HAIL ROCK, OHIO — Jack Palumbo is 26 years old, works at a bank, and holds an associate degree in political science. He describes himself as a “modern libertarian,” “classical liberal,” and he is a registered Republican. The Political Garbage Chute sat down with Palumbo last week to ask him why he was supporting Donald Trump in the upcoming Republican primaries. Just before the interview Palumbo lit up a marijuana cigarette, or “joint,” and he said it was to “help [him] chillax for the interview.”
“Well, for starters, he just tells like it is,” Palumbo told us, “no matter how badly he knows the reaction to what he says will be. You have to admire someone who will say horrible, overly generalized stuff about a whole group of people, and then double-down when he’s called out on it.” Then, after a moment of reflection, “Well, you have to admire him as long as you’re not from Mexico. Then you’re probably pretty offended by what he said, but hey man, he’s just a straight-shooter telling it like it is!”
Palumbo said that another part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s a “well known business man” and that “the country needs someone to run it like a business” which includes “offshoring various government functions, selling certain departments to foreign investors, and then selling off the remaining assets in the White House and heading down to the Bahamas for the rest of his term.”
“What I want more than anything in our next president is someone who understands what it’s like to be fiscally responsible,” Palumbo told us. “That’s why I’m a Republican, because clearly Republicans are the most fiscally educated and responsible. Just look at the economy George W. Bush gave us. Just look at how much the middle class is thriving after more than 30 years of one flavor of Reaganomics or another! So just imagine what Trump, a real, bonafide business guy could do.”
We asked Palumbo what he thinks about Trump’s companies filing multiple bankruptcies, and whether he thinks that means Trump is actually fiscally responsible. “Well, um, sure,” Palumbo stumbled. “Maybe those bankruptcies don’t make it look like Trump is good with money and is instead an expert at knowing how to use the system to his advantage. Maybe all it does is show that he was born into a position of such great privilege that he could tank a business or businesses multiple times and still get to call himself a ‘winner’ and still has more money than I’ll ever imagine.”
“Look man, all I know is that I don’t want to vote for the Democrat,” Palumbo said. “Whether it’s Hillary or Bernie or Biden, they’re all going to support policies that help the lower classes more than the upper classes, and even though I’m firmly entrenched in the working class and thanks to efforts from conservatives the ladders up and out of the lower classes are harder to come by than ever, I have to vote for the Republican. I just have to. It doesn’t make sense to me, or probably to you. But hey, I’m an American, I wasn’t really taught critical thinking skills because I lived in a red state, so I just vote based on what I see and hear on Fox and from Rush.”
Plaumbo ended the conversation by telling us that for him, “the bottom line is that being a conservative Republican voter, [he] can easily ignore the reality of Tump’s economic bumblings because he’s using all the right buzzwords about immigrants” and “he is calling people losers and that’s always a fun Republican pass time.” Palumbo did say he’d consider voting for any of the other Republicans as well, but that they just “aren’t nearly as fun to root for because they’re not quite as stupid or obnoxious.”
