Leopards On Parade

I know it’s been a long time. Too long, honestly, and I don’t have a good excuse. I just didn’t feel like following the news as closely as I perhaps should have been. Here we go.

Thumbnail of Ryleigh Cooper’s CNN interview. Image taken from CNN’s website.

While I was driving with my mother today back from downtown, we listened to a segment of the David Pakman Show about Ryleigh Cooper. If you’ve heard the phrase “regretful Trump voters” (which I’m sure you have if you’re online in any capacity these days), then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about here. Here is an article about Cooper.

For those who couldn’t be bothered to read that article, the TLDR version is this: Cooper, 24, is a federal worker from a rural part of swing state Michigan. Or at least, she was a federal worker for the U.S. Forest Service. 

Now, in case you’ve already forgotten (which many people have), Trump’s first term was marked by many attacks on environmental regulations and our system of federal lands. There should have been no reason to assume that things would be any different in Trump’s second term, unless “the same as before, but more of it” counts as different. But that’s beside the point.

In the month and a half since taking office, Trump has fired many federal workers. He’s done this with the aid of Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose role hasn’t been clarified yet and will probably never be. For all intents and purposes, Musk is currently President, but again, that’s beside the point.

So let’s get back to Ryleigh Cooper. And I have to tell you, while listening to her CNN interview, I felt like my brain cells were oozing out of my ears. I could not believe what I was hearing, and I don’t think you’ll be able to either. And I’ll let her explain it:

“As someone who is more of a swing voter, sometimes that’s what it comes down to. Those single issues … that are resonating with you at this moment.”

Fair enough. A lot of people in this country are single-issue voters; that’s no secret. It’s one reason Trump and other GOP Presidents were able to get Roe v. Wade overturned after a crusade of nearly fifty years. But what was Ryleigh Cooper’s most important issue?

Well, Cooper, like a decent number of women her age, was trying to get pregnant. She’s been through numerous fertility treatments in an effort to do exactly that. She voted for Trump because she wanted to be able to afford an IVF treatment in order to have a child.

Now, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: To want a child, and yet fear that you’ll be unable to have one, is undoubtedly a very difficult experience to endure. As a man who intends to remain child-free, it’s not something I’ll ever go through, but I empathize with this part of Cooper’s story.

But let’s turn the clock back four months and pretend it’s time to vote. I struggle to imagine how, if your singular issue in the 2024 election is anything related to reproductive care from the pro-choice side, you could make yourself vote for anyone but Kamala Harris.

 After all, during her brief (by American standards) 2024 campaign, Harris championed abortion rights and pledged to preserve access to IVF. Trump, meanwhile, said once that he would make IVF free, but he has also bragged about overturning Roe on multiple occasions. He appointed the Supreme Court Injustices who handed down that decision, so he’s responsible more than anyone else for it. Actions speak louder than words; or at least, they should.

This is a classic case of leopards on parade. Cooper voted for Trump thinking he’d take away opportunities from other people; she admitted this herself in her CNN interview. But she thought she would be safe from the negative consequences of electing him. Which, as a newly-fired federal worker, she clearly wasn’t.

A meme about the “Leopards-Eating-Faces Party” that looks like the Japanese flag. Taken from Redbubble.

The other thing I want to address is the broader issue at play here. David Pakman, a very wise man, once said that “millions of Americans have no idea what’s going on”, and he couldn’t be more correct about that. 

Ryleigh Cooper thought that voting Trump was the best decision to make from the standpoint of reproductive rights. It doesn’t matter how much the rest of us know that Trump’s record on these rights has been nothing short of cataclysmic. The politically engaged among us know that there’s a vast gulf between Republicans and Democrats on this issue, and that Trump’s the reason women like Amber Nicole Thurman died after being denied medically necessary reproductive care.

Here’s the thing: The important words there are politically engaged.

Lots of Americans don’t follow the news. On some level, I don’t blame them, for the news is pretty damn depressing these days. But the fact remains that a lot is going on right now, and the German people were probably sick of politics in 1933 - look where that got them. It’s hard to keep track of everything Trump’s doing to flood the zone, and I get it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Truth be told, Ryleigh Cooper is far from alone. She’s a microcosm of what Green Day would call the American Idiots. According to the Atlanta Black Star article I linked at the top of this page, Cooper voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, making her a swing voter. If you’re undecided between a party that’s centrist to center-right (the Democrats) and a party that’s completely off the rails (the Republicans), you’re either dumb as rocks or woefully uninformed. 

If you were paying attention, Trump was telling you exactly what he wanted to do. Project 2025 was available on the Internet prior to the election -  all 900+ pages of it! So if you didn’t have even a basic sense of what Trump would enact given the opportunity, that was your problem. 

However, this speaks to a far more important problem for Democrats. No matter what insane things Trump promises, the blue team has not been able to convince voters that Trump actually means it. And I say this as a Democrat: If we cannot break through the disinformation bubble, we will never win again, and we might not deserve to. 

The saddest part? I don’t know what the solution is, short of letting Trump do whatever he wants, ruining the country even more than he already has. Maybe, like Cooper, they will care once they have experienced hardship as a result of their decision to elect a convicted felon as President. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

To her credit, Ryleigh Cooper seems to regret her vote, even if only because she’s been fired from her forest service job and is on the brink financially. Most of Trump’s voters will never abandon him, so at least she has that going for her. I just wish she (and others) would have done her research before the election so that we could have prevented this mess. 

The 48.3% of us who voted for Kamala Harris, meanwhile, didn’t fuck around, but we still have to find out.

Meme taken from user “Being Liberal” on Facebook.