes could come in and make sure that their vote was counted.
The really dumb theories came in from the usual suspects: the Tucker Carlsons of the world. When California had not yet counted all of its votes, and Harris temporarily had eight million fewer votes than Biden in 2020, Carlson used that to suggest that Biden’s 2020 totals had eight million fraudulent votes due to ballot stuffing. He must have the lowest imaginable opinion of his own listeners to spin such easily debunkable theories.
Powell: Another aspect of this election that was interesting and ties into your work is that alternative voting methods performed pretty poorly. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) survived in Alaska but it did not do well overall. What’s up with that? The idea that we should implement voting models that will reduce partisanship or produce results that are more representative of the will of the people is a compelling one. So why did the voters sour on these ideas?
Olson: Well, I got my humility in double-serving because this had been a big issue for me, and the night ended up going disastrously for the Alaska model, which people describe as ranked-choice voting but that’s only a part of it. The main thing that the Alaska model does is abolish party primaries in favor of one big primary for everyone. Everyone can run in it and everyone can vote in the same primary. The idea motivating it is that a lot of the bad candidates we have in races around the country, and a lot of our polarization, is an artifact of America’s unusual party primary system. In order to get on the general election ballot, the candidates have to go through a bottleneck, and subject themselves to a gauntlet of each party’s base. A lot of the candidates get weeded out at that point for not having flattered and wheedled the base enough.
Alaska adopted it in part because Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is nominally Republican but in practice represents just about exactly the 50th percentile—ideologically a very, very moderate Republican who votes with Democrats on quite a lot of things—had no particular path other than creating her own party or being a write-in candidate to ever get reelected because she could never get through a Republican primary. That’s what Republican primaries are like in almost every state. This affects Democrats, too, as they’ve also seen many fairly respected, and respectable, figures picked off by more ideologically militant primary challengers.
“The 2024 election was remarkably honest with very few integrity problems—just like the 2020 election, which was also remarkably honest with very few integrity problems. The difference was that in 2020, you had Donald Trump personally leading a massive campaign of falsification in order to get people to distrust what had been a trustworthy process. And this time you didn’t.” — Walter Olson
So Alaska comes in and says, “Okay, no more power to the party base.” What this does is empower every voter, but especially independents, who comprise a good deal of the Alaska electorate, to fully participate in the process. Alaska’s experiment with this has been really good—for example, under the configuration in most other states, Alaska would be controlled by MAGA types because that’s what Republican primaries produce. That’s just the way it is in other states. Instead, since Alaska introduced its reforms, not only did Murkowski get reelected, not only did the model crowd out a partisan bomb-thrower like Sarah Palin, but in both houses of the Alaska legislature, the system produced bipartisan coalitions in which the MAGA Republicans were excluded and a bunch of Democrats and more normal Republicans vowed to cooperate at splitting the committee chairmanship between them so that the state would have practical-minded leadership rather than partisan rancor all the time.
That’s what happened in the one state that adopted that alternative voting model. Seems like it should be pretty attractive for other states, right? Voters disagreed. I had closely covered the 10 or so state ballot measures, which represented a very ambitious attempt to take the Alaska model and spread it to five other states, all of them in the West, and these measures were absolutely clobbered. Alaska voted to retain its system by a whisker. A few states like Nevada, Montana, and Colorado came pretty close—around 54%-46%—so there was a substantial popular support for them, but in the end, they did not pass. Arizona and Idaho were less close.
Technically, Alaska uses RCV after it gets its final four candidates. It uses RCV on Election Day to pick which of those final four advance to office. But most places where RCV was on the ballot did not connect it with broader primary reform. Cities really like it. Washington, D.C. became the latest to adopt it and there were a couple of others like Oak Park, Illinois. If this keeps up, RCV will eventually become a standard way of voting in large and even medium sized cities. It’s just making that kind of progress. But states are different. Cities typically have one-party politics in which there’s functionally only one primary contest that matters. RCV allows city contests to adjust for some of their faults—for example, as when a non-RCV method enables a candidate to become mayor with 29% of the vote over a split field, and they’re not actually a popular or good mayor, but everyone else was so split. RCV is beautifully tailored to address that. State elections aren’t typically like that—they’re not typically one-party contests. So states have been much more reluctant.
Yes, Maine and Alaska passed it. But only a few years ago, Massachusetts, just about the most progressive state, turned it down. One reason why it’s had such a hard go of things is that the parties hate it. When RCV is proposed at the state level, each party establishment reacts as if adopting it would spell absolute doom. Republicans and Democrats are equally loud in opposition to it. There are, of course, a few exceptions. The Alaskan Democrats began favoring it when they saw that it was better than the shot they were getting otherwise. A few Coloradans like Gov. Jared Polis have been good on it. But by and large, party establishments hate it.
