This account draws from conversations with a close family member of Mark Thompson, the central figure. To protect their privacy, names and locations have been changed. The events described, however, are true. What follows is an edited compilation of those communications.
My name is Mark Thompson.
I’m sitting at my dining room table in Toledo, Ohio, staring at a stack of bills that seem to grow every month. The faint hum of the fridge reminds me of grocery trips that now feel like a punch to the gut. My wife, Jen, is upstairs reading to our kids – Lila, 9, and Ben, 6. I’m 40, a welder at a small manufacturing plant, and regret is eating me alive. Last year, I voted for Donald Trump, convinced he’d stand up for people like me. It’s 2025, and I’ve never felt more betrayed.
I’ve been at the plant for nearly two decades, welding parts for heavy machinery. I’ve seen factories around here shuttered, jobs shipped overseas, and entire neighborhoods hollowed out. Trump’s talk of tariffs and bringing manufacturing back sounded like a lifeline. He promised a “Bold New Plan” to revive the heartland and put workers first. I believed him. I thought he’d fight for us.
But those tariffs are going to be a wrecking ball. Steel prices are predicted to climb, and my plant’s already slashing shifts to stay afloat when the tsunami hits. We’re losing bids to overseas competitors who aren’t dealing with these costs. At the supermarket, Jen and I wince at the price tags – clothes up 15%, bread and meat even higher, and Ben’s school supplies cost a fortune. Experts say these tariffs could hit families like ours with $4,000 in extra costs annually. That’s money we can’t scrape together. Lila’s soccer league is on hold, and our savings for emergencies are gone.
Then there’s that “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Trump pitched it as a miracle – lower taxes, fewer regulations, a booming economy. I thought it’d mean a raise or at least some relief. Instead, it gutted programs we needed. Medicaid cuts hit hard; Ben’s inhalers for his asthma aren’t covered anymore. Private insurance? That’s $1,400 a month – more than our mortgage. The plan also axed Affordable Care Act subsidies, leaving us uninsured. Trump swore he’d replace it with something “terrific,” but we’re still waiting. Every night, Ben’s cough keeps me up, and I feel like I’m letting him down.
Toledo’s taking a beating, too. Local shops are struggling – some closed after deportations swept up their customers. Jen’s part-time job at the boutique is down to 10 hours a week. My plant laid off a dozen workers last month, and I’m constantly looking over my shoulder. Reports say tariffs won’t bring back jobs, just inflate prices. That “One Big Beautiful Bill”? It’s ballooning the deficit by $2 trillion, mostly padding corporate profits while guys like me scrape by.
I used to argue with my mother-in-law, a lifelong Democrat, who said Trump’s promises were empty. I called her naive. Now I’m choking on my own words. I still want a country that puts working people first, but Trump’s not the answer. He sold me a dream, and I’m living a nightmare. I hold my kids close, promising things will get better, but as I stuff these bills in a drawer, I wonder if I’ll ever forgive myself for marking that ballot – a vote I can’t take back. I wonder too, if my country will ever forgive me.
PS: Please don’t tell me I got what I deserved. I’ve already been kicked in the guts enough. The first kick – which landed a solid blow – was from Donald Trump.
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I know he says don’t kick him he’s been kicked enough but I can’t help thinking you knew you were voting for a convicted felon, a misogynist, a bullshit artist , a multi bankrupt and you believed he could improve things for you. You and all of your other MAGA mob are just plain dumb. By the way I am finding it hard to believe this is a real story.
This writer of this, if actual and human, voted for knowns, and badly. Trump was known in pre-candidate days as a T V simian simpleton crooked pervert untrustworthy lying cheating arsehole. USA stupidity glares out.
Romeo, it was sent to us by a reader in America. I did a fair bit of editing to make it read better.
I agree it doesn’t sound real. Magathropes are too vain and venal to admit such errors of judgement. Then again he might have just been a swinging voter with misguided hope but that in itself is a sad indictment of the US standards of education, intelligence, global awareness and choice of character.
Perhaps I should elaborate. Rather than being “sent” in by a reader, it was a Twitter message from the mother-in-law of the person.
