The reason Americans voted for Trump was because he delivered in his first term - Yorkshire Post Letters

In The Yorkshire Post (April 9) you publish an article by your American correspondent William Cooper bemoaning the politics of his country and in particular his fellow Americans' voting habits.

I was quite taken aback by his following words: "All over the country Americans pick and choose the facts they want to believe, champion policies they don't understand, hold contradictory views at the same time, admire immoral politicians, loathe decent ones, and so on."

I don’t know what makes Mr Cooper believe that he is qualified to make such a sweeping judgement about his fellow citizens. And his comments about the psychology of voters are speculative and highly dubious.

In fact there are many reasons for the members of any electorate to vote in the way they do, but to describe them as irrational is highly tendentious.

The American people were well aware of what Donald Trump was promising to do and they had good reason to believe him, based on their past experience of his first term.

According to official figures, in his first three years, before Covid, real wage growth for the bottom 10 per cent of the population, at 9.8 per cent, was more than double the real wage growth of the top ten per cent, which was 4.8 per cent.

In the same period, real wealth for the bottom 50 per cent of the population rose 28.4 per cent, while that of the top 1 percent rose 8.9 per cent. The bottom 50 per cent’s share of real wealth rose, while that of the top 1 per cent declined.

In 2019 real median household income in America rose by more $4,400, more than in any of the 16 years to 2016.

In other words, ordinary people benefited disproportionately from his first term and in 2024 they voted quite rationally for Trump on the basis of his record and his intention to restore economic growth to areas of the country that had been left behind.

Trump's tariff policy is undoubtedly an audacious attempt to persuade major companies to invest in the United States and we have yet to see how that policy ultimately works out.

Undoubtedly there is short-term disruption to the international trading system.

But to suggest that voters who support him are irrational is misguided and, dare I say it, irrational.