They Voted Trump. How's That Going?

At the end of the president’s first year in office, five of his female voters talk to ELLE. They still support him. But it’s been a wild ride for them, too.

- Linda Tirado

Things change very slowly, and then all at once. In the course of this yearlong series on five women who voted for Donald Trump, I thought I’d find the reaches beyond which Trump’s voters wouldn’t go. That even the people who simply hated Hillary Clinton would eventually, mostly, come to realize that she’d have been a better choice. Right?

That hasn’t happened, at least not with the women we’ve been following. As I type this, Trump’s approval ratings are at record lows, and his administration is still mired in chaos. Yet many of Trump’s voters are sticking by him; all of our women are, though most of them aren’t overjoyed with the job he’s doing. Some of it is the sunk-cost fallacy: You’ve made a bad bet and you know it, but you stick with your decision because you don’t want to admit you’ve made a bad bet. I’ve never experienced this in politics, but I could name a few exes I gave far too much credit to—and too many chances to—before I finally learned better. Half the reason I stuck with them for as long as I did was that I didn’t want to think of myself as so stupid as to have been taken in by a charming lout.

None of the five women I interviewed are stupid; quite the contrary. They are all articulate about their Trumpian choices. So for this last piece, I decided to let them speak in their own words about some of the pivotal events and sound bites of the past year. What did they think about…

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, when hundreds of mostly young white men marched through the town with actual torches shouting, “Jews will not replace us”?