I’m in an American anti-Trump Twitter group, and the mother was telling us how her son-in-law wishes he hadn’t have voted for Trump and how he is now paying for it. Everything in the article is real life, and this one is not unique. I took notes of her comments (and replies) and asked if she would mind me publishing the story. Approval was given, as long as I hid identities. In the write-up I may have gone overboard with the dramatics. Namely, that “kick in the guts” bit was mine, though it was based on all the shit he’s been copping.
Do I feel sorry for him? Yes and no. Do I pity him? A definite yes.
And the “sister” I spoke of the article was actually his mother-in-law.
The motto here is: if you voted for Trump – don’t admit it.
You have allowed your government to be corrupted by big money. You have allowed the rest of the world to be bludgeoned by The Orange Fraud’s tariffs. You sit by while he abandons the rule of law, melts the statue of liberty, and you expect our sympathy? You think you are doing it tough, try trying to live without USAID, if you’re a starving African with AIDS watching your kids shrivel and die before your eyes. And you worry about not being able to being able to afford soccer fees? You voted for America first and only, fuck everyone else, and now you want sympathy. The rest of the world, that has previously relied on American compassion and wealth, to pull themselves up by their boot straps to a survivable state, while you exploit them for their cheap labor, won’t forget your betrayal. We look forward to seeing your staving children being wrapped in rags, and dumped in holes, or left outside on the foot path to be collected by the garbage trucks. You voted for this chronic abuse of the human race knowing that he was as a narcissistic, sociopathic, sex offender. You voted, in exchange for promises for yourself of a wealthier better world, to tell the rest of us who share this planet with you,to go screw ourselves. When you’re standing bleeding in your streets protesting your loss of freedom and human rights, we may cheer you on from the sidelines hoping you relearn the value and responsibilities of your humanity and democracy. Something that two thirds of your electors have so obviously forgotten. The rest of us, will hopefully learn from your mistakes of myopic, ignorant self- importance and self-imposed stupidity. In the meantime, hopefully the rest of us, the ones that didn’t matter to you whilst you were placing yourselves first, greatest, and only, will learn to better work together to build a better world in which we can all prosper!
You hit the nail on the head, Jim. Between you and me, I’m 100% certain that Americans don’t consider the global ramifications of their vote. It’s not really an “America First” attitude, more likely an “Only America” attitude. There is no “the rest of the world”.
Most Americans – and I apologise to my friends and relatives who live there – are like the worms in my garden; oblivious to the fact that our house is surrounded by other gardens.
Carol and I spent a couple of months in America some time ago, and we were absolutely gobsmacked at their ignorance, and in some cases, stupidity.
Generally the people were nice though, and we enjoyed our time there. We really liked America, though Obama was President at the time. My friends over there tell me how much it has changed, and I believe them.
Sorry, but you voted for it. So deserve it
I have added an introduction to the article.
I see that Trump has sacked the government statistician because the employment numbers didn’t suit him.
It seems that there will be any number of MAGA applicants for the position who are prepared to take the job which, it seems, just involves reporting the numbers supplied by the White House……Karoline Leavitt probably has the September and December quarterly numbers in her purse already !
What is it they say about statistics “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
As an Australian I find it bewildering to read that 77 million Americans voted for a convicted criminal with a long history or shafting those around him and who gave them a preview of who he was and what he stood for when he was elected in 2016.
The US education system seems to have bred a generation that cannot think for itself, the internet is filled with facts about trump and his first go round at the presidency, he stood up time and time again and told the American people what he was going to do, especially when it comes to tariffs and deportations, and it seems that few who heard the message took the trouble to check the facts, facts that are at everyones fingertips, facts that are clear unequivocal, like tariffs.
Twice in the history of the European US, the imposition of across the board tariffs have been used by its government and the results both times have been disastrous, resulting in recession and depression. These are not a democrat lies, these are facts.
Are the American people so brainwashed that they just believe anything they are told? It would seem for a goodly proportion of them, they are.
