Remember that guy who claimed that the “kindness” of Sarah Silverman on twitter caused him not only to drop support for Trump but become a Dem & then declare support for Elizabeth Warren? It’s even more ridiculous than it sounds! Let’s break it down:

Who is David Weissman and why should I care? you might be asking.

Who he is doesn’t matter. It’s very unlikely he wrote the post in question (which you can read here) himself. The tone is too varied to indicate one writer anyway (the voice shifts from humble to condescending to patronizing to contrite to patriotic to corporatist faster than Linda Blair on an Exorcist Merry Go Round) so the who isn’t relevant. The what is why you should care.

The what?

I said, that’s why you should care.

LOL. But seriously, this anti-Trump piece of propaganda — er, I mean, opinion piece — is some heavy duty power of suggestion-based nonsense. The multiple tones of voice are just the beginning! Wait till we get to the word myopic!! LOL!! I’m dying.

The premise is that the author claims he attacked liberal activist Sarah Silverman on twitter, and the fact that she reacted with kindness to him instead of just blocking him caused him to FIRST decide not to support Trump and SECOND to magically become a Democrat! Let’s start with the headline (which you can see for yourself here). It states: “In 2016, I was a conservative Trump supporter but I’m backing Elizabeth Warren in 2020. Trump supporters who once knew me now call me a traitor, a sellout, a Dem plant, a fraud — which surprised me because I thought they were friends.”

Headlines are great, because they tell us exactly what the writer wants us to walk away thinking in our own mind. The headline is the bright red neon sign that says, “This is the take-away. Not the conclusion you might draw with your own ability to reason and apply logic if you took the time to read the entire article, oh, noooooo. Put your deductive reasoning cap on ebay; you won’t be needing that anymore, because instead, I’m going to tell you which conclusion to draw!”

That conclusion? That it’s ok — you have permission — to switch from Trump to a Democrat candidate in 2020, just like the writer has, and specifically, to the DNC’s pre-annointed victor, Elizabeth Warren. And, by the way, the writer continues, people I thought were my FRIENDS are now calling me mean names!! Trump supporters! Being mean to me!!

Does this sound familiar? Because something similar actually did happen. Many many — to the tune of millions — of Bernie supporters (1 in 10) flipped to Trump in 2016 after he endorsed Hillary. And between 8 and 12 million Obama voters in 2012 magically transformed into Trump voters in 2016. And these people who flipped were then as a consequence ruthlessly mercilessly harassed and shamed and pummeled with insults and hate for months and even years on the internet and at rallies if they went public with that information. Including yours truly, who voted for Obama twice, supported Bernie in the primaries, and switched to Trump after I read his now famous tweet, “Bernie Sanders endorsing Hillary Clinton is like Occupy Wall Street endorsing Goldman Sachs,” during the summer of 2016.

The target audience of this propaganda piece is anyone and everyone who flipped to Trump in 2016. And the purpose of the piece is to influence that group of people to flip back.

The ways to get people to do something they would not otherwise do are to give them a reward (for example, a bribe), threaten them with a punishment, or do it in a far more sinister way, such as by using the power of suggestion so that they believe it is something they already want to do and then go ahead and DO it with little resistance. We’ll come back to that word BELIEVE (because it is sprinkled liberally throughout the piece).

The “opinion” piece begins:

It’s been over a year since I decided to stop supporting President Trump and join the Democratic Party. I have also decided to support Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primaries. To this day, I am still asked why I made the transition — and I feel that I need to explain why.

I want to ask you a question, dear reader: do we as Americans, or even just as human beings, decide on a certain candidate? Or do we feel desire for a certain candidate? Desire is a powerful word, in terms of the power to influence your action. But the word decide is even more powerful. You might desire neither candidate and subsequently take no action. But if you are repeatedly told to DECIDE, well, that’s a whole other area of suggestion. It’s a command statement. You have to choose. You have to pick one. You have to take decisive action. You HAVE TO VOTE. DECIDE DECIDE DECIDE. Pick one!!!!!

