Canadian Meghan Murphy Registers to Vote in the US - For Some Imaginary Election

Meghan Murphy's political analysis and assessment of Donald Trump, that inform her first-time vote, bear little resemblance to the reality here.

Last week, Canadian writer and podcaster Meghan Murphy declared that she had registered to vote in the US presidential election in order to cast a ballot for Donald Trump. It may come as a surprise to many of the former and current followers of her work that she has a dual US/Canadian citizenship. Murphy, who lived most of her life in Canada before moving to Mexico several years ago, made her name as the most prominent Canadian activist opposing gender identity policy and law. Although she was not born in the US, and has never lived here, her mother is a US citizen; ergo, Murphy has the right to vote in the US, something she has never done before.

Murphy explained that after her disappointment with the 2016 election of Trump, she decided to investigate why so many Americans were willing to vote for him. What she found, she writes, was that mainstream media had painted a false picture of him as a “racist, sexist, and bully,” and this year are running “the same tired story, albeit ramped up to desperate measures: He is a fascist, a liar, a misogynist, and an immigrant-hating racist.” She notes that it is easy for people like her who “live overseas” to buy into the false narrative. (Overseas? Mexico is located on the same land mass as the United States; i.e., North America, which also includes Canada.)

Moreover, Murphy says, support for Trump is “rooted in a very real and valid sense of marginalisation (sic) felt by rural working class Americans” whom the Democrats denigrate, citing Hillary Clinton calling them “deplorable” and Biden calling them “garbage.” Democrats, she opines, are too focused on identity politics, instead of the practical concerns of Trump supporters such as jobs, crime, and gender identity policy.

Murphy portrays herself as a “curious” and “critical” thinker, who sought out “alternative voices and information” to develop her analysis - but doesn’t name her sources.  One wonders who and what they were, given nearly everything she states is incorrect and easily disproven. Nor does she refute well-known instances of said racism, misogyny, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Murphy’s deep dive into the truth of Donald Trump somehow missed how he and his father were sued in 1973 by the justice department for refusal to rent properties to blacks and his role in whipping up racist sentiment in the late 1980s against the Central Park Five, a group of black and Latino teenagers accused of the brutal rape and murder of a white female jogger. The teens were wrongly convicted and served years in prison before they were exonerated with DNA evidence. Nor did she stumble across discussion of John O’Donnell’s 1991 book wherein the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City reports his boss saying:

 Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.

Trump at first denied having said this, but in a 1997 interview admitted that it was “probably true.”

Current events also seem to elude her. Like Trump falsely accusing legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio of eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs, a claim he repeated at a number of his events, even after his words incited bomb threats in the community; and his vow to remove their Temporary Protected Status and deport them if he is elected. Or the many times during this campaign he has described undocumented immigrants from south of the border as rapists, killers, and “bloodthirsty criminals” who he believes are genetically predisposed to such behavior. (In fact, a major study has found that undocumented immigrants offend at lower rates than both legal immigrants and US citizens.)

Taking Murphy’s article at face value, one might assume that the description of Trump as “fascist” is leftist demagoguery; in fact, it originates with military generals who served in his administration. They are also among those calling him a “liar,” along with “diplomats, intelligence officers and security strategists.” Trump’s own vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, messaged a friend in 2016, wondering whether Trump was “America’s Hitler” and described Trump as a “moral disaster.”

Murphy’s “research” also appears to have significant gaps when it comes to Trump’s misogyny. Gen Z voters have only just discovered, and are sharing on TikTok, the Access Hollywood tape, wherein Trump brags about how he doesn’t wait, but “just starts kissing” any woman to whom he’s attracted. He continues:

When you’re a star, you can do it. They let you do anything… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.

That generation is aged 12-27, so, understandably, might have been unaware of a tape recorded in 2005 and published in 2016. Murphy, however, is in her mid-forties and for many years identified as a feminist. Moreover, the “grab them by the pussy” quote inspired the pink hats worn by nearly half a million women at the 2017 women’s march in Washington, DC, part of a worldwide protest of Trump’s election. Hard to fathom how she missed it.

Image credit: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

When he owned the Miss Teen USA pageant, Trump bragged about walking unannounced into the women’s changing rooms to ogle naked women.

His position as the pageant’s owner entitled him to that kind of access, Trump explained, seemingly aware that what he was doing made the women uncomfortable. “You know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore I’m inspecting it… Is everyone OK? You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that,” he said.

Asked to comment, Trump’s daughter Ivanka “shrugged it off, saying, ‘Yeah, he does that.’”

Earlier this year, a federal judge upheld the 2023 verdict against Trump for sexual abuse perpetrated on E Jean Carroll, whom he was ordered to pay $5 million. Given his well-known history as a sexual predator, his threat at a recent campaign rally to “protect the women, whether they like it or not!” is particularly ominous.

Murphy’s “independent inquiry” fails on the electorate and campaign issues as well. Murphy imagines Trump’s supporters to be largely rural working class people. However, a Pew research study of middle class metropolitan areas found that:

Although many middle-class areas voted for Barack Obama in 2008, they overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump in 2016, a shift that was a key to his victory.