It is hard to feel any sympathy for people like this man. Who in their right mind votes for a sexual predator, a convicted criminal, a twice almost impeached president, a man who has bankrupted Casinos, for goodness sake casinos are money making machines, you have to be particularly inept to run one into bankruptcy, to lead their country. A man totally beholden to the super wealthy, who doesn’t even know who pays the tariffs that he is imposing, who has no idea what groceries are, along with a whole heap of other stuff that the average human being knows.
I agree with Michael Taylor that the “America First” is really “America Only”, but this is not new and it has not been brought about by trump, it is how the Americans have always seen themselves. I have worked with a number of them, to a man and woman they were completely self absorbed, is that the right word, they almost did not recognise anyone other than Americans as being part of the human race and while it is all well and good to be proud of your country and countrymen, the women not so much, the belief that most Americans seem to have that they are the chosen ones borders on pathological. The term Ugly American is well deserved.
Sorry, no sympathy at all.
they were told, over and over and over, that he was a liar, a conman, never mind a convicted felon. He had bankrupted several businesses, and a university and STILL people believed the BS.
Part of me feels a bit sorry for all those who actually DIE without medical help especially children who had no choice in this game, but they were all able to make the choice and they just picked the person who said he’d give them MORE. Greed, plain and simple.
Somewhere around 160-170 million people are registered to vote in the States. Millions of eligible voters don’t bother to exercise their democratic right to do so.
Hard to disagree with the sentiments expressed above, given the simple truth that you get what you vote for.
Americans seem prone to preferring the sauce to the sausage, the razzle-dazzle to the substance, but it’s somewhat easy to feel a little sorry for the voting public inasmuch as the binary options – donkeys or elephants – is a bit of Hobson’s choice… both unattractive, but which is the lesser of the evils?
The constant dramatics that accompany American politics must inevitably lead to voter fatigue, and a loudmouth blusterer like Trump with his ‘promise the world’ approach would appeal to millions who are sick & tired of their very real sense of the mess that the political scene appears to be.
I suspect, like the person cited in the head essay, that millions will be undergoing deep regret for their polling decisions.
We’ve a lot to be thankful for, here in Australia, and it is essential that we never adopt any of the policies that have been instrumental in the creation of the almighty mess that is the current state of play in the USA.
It’s always been the great American con job since day 1. A right bunch of incompetent bloodthirsty mob expelled from Europe. Since arriving in America, it’s been endless murder, thievery and exploitation of everything and everyone. This is their fundamental M.O. Even their national anthem is an abomination of supremacist bloodthirstiness, operating under their own invented god of convenience.
Their coffers grew out of their corruption and amoral stupidity, environmental vandalism and consumerist bling. Just as the rest of the ‘West’ had done following the crazed religious BS of pope Alexander VI – they all launched into imperialist scourging of the planet.
After WWI & WWII, America just did it more assiduously than anyone else, and with an ever-increasing population (including migrants) committed to the machinery of the industrial revolution, they pumped themselves up with hubris and ‘exceptionalism’. And that generated a ‘moment in the sun’ where they set themselves as ‘the generous big brother’ with ‘aid’ programmes across the world. But the underlying reality was that these ‘programmes’ gave cover for their monumental militarized hegemon.
Its incompetence and incompetent accounting along with its hubris was always leading it towards a crash, financially and morally. Yet it propped itself up with bling, saturation propaganda and mythologies ‘Holywood-style’.
But one thing never changed, its foundational stupidity and corruption.
Once all fully corporatized, the corruption accelerated. Because of its dysfunctional Constitution and political system, all it took to decimate itself, and with it, the rest of the world, was the lying, criminal, narcissistic moron T-Rump, their discombobulator-in-chief. They got him out of a cheap TV series, and elected him as POTUS with his SCOTUS appointee mates, and his associated cabinet of flunkies.
It seems Americans in their one-way-mirrored glass dome, can only learn the hard way. Now they’ve got it coming at ’em like a steam train using sewage as fuel & water.
Having been there many times over the years, there’s no way I’d go there again, coz it’s unlikely to be fixed in my lifetime.