Who participates in the public debate about these things? Well, you have the interest groups and the pressure groups and the ideological groups. Just over the past few years, the conservative movement, which had been largely on the sidelines—and to the extent that any particular conservative had come up by reading economists, they were likely favorably predisposed to RCV because economists have been historically just about the number one constituency for it—all of a sudden saw the Heritage Foundation and other large entities and donors generate millions of dollars to ensure that the conservative opinion pipeline is a firehose of anti-RCV commentary.
Meanwhile, on the left, the American Prospect, representing the soft socialist part of Democratic politics, ran a very hostile piece in September essentially saying, “Look, this is being pushed as progressive. Don’t do any of this stuff. Our power currently consists of being able to roast moderate Democrats in the primary and force them to commit to all of our positions. If we lose that leverage, they’re just going to govern as they think best for the general public.” I’m of course paraphrasing. But the piece claimed that that’s why in San Francisco (and in various other places where RCV has been coming in), RCV is considered a terrible development by the most radical unions and the various nonprofits that had been in charge of the government. In fact, San Francisco threw out a lot of the very left-wing people who had been running it in favor of more moderate Democrats and RCV played a role in that. The most prominent socialist supervisor lost under RCV. He led in the first round because the moderates were split, and then as RCV redistributed the second choices of the moderates, he lost.
Powell: When you were describing the Alaska setup, I can imagine it sounding very complicated to people. People are used to the status quo for voting. They know that there’s two candidates and they pick the one they want. They know that there are primaries they can participate in if they want to. Is one of the challenges for fixing our current system that people just don’t want to rock the boat—that new models, RCV included, just sound complicated, or that people aren’t exactly sure what’s going to happen if they agree to it?
Olson: That is certainly some of it. At the same time, RCV is in some ways one of the most familiar and longstanding of the proposed changes. It’s been practiced for a long time. We know a great deal about how it works. The abolition of party primaries, not so much. And we don’t know how the players will necessarily adjust to that. We don’t know if the parties will be weakened by it and if that will have other knock-on effects in unrelated areas. I think those concerns are misguided, but again, it’s not unrealistic to want a discussion of that and not want to be rushed into some huge change.
“There are so many ways in which these contests are a tribute to the largely volunteer workforce that makes American elections happen. Some of these workers have been put through such vicious treatment—MAGA ‘Stop the Steal’ types routinely harassed them. And yet they had a public job to do. They are by and large very idealistic, and they did not allow the threats against them to stop them from helping to keep our democracy running.” — Walter Olson
If you look at an area like citizen redistricting commissions, which finally began to get some traction within the last 10 or so years, you see that it has taken about 25 years. Arizona went first and then it took about 10 years for California to go second and then it took many more years before Colorado and Michigan and some other states went for it. And, importantly, each generation had refined the models to avoid some of the problems encountered with the first couple of generations so that the Colorado and Michigan citizen redistricting panels adopted more recently are much more highly functional and fairer, in my view, than the Arizona and California ones.
Powell: Let’s turn to looking ahead. So you and I share a commitment to defending liberalism and liberal institutions. Liberalism didn’t do well in this last election and is likely to do fairly poorly over the coming four years. So we can diagnose the election all we want, but what matters now is: Where do we go from here? What do we do next? What happens over the next two, four years and beyond?
If the story of the election is simply that there was too much inflation, then the answer is we just wait. Next time around, people will be used to the new price levels. Or if Trump institutes mass deportations and high tariffs, they’re going to have sudden shocks of much higher price levels than we have right now that they’ll likely hold against the party in power. So if this is the big takeaway, there’s not much of a lesson for liberals to draw from this except it sucks when inflation happens on your watch. But is there more we should be drawing than that?
Olson: If you believe that this last election was decided on “normal” issues like the economy, then to that extent, we may be simply going through the normal cycling that has characterized American politics for some time. At some point, if Trump follows through on some of his plans, farming areas are going to discover that half of their workforce has been deported even as tariff wars destroy much of their market for agricultural exports. And they may rethink things no matter how many subsidies he tries to give them if they’ve got that combination falling on them.