Lol.*

Deep dive into the word decide:

I never decided on Trump. I was devastated that Bernie had been absolutely robbed of any fair chance to be the Dem nominee and I looked around and saw Trump. And Trump wanted to get us out of Afghanistan, bring back manufacturing jobs (he literally said “I’m for fair trade not free trade” at a rally I was watching live in 2016; as I picked my jaw up off the floor, I was like, holy shit, does this guy have a membership at the co-op too? I’m gonna shit my pants! I could just imagine him and Melania measuring bulk organic rolled oats, “it’s tare .37 on that tupperware container” as they approach the register with their cart filled with free range chicken and grass fed beef — LOL), get us out of the TPP (which he did on day one, almost literally day one — I think it was week three), and end endless war. I was like, oh wow. I’m gonna have to look into this guy. I never decided. I DESIRED. And Candidate Trump knew the power of humor too. Read the tweet mentioned above. I was like, omg, this guy wants China to stop fucking our country to death and he’s funny as hell. Interesting! (We’ll get to some of the things he said that I didn’t agree with later, but I want to note here that I would fight and die in a war against China tonight if it mean ridding the world of their sick communist sadistic torture regime.)

So why does this overt piece of anti-Trump propaganda use the word “decide”? Because its target audience is the undecided voter, not the passionate desire-filled voter. Let’s go to the next paragraph:

I was a conservative activist and writer for a couple of years prior to the 2016 election. I decided to do this because I felt threatened by Democrats, and I believed that they wanted to take our rights away — rights like freedom of religion, and speech. I believed Islam was a religion of terror. I believed Democrats wanted to destroy the sanctity of marriage. I had a myopic view of the second amendment, without seeing its full context. I condemned socialism and abortion. I wanted a wall to stop immigrants from “invading” America.

I was originally a Ted Cruz supporter

Again with the “I decided” seed being planted (over and over) in your mind. But anyone who knows conservatives (and you’re talking to NOT one; I’m a pro-choice, pro-$15/hour minimum wage voter as well as being a pro-America FIRST policy, pro-gun voter) knows that certain views are non-negotiable. Conservatives are often religious. Let’s use deductive reasoning to figure out if this David Weissman character is probably one of them. He says “I condemned abortion” in the past tense.  People who condemn abortion are almost always religious. They believe that abortion is murder because it stops a beating heart. If he condemned abortion, then we can safely conclude that he is probably a religious conservative (and not just fiscally conservative as many Independent voters are). What would be the reason he changed his mind on the abortion issue? Because Trump? Doesn’t quite pass the logic smell test, does it? Let’s say–for the sake of argument–that there is a person somewhere who was pro-life who switched to pro-choice later in life: I’d bet money that there are a few. Ok. But the author of this article? Who ostensibly supported Ted Cruz? A simple google search reveals Cruz’s political positions:

But if a person were against legal abortion, are they going to become pro-choice and stop condemning abortion because … twitter? No, if the Republican candidate is not someone they can morally support, they’re going to hold their nose and vote for the pro-choice candidate anyway, as many of my Catholic friends did in 2008. It’s almost as if the team writing this piece of propaganda doesn’t know how to create a fake profile of a voter that is based on any semblance of reality. The portrait of this fictional flipper — er, I mean, very real human being named David Weissman — could just as easily have been of a fiscal conservative instead of a religious conservative who flips from Trump to Warren and it would have sold marginally better. And that is to say, still poorly!** OR, they could have left the abortion issue out of the article completely. Or the author could have said, “I remain pro-life but it’s not the most important issue for me.” Or any number of variations that would have made SENSE.

Same weird inconsistency with condemning socialism; that wouldn’t change either. (And why is this article trying to plant the seed of the idea that ANYONE should be ok with socialism? Hmmm? Let’s ALL condemn socialism.) And how about destroying the sanctity of marriage as between one man and one woman? Again, you’re talking to someone (me, Sarah) who believes gay marriage should be legal (but PSA: there are only 2 genders) especially since forbidding it hurts straight women, because as long as society condemns homosexuality, there will be those few gay men who will entrap an unsuspecting woman in a loveless marriage and use her as a beard while he has affairs with men. I love gay marriage. Marriage is a legally binding contract that says one sexual partner for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. It’s the ultimate cross fit class, the ultimate test of endurance and commitment. I dare you to get married. Straight or gay. I dare you to TRY to find someone you love so much you are willing to agree to only have sex with them till the day you die. I triple dog DARE you. (If you’re really feeling brave, may I suggest opening a joint checking account! HAHAHAHA! I’m not laughing at you. I’m crying with you.)

