Trump supporters still can't find love [View all]

So what if MAGA lonely hearts never find love?
There's a reason those "swiping left on Trump supporters" stories won't go out of style

By Andi Zeisler
Senior Writer
Published November 4, 2025 1:30PM (EST)


(Salon) Pity the young MAGA voter. They’re out at the bars. They’re on the apps. They might even have a genuine meet-cute. But it turns out that being an out-and-proud racist/sexist/homophobe isn’t as alluring a look on them as it is on the man they worship. And that just isn’t fair, is it? If it weren’t for politics, they’d surely have found their perfect match. Isn’t all this worrying about political compatibility spoiling pure, untainted love? Why can’t people just let go of their judgments and be open to meeting someone who very vocally looks down on them?

These are questions that media outlets began asking even before Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Columns with titles like “Would a Clinton voter date a Trump supporter? Actually, the outlook is great” and “Do millennials date outside their political party? These couples do” — both published in the Washington Post during Trump’s first term — tried to keep to a sunny, it’s-just-politics outlook with chipper sound bites from the likes of Stamford, Conn. mayor Caroline Simmons and Connecticut state senator Art Linares. Meanwhile, headlines like “How Donald Trump is killing romance” and “Swipe left if you voted for Trump” took what often seemed to be a bemused look at how some people were foregrounding their dating dealbreakers on apps like Tinder and Hinge. (“I still swipe right,” said one defensive Trump voter. “I would like them to know who I am first before I openly tell them I voted for this person. They know nothing about me. I’m a very reasonable guy. I’m a nice person, open-minded.”) More hardline publications like The Federalist argued that people being exasperatingly particular about so-called associative mating — wanting to share values, goals and interests with the person they might spend the rest of their lives with — was in itself evidence of a coming societal implosion.

As time went on and allying with Trumpism increasingly began requiring paranoia, bigotry, and a decision to live life in a factually unsupported parallel universe, it would have made sense if these outlets admitted that maybe a dearth of politically star-crossed love matches was probably for the best. Instead, Joe Biden’s presidency found stories like these not only proliferating but doubling down. The narrative was no longer about people across genders adding “No Trump supporters” to their dating profiles; rather, it was about an existential crisis: If liberal women remained unwilling to date Trump supporters, the very future of the human race was at risk. A Washington Post piece credited to “the Editorial Board” laid out the stakes in the grim headline “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.”

....(snip)....

That is, of course, the goal of every attempt to portray Trump voters as romantic martyrs. The premise of all the digital ink devoted to finding the hidden depths in men who support Trump is that they must in some way be profoundly misunderstood, that their embrace of bigotry and megalomania is not nearly as much of a problem as people who find it repellent. Mentions of polarization and extreme ideology imply that liberal, anti-MAGA voters are being similarly shunned on the apps and the Washington Post just doesn’t want to cover it. Lamenting the loneliness of people who take pride in alienating others requires recasting antisocial behavior as political bravery. And referring to unspecific “differences of opinion” as trivial demands framing “Pineapple on pizza is an abomination” and “Another Holocaust would be awesome” as equally consequential statements. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/11/04/so-what-if-maga-lonely-hearts-never-find-love/