I love honesty in a world where honesty has now become in short supply, and I like honesty more when the person — in this case, Trevor Coleman — shares his views on this crazy, mixed-up world that he sees for what it is: an American without a moral compass.

On Facebook the other day, Trevor posted a thoughtful essay about the Trump era, and in response, somebody countered his view with this thought: How many Trump voters really voted out of race hate though? How many were waiving Confederate flags? Do you have any empirical evidence for that or are you just calling 77 million people magats?

Empirical evidence? What more does this critic of Trevor need?

It’s a fact that Donald Trump is a felon. Just look it up. It’s a fact Donald Trump is a misogynist. Just look it up. It’s a fact Donald Trump is a xenophobe. Just look it up. It’s unproven, however, whether Donald Trump is bent on destroying America, although the landscape is littered with evidence that suggests he is.

Just look it up.

Another fact: 77,284,118 people in America voted for Donald Trump. Yet inside that big number, and you discover that it represents less than 50 percent of those who went to the polls last November. They liked Donald Trump, who flipped six states to his side from the 2020 election, for whatever reason. I’m still struggling to figure out why.

Did they not hear the man say (or believe him) when he vowed to spread napalm across the political landscape? Did they not hear him promise to attack his critics with the legal system, that he’d kick Hispanic aliens out of the country with due process, that he’d take a meat cleaver to the U.S. Department of Education and that he’d levy hefty tariffs on enemies and allies alike?

Did those 77,284,118 voters not remember the America that Donald Trump, a fragile, narrow-minded man, left for Joe Biden to straighten out?

Yet none of this stopped people from looking at a despicable candidate, a felon, and deciding he was right for the country.

Poring over those vote totals, Trevor put it like this: “I’m not sure which is more offensive: their feigning innocence in their motivations for voting for an explicitly racist/fascist takeover of our government. Or their clucking in pious disgust while decking themselves in pedantic velvet demanding that … empirical data proving Trump voters were motivated by his explicit appeals to bigotry.”

I agree.

For everything about Donald Trump pointed toward bigotry, toward a candidate bent on turning a multiracial democracy into a white oligarchy. Voters should have seen him as a more impetuous, a more vengeful leader than he was during his first term as president, and for any of his supporters to demand empirical data tells me they were either blind to what they saw in his first term or they were dumb. I give them no other choices.

Now, I understand that Kamala Harris wasn’t the perfect candidate. Have we had a perfect candidate in U.S. history? No. But she was everything a president ought to be. Harris was smart; Harris was seasoned in politics; and Harris was absent grudges that needed to be set right.

With all of this in their face, several things should have separated Harris from Donald Trump: her experience, her gender and her skin color.

To ignore those differences with empirical evidence to prove it shows the Trump supporters preferred to rely on myth and to believe the lies.

The latter doesn’t govern well, which explains why a second Trump term is tearing America apart at its seams.