But I digress. The point is, a religious conservative person is not going to change on the gay marriage issue either. Again, they might stop liking Trump and go support a different Conservative, but to switch to a Democrat? I mean, the proposition is silly! And briefly, to touch on radical Islamic terrorism, that’s an unfortunate reality of life on Earth at this moment in time. Who doesn’t know that? How odd. Why did the propagandists “go there”? Plus, feminists morally oppose the hijab and female genital mutilation: all my female Boomer friends who tried to talk me out of voting for Trump (they voted for Hillary) think that the oppression of women inherent in radical Islam is deplorable. Bringing this issue up was unwise in this forum, to put it mildly. And you know why, my conservative friends, don’t you. Because conservative women — and every conservative man I’ve met and talked to about this issue while at the MAGA meetups I’ve attended — think that the oppression of women inherent in radical Islam is deplorable! Oh, what’s that? Common ground? Gee whiz! Who’d a thunk it! Propagandists, in your next piece, just don’t even go there. Really.

And it gets better! And even more absurd. I mentioned my religious friends who usually vote Republican but held their nose for a pro-choice candidate in ’08 thinking Obama would end the endless war (and death). Did you notice that NO WHERE in this article is the word Republican mentioned? No where. Not once. As I’ve mentioned in my previous blogposts, the three elements of communication are: the words that are coming out of the person’s mouth, what they’re really saying, and what’s not being said, i.e. what has been specifically omitted. And it’s the third category that can be most revealing. We get to ask, why were you afraid to say “Republican,” Mr. Weissman? You want people who voted REPUBLICAN in 2016 to not vote REPUBLICAN in 2020, but no where in the entire article do you utter the word? Why? Because the piece is purely an attack on MAGA, the movement to end endless war and crony capitalism that ships our jobs to China, Mexico and other countries and bring back union jobs that pay middle class salaries to hard working Americans. I am a Trump supporter. I’m not a Republican and I’ve never been a Democrat. This article is an attack on ME and the 8 million people who voted for Obama in 2012 and flipped to Trump in 2016.*** That’s why Mr. Weissman never uses the word “Republican.” But he uses the word MAGA. Several times.

Here’s how we know the piece is an attack on MAGA, this quote:

The insults continue to this day, but when it happened during that initial learning period [after the author supposedly spontaneously, and not as part of a pre-planned psychological operation, began a public discourse on twitter with liberal celebrity Sarah Silverman], it snapped me out of my MAGA trance. I saw how Trump thrives on this behavior, and that’s when I decided to no longer be part of MAGA.

This article is designed to paint the MAGA movement, the effort to drain the swamp, in a bad light. The effort to bring back manufacturing jobs? Imply that one would have to be in a trance to want that! The effort to end endless war? What have you been smoking? We’re in a trance to want jobs that have benefits and pay enough money to raise a family, and God forbid we want a national budget less bloated than a good year blimp. We must be hypnotized!! “I decided to no longer be a part of MAGA.” Again, the word decide. As we read a first person narrative, our mind automatically internalizes what the writer is saying as its own thoughts; only a very strong moral compass makes you simultaneously react, “whoa, this is some fucked up shit right here, yo.” The weak mind will not resist the “decide” command statement and the “I decided against MAGA” suggestion that is being given.

And no attempt to establish rapport with the MAGA tribe would be complete without inserting the phrase “fake news” somewhere in the piece:

After a couple of years of defending Trump and calling media that portrayed him in a bad light “fake news” — which was a thing before Trump — I had a conversation that changed my approach on social media.

Wow, “which was a thing before Trump,” B T W. F Y S A. Oh, we didn’t know that? We the reader are too ignorant to know that fake news didn’t take its first stroll down the escalator in 2015 (only to fall flat on its face at the feet of President Trump)? Gee, thanks for enlightening us. We would never have known that without you educating us. It’s an example of the patronizing tone I mentioned at the beginning, and only something a CNN/CNBC/MSM fan would feel compelled to point out — Fox News “fair and balanced” watchers have always wanted real news and known of the dearth of fair and balanced news sources. This is something an intern who googled “origin of the phrase fake news” as part of her research for ghostwriting this piece for Weissman would say. Now, let’s peel back one more layer. The writer is admitting that the media is portraying Trump in a bad light instead of a factual unbiased light! (That was a slip-up.)