But let me talk about the other part of it, the part of the 2024 election that was not typical of American election cycles. As one who was monitoring and championing “democracy issues”—issues of rule of law and constitutional adherence—I was preaching that up and down every street in 2024, but Kamala Harris’s pollsters consistently told her that those issues did not engage and rouse the public. Those were not big vote-winning issues for her. The people in the middle who were undecided didn’t treat that as the deciding issue. So that’s grounds for possible deep concern if you believe that those issues are ones that will still be important to America long after the cycles of tariffs have been forgotten. Damage to the institutions through which we are supposed to govern ourselves, the realization of a strongman-led government, could last far, far longer than that.
Is it that caring about this is out of step with Americans? Is it that the public doesn’t understand? What gives on this? Naturally, when I talked with people who were planning to vote for Trump—and again, I’m not necessarily speaking to a random cross-section of voters here—I’ve brought up these issues. While polls indicate that something like 20% of the electorate articulates a desire for something like a strongman government, the people who I talked to never put it that way. Instead, they see Trump as being fundamentally in line with what’s already politically normal. They say, “It would be one thing if he’s the only one willing to use government for his own ends or to go after political enemies—but it’s the other side who has tried to weaponize the state against him first.” At that point in the conversation, when I follow up with why at least two federal cases against him are on very solid legal footing, they don’t want to argue the merits. They start talking about White House-directed censorship against conservatives or something else like Biden thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court, and the conversation eventually sputters and stops. The long and short of it is that they just don’t believe he’s much of a threat—or, if he is, then he’s not uniquely a threat; he’s a threat just like and in the same way as his political opponents are threats.
I hold out hope that, if they believed the sitting Democratic government was guilty of abuse of powers or weaponizing government, we’ll be able to break through to them that Trump doing it is also a problem. A message along the lines of, “This bothered you when you saw the Democrats doing it, right? It should bother you now that Trump is doing it too.” And that might be fertile ground for a return to divided government, with a possible electoral rebuke to Trumpism in the midterms. That hinges on us doing our job correctly of arguing the issues well. I’m hopeful we can do it.
This post has been adapted from a prior conversation on Aaron Ross Powell's ReImagining Liberty podcast. Please consider subscribing to Aaron’s newsletter.
The first problem is that voters actually believe that Presidents can run "the economy." Presidents take credit (falsely) for good economic conditions so it is logical they should also be responsible for bad economic outcomes. BUT THIS IS JUST A LIE and the media insists on repeating the lie because to really communicate the reality of how a market economy works here or in China is just too hard. It is an economic SUPERSTITION. It is the classical error of confusing correlation and causation.
When a President crows about the economy under their watch they NEVER ask the President or his reps to explain exactly which of his policies are responsible for that improvement. Likewise when blamed for bad economies critics never seem to be able to pinpoint exactly what the President did or failed to do.
The economy is global. The economy is like a climate system not the weather. Just as a climate system can produce hurricanes markets create their own disasters in order to adjust themselves.
Economies grow and retract, boom and bust, recede and recover. Sometimes markets balloon and then spectacularly collapse. The more complex the economy and its market the more difficult it is to predict the consequences of any particular policy pursued by the state.
The question where economics intersects with politics is not who caused the economic situation at any particular moment but which political party is best able to respond to the crises which will inevitably come. Who and how will they take advantage of periods of growth prosperity and who and how will they prepare for times of retraction and privation?
Joseph advised the Pharaoh that there would be seven years of good harvests followed by 7 years of famine. Instead of just gluttonous gorging during the good years Joseph advised storing up excess grain during the good years that would tide them over during the famine.
Adam Smith believed that political economy should fight false beliefs and superstition about economic policy. He also thought that political economy should propose regulatory frameworks that would help protect society and encourage socially beneficial behaviors. However, he also believed that competition and regulations could be undermined, which could lead to monopolies that are profitable for the monopolists (oligarchs) but harmful to others.
The Trump administration will not change that.
And...
I hate to be catty, but...
*Homo economicus* died some time ago. RIP. And yet the Libertarians at Cato continue to believe in and push "individual liberty", somehow believing, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that humans are by default ruled by their frontal lobe. In fact it takes effort to make your rational brain work and very many of us (about 50% per the latest election results) don't bother to fire that sucker up. If the re-election of the Orange Felon thRump doesn't convince you that your conception of "individual liberty" may not be the best of all possible worlds, I'm not sure what will! What is one of MAGA's mantras? "Freedom" "Free to choose what I want; jobs, cake and a fork to eat it with. And don't forget the beer! Don't wanna' think about it, just wanna' have it. If thRump says he can give me that, he's telling me what I want to hear and I believe him. My heart says he's right!" Libertarianism on steroids. Wake up, guys!!