Statisca analysis of voting patterns in the 2020 election found that 57% of those earning less than $50k a year, and 56% of those earning $50,000-$99,999 a year voted for President Joe Biden, while 54% of those earning more than $100,000 a year voted for Donald Trump. Of those who attacked the capitol on January 6th, 2021, at Trump’s instigation, 40% were business owners or held white collar jobs.

Murphy criticizes Hillary Clinton for calling Trump supporters “deplorables,” and President Biden for calling them “garbage.” Biden says his comment referred to the comedian platformed at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally who described Puerto Rico as garbage floating in the ocean. Whatever the case, neither Clinton nor Biden are running against Trump. That would be Vice President Kamala Harris, who refused to be baited into name-calling. During a Fox News interview, Brent Baier pressed her to describe Trump’s supporters, asking “Why is half the country supporting him? Are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?” To which she replied, “Oh, God, I would never say that about the American people.”

Murphy claims that the “Democrats continue to appeal to identity politics and fear-mongering” when citizens are more concerned about economic issues, crime that has “run rampant,” and transgender politics. However, a striking feature of the current election is the dialing back on “identity politics.” Though she may make history as the first woman, and woman of color, to be elected US president, Harris herself never highlights that aspect of her candidacy as a reason to vote for her.

Earlier this year, many women delegates and supporters wore white to the Democratic National Convention, a symbol of suffrage and women’s rights. Both Hillary Clinton, the first female candidate for president, and Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice presidential candidate, also wore white at their conventions; Kamala Harris did not. Whenever she is asked about specific voting blocs, such as women or black men, Harris emphasizes that she knows she must be a president for all Americans and earn every vote.

Moreover, trans politics have not been prominent and two Democratic senators in tight races, Colin Allred (TX) and Sherrod Brown (OH), have said that they do not support males in female sport. Here they mirror the US electorate; several polls have found that while a majority do not think it fair for males to compete in female sport, they also favor broad civil rights for trans people. The Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (WSPWG) has endorsed Harris for president and submitted a proposal to the Harris/Walz team that calls for preserving the female category in sport, while accommodating trans-identified males through either a 3rd “open” category, or educating men to accept gender nonconforming males in the men’s category.

Murphy, who opposed Covid restrictions, cites them as a cause of child poverty. However, Democrat-led covid relief policies halved child poverty; when key Republican legislators blocked renewal of the program, “the poverty rate bounced right back up.” Vice President Harris, who Murphy describes as “incompetent,” “phoney (sic),” and incapable of discussing policy, has proposed a number of measures to provide financial relief for Americans, including restoring and making permanent the child tax credit, an additional child tax credit of $6000 during the first year of a child’s life, providing down payment support up to $25,000 for first time home-buyers, and increasing the first-year tax deduction for small businesses from $5000 to $50,000. 

Trump, on the other hand, has no similar proposals and is notorious for stiffing workers. He has been the subject of at least 60 lawsuits accusing him of failing to pay workers for their labor and services. Among them: 

[A] dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.

More recently, in an interview with Elon Musk, Trump expressed admiration for Musk’s practice of firing striking workers. At a September campaign rally, he talked about how he hated paying workers overtime, would “get other people, and wouldn’t pay.”

Murphy asserts that the “defund the police” movement “appears to have gotten” its way, with “violent criminals left to their own devices.” However, both FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicate otherwise. Although the US is still plagued by mass shootings, overall violent and property crime rates have declined. FBI data indicates that violent crime fell 49% and property crime by 59% between 1993 and 2022. BJS statistics indicate that both violent and property crime fell by 71% during the same time period.

Astonishingly, abortion rights, which is emerging as a key driver of the women’s vote this election, does not factor into Murphy’s analysis at all. As soon as the Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health (2022), which overturned abortion rights at the federal level, was handed down, VP Harris became a vocal advocate for restoration. There has never been a politician who so unequivocally supported full abortion rights, and she brings down the house at her rallies every time she passionately exclaims, “The government should not be telling us what do to with our bodies!”

This issue is considered likely the biggest driver of new registrations among women voters, and their higher turnout at early voting - so far, roughly 10 percentage points higher than men. Trump, who initially bragged about having appointed the justices who overturned abortion rights, has now backed off and far right men, alarmed at the female turnout, have begun angrily urging men to vote.

Murphy’s discussion of the character of Donald Trump and the issues at stake has virtually no basis in fact and bears no resemblance to the situation here on the ground. It is as if she is voting in some other election, defined not by her independent “research” but instead by GOP and libertarian talking points - that VP Harris is incompetent, that Covid restrictions and Black Lives Matter have created a poverty-stricken lawless society, that Donald Trump is a champion of the worker.

The law requires that citizens who have never lived here register to vote in the state where the parent from whom they get their citizenship resides or resided. For Murphy, that state is California, an overwhelmingly blue state with 54 electoral votes, the highest of any state. Tomorrow night, when the California electoral votes are recorded for Kamala Harris, I’ll be raising a glass with a smile on my face.