Then suddenly the article takes on a fake-humble tone …

I realized I had always been aggressive and mean. I wanted to force my views on people. There was never a debate — I used insults and ad hominem attacks.

These tactics didn’t get me anywhere.

… as if the author is confessing to us, “I realized …” and the unspoken, “I confess that …” I used insults. But if the writer had truly wanted to create empathy, they would have apologized. They would include a “saw the light” statement, following up “these tactics didn’t get me anywhere” with something like, “and I’m sorry I hurt people I didn’t even know with things I wish I hadn’t said” or something along those lines. Because the author(s) is in no way humble, and in no way self-reflective, and in no way sorry for anything, these words are omitted. Ironically, the entire paragraph comes off as an extended insult (“Trump supporters are aggressive and mean, force their views on others, use insults and ad hominem attacks — I’m no longer a Trump supporter, er go I no longer have these personality traits”). And we all know how well insults work to change someone’s mind! (The irony!) But let’s get totally real: people who are aggressive and mean don’t stop being aggressive and mean when they switch political parties. They just become aggressive and mean about the new party. Is this news? This article acts like the author found Jesus, not Elizabeth Warren.

Here’s another slip-up; read this (unintentionally) sweetly complimentary description of POTUS:

Trump wanted the same things I wanted, so I thought he was an easy choice for President of the United States. I really believed Trump was a patriotic, successful businessman, who cared about all Americans, and that sold me on voting for him. I was aware he wasn’t a saint, but I felt no one is perfect and anyway, conservative news networks kept calling Hillary a criminal.

No one is perfect! Ain’t that the truth. What a healthy sense of self and others the author is pretending to have! But uh oh … here comes the sinister reveal.

At the time, I didn’t realize who Trump really was.

Yes, that’s right: you, dear reader, are not smart enough to see who Trump really is. You need Mr. Weissman to tell you. And then to tell you The Truth about Hillary and Obama.

Here’s who Trump really is, according to Weissman:

but then the Helsinki meeting with Putin came. I saw how he, the President of the United States, made himself vulnerable to Putin and Russia, agreeing to closed-door meetings and being recorded by our adversaries. What kind of president would do such a thing? When I saw someone tweeted a clip of the debate between Hillary Clinton and Trump where she called Trump a puppet of Putin, I was stunned. I now believe she was right. This is not the guy who I voted for, and yet it is. That was the moment when I decided I was no longer a Trump supporter. I went back over years of his corruption, lies and draft-dodging. My whole world was turned upside-down.

Is this the best they’ve got? Helsinki? The non-event that happened over a year ago? Putin hands Trump a soccer ball and says, “the ball is now in your court” in an OBVIOUS attempt to deliver Trump a message in a concealed way so that the message would not be intercepted by anyone in POTUS’ immediate circle and all of a sudden Trump’s a puppet to this guy? All diplomatic meetings are surveilled and recorded by the government of the country they’re being held in —  LOL.  I mean LMAO. Seeing that part of the clip from the debates changed Weissman’s mind?  It’s laughably unrealistic.  And yep, Putin’s a mean dick. And? How long have you lived on earth? You didn’t know that mean dicks fill power vacuums? Well, welcome to the shithole war planet. Here’s your accordion. (Old Far Side joke — ode to Gary Larson.) When mean dicks have nuclear weapons, you play nice so they don’t blow up the planet. Now go get a mirror. And don’t you TOTALLY wonder what was inside the soccer ball? I heard from this guy Comey once during a press conference that Hillary’s lawyers used a scrubbing software to wipe her emails from US State Department computers. In the same press conference, the guy Comey — oh yeah, he was like the FBI director at the time, omg — he totally said foreign actors had accessed her emails because the server in her bathtub at her house in NY was like totally NOT secured (yes, it was like LITERALLY IN HER BATHTUB – I know right?!?). But what if Russia had TOTALLY read all the emails and was like, lol, I heard it was your birthday, President Trump, here’s a flash drive buried inside a soccer ball with ALL her emails, yeah we made a copy — I know, you didn’t expect that, you thought we would just skim the subject lines but no, we actually printed them out too and bound them in a fun spiral bound book cover and laminated it, you know those fun laminating machines from the 80’s? Well, here you go —  Putin heard a rumor Trump was a mean dick with access to nuclear weapons and this was his way of saying, please don’t blow up the planet! Hashtag GLASNOST!!!

So a couple of things. I hope you saw the humor in the previous paragraph, is probably number 1. Second, there’s a lot of gray area on earth. But this article reeks of black and white thinking. Yeah, Russia is our adversary. They’re also a nuclear power.  Russia is a beautiful country with beautiful people with a shitty government. (Oh, is it mirror time again?) Freedom is hard. Half the people eligible to vote in our country don’t even show up on election day. “I don’t have time” and “I don’t think my vote matters” are the odd things I hear come out of the mouths of people who lack gratitude and reverence for their freedom. Elections have consequences, as former President Obama said. That they do. One lives in the White House right now. You know why? Because math. Votes are counted. Did anyone think the Berlin Wall was going to fall and Russia was going to be like, “oh, yeah, we’re totally cool with less geographical territory now that we’re not the USSR”? Sometimes the best we can hope for is peace but the most we can actually get is an absence of war. A little diplomacy goes a loooooong way. (Lol, did you know there is no gayness in Russia? True story!) Do you know why you don’t even remember Helsinki? Because nothing happened. Seriously. Anderson Cooper practiced his method acting skills in an attempt to display Shock and Chagrin, and a couple people on twitter pretended they had a heart attack, but really, two world leaders talked about politics, and maybe, MAYBE IF WE’RE LUCKY, we’ll get to find out what was so controversial in those State Dept emails that good people, career public servants, risked their jobs and security clearances and freedom (from JAIL) to cover for Madam Secretary. All because the Russians are nosy mo-fo’s! (Although, if it’s a nosiness contest, well then ….)

Trump is strong and scary, the quintessential Alpha male. That’s who he “really” is. He will stop at nothing to protect the United States of America and her people from danger. Period.  Putin and Hillary are Alphas too. These aren’t “nice” people. Who do you want protecting your tribe? Nice or scary as hell?

But this article purports to tell us The Truth about Hillary and Obama too — again, because you aren’t smart enough to figure it out yourself. It should go without saying that anyone who tells you that they have The Truth, and that The Truth is ______ is full of The Bullshit. (Biggest red flag in the article — it’s almost as if they want this article to reinforce existing support for Trump!). Mr. Weissman says:

I learned the truth about President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats. I have learned of all the good they have done for our country. They are not twisted, evil people who wanted to destroy America from the inside. All they wanted to do was to help move our country forward

What does “move forward” mean? Linguistically, it’s nebulous — it could mean getting out of a rut or not standing still, but in contrast to “make America great again” which indicates going back to the way it was before NAFTA/WTO and twenty years of endless war, “move forward” clearly implies that going back is wrong and moving forward is right. Attacking MAGA is a divide and conquer strategy since it was THEE thing that united conservative voters and independent voters and old school union dems.

I would argue that those people were voting for MAGA, the idea, not Trump, the man, whereas people who voted for Hillary were voting for the woman, not the policies she represented. And as far as “the truth” about her and other “top democrats” that Mr. Weissman claims to have learned, what good was it that they did for our country? That’s a big claim. The author presents no evidence to back it up. Weissman says Trump was corrupt and dodged the draft, but we the American people aren’t looking at anything but the actions of the LAST THREE YEARS that affect us personally. And we see factory jobs coming back, factories coming back that help middle class families and communities, prison sentence reform that helps Black families, finally someone fighting China back on their currency devaluation and intellectual copyright violations and flooding our US market with deadly fentanyl. And more. The list goes on and on and on. At the top of it? Average increase of $5,000 a year per family in income. I mean, that’s so awesome (thank you, President Trump!).

Hillary Clinton asked rhetorically, “What difference at this point does it make?” when being questioned about Benghazi. She said of Gaddafi, “We came, he saw, he died” and laughed strangely. These cringe-worthy moments were horrifying to me as a student of body language and speech patterns. But to my liberal friends who voted for her, it was so embarrassing for them to recall those moments that they would come up blank when I mentioned it to them. They would say, “How can you vote for Trump when he says “grab ’em by the pussy”? And I would say, “because it was said around all guys and men talk using language far worse than that and he had no idea he was being recorded. We all might be embarrassed by words we said in confidence. Hillary doesn’t even realize how awful she sounds when she KNOWS she’s being filmed, and broadcast live, and she can’t even reflect on how insensitive it sounded to gleefully cackle about Gaddafi or throw her hands up and ask what difference does it make when she and Obama are personally responsible for the attack on the compound in Benghazi. Yuck! I’m embarrassed FOR her!”

My friends couldn’t argue. Why? Because essentially we were in agreement: both Trump and Hillary had said things that were embarrassing. The “she’s so qualified” argument, I noticed, was often used by those who couldn’t confront how uncomfortable it makes people to observe Hillary Clinton’s social ineptitude: how patronizing, how smug, how arrogant and how out of touch she comes across as. Furthermore, Hillary Clinton was treated as if she were literally above the law. Her lawyers wiped her server (like with a cloth? No, with bleachbit) so that thousands of those emails would never see the light of day. Obama knew about it, indeed, aided and abetted it, and participated in it by replying to her non-government email address. And the FBI director didn’t care. What good DID Obama do? I can think of many broken promises but I can’t think of anything he actually accomplished that Trump isn’t undoing as we speak (Affordable Care Act, etc). When I think of Obama, I hear him saying, “The jobs aren’t coming back. There’s no magic wand.” And you know what I think? I think, what a prick.

AND I CAN’T WAIT TO VOTE FOR TRUMP ALL OVER AGAIN! Make America Great Again! Awesome union manufacturing jobs, come (back) to mama!

Let’s wrap this up with a few more indicators that Weissman’s piece is purely political propaganda and not an authentic conversion of heart narrative.

As I began conversing with Silverman, other people began reaching out to me. I started learning more about Democratic values and people. In many ways, it was shocking.

“In many ways, it was shocking” … why, because you were living under a rock? You never heard of a living wage before? Government funded healthcare? You never heard of that even though Canada has it and Obama wanted a public option in 2008 and Hillary pushed for single payer in 1994? LOL. We might have been born at night. Not last night. Conservatives call it the nanny state. Again, “it was shocking to find out I had so much in common with people I would have disagreed with a year earlier” makes sense. He doesn’t say that. “In many ways, it was shocking,” which is what he did say, comes off as juvenile. It’s almost as if someone edited the piece to shorten it and went too far.

What [Silverman] did was inspire me to talk to other people who had different views to mine. She accepted me for being a Trump supporter and that’s what brought down my wall of hate and closed mind.

The “wall of hate” imagery is being used to plant the idea of the border wall, as in Build the Wall, is a wall of hate, and not a very real physical barrier against criminals trying to break into the back door of our house-country. Being accepted exactly as we are, warts and all, IS an extremely powerful precursor to transformation. But again, insulting Trump supporters by telling them they are filled with hate and have closed minds? Not going to change their minds. (The same irony as above, using a story of acceptance to shame someone for being different … so strange.)

Ok, read this one: this is the best deep state co-authored part of the WHOLE piece. LOL, I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!

SO: was this thing written by a DIA intern over the summer? Do I get a prize for guessing right? LOL, did General John “Guilty as Charged” Kelly help edit it? Wait, was he like, “be sure to use the word myopic twice in reference to the Second Amendment”?? Because I want to really get this straight: we’re supposed to believe a Ted Cruz supporter would flip to Trump … and then to the Democratic Party and then …. to Elizabeth Warren? Really??????????????????? 

Thank you for reading, this was a long one! I would love your feedback below. And to support me on patreon, please click here. To follow me on twitter, please click here.

**Now, it’s possible a person could vote for Trump in 2016 and Warren in 2020, maybe if they were Catholic and came from a long line of family members who’d been a part of the Catholic Workers party, for example a nurse or other medical care provider who believed in subsidized healthcare for all, as part of upholding the belief in the sanctity of human life. I went to school and was educated by these people/nuns at a Catholic all girls school from 7th through 12th grade–when they say they are pro-life, they look over their shoulder as if Archangel Michael himself is going to smite them if they are morally inconsistent about it and don’t help the sick and the poor, whether pre- or post-birth.

***FROM the “American National Election Studies’ 2016 Time Series Study”

Overall, if we estimate the raw totals using these percentages while working off of Trump’s nearly 63 million votes and Clinton’s almost 66 million votes, the ANES data suggest that about 8.4 million 2012 Obama voters backed Trump in 2016 and 2.5 million Romney voters supported Clinton. Click here to see the source site.