I’m not from the US, so I’m curious why Americans still wants him back. I always see him as a bad mouthed guy and was worse when he lost in 2020. But feel free to change my mind. This question is also for non-trump supporters who can think of one thing (if you can) on why he’s good for the top position.
You are a multimillionaire that has plenty of options on leaving if things get rough, but in the interim you can look forward to tax breaks and more lax controls/protections over whatever industry you may be involved in.
As for the rest of them, he’s flying the right colored flag and that’s about it.
the american right thrives on propaganda and boy howdy do they have a lot of it.
Immigrants? simultaneously lazy welfare moochers and will steal all jobs forever
women? sluts with no self control that must abstain themselves always, except for you of course
queer people? pedophile groomers that hate you specifically
black people? Racism was solved 100 years ago according to these white guys! now they’re claiming that it’s systemic?!
Any and all political opponents? Corrupt. Monetarily? Characterally? Spiritually? yes.
A lot of people are very religious and oppose abortion. And that is literally the only issue they care about. Trump stacked the Supreme Court and got abortion made illegal in many states. They love him for that.
Some people think he’s stronger on the economy. They just think “look at all this inflation we’ve had under Biden! It wasn’t like this when Trump was in control.” Of course they can’t think far enough to realize that perhaps a global pandemic caused this inflation and there was little that Biden could have done to stop it.
I think those are the big two reasons. But then there is the propaganda. People are made to believe that crime is running rampant despite the fact that violent crime is actually relatively low compared to in the past. Illegal immigrants are vilified as criminals who are bringing drugs and crime into the country while taking advantage of government benefits. The propaganda says that Democrats are the cause of these problems, and Trump is the solution. Tons of people fall for it. And Democrats are really bad at counter-propaganda.
My aunt is religious and votes mainly on abortion. She’s voted republican for years. She didn’t vote last time Trump was the nominee because she couldn’t stand him and couldn’t vote democrat because abortion.
They just think “look at all this inflation we’ve had under Biden! It wasn’t like this when Trump was in control.” Of course they can’t think far enough to realize that perhaps a global pandemic caused this inflation and there was little that Biden could have done to stop it.
Which is particularly painful because Trump overheated the economy before the global pandemic even got off the ground. It’s a sort of miracle things aren’t worse than they are in that regard.
Having formerly been a rural Republican, there is no good reason to vote Trump. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. People vote for him because they’re some mixture of uninformed, misinformed, psychotic, or psychopathic. The broader GOP party is fully culpable, too.
Let’s explore some profiles:
17-year-old “lel kek” 4chan/8chan nihilist troll who just wants to act like a dumbass and think Trump is so cooolll.
Grandpa who never left his home town. Never been on an airplane. Watches fox news 24/7.
Your crazy uncle who listens to right wing radio while commuting to work and has a major temper problem, loves his compensatory guns that give him a sense of agency in his sad pathetic life. He loves to blame immigrants for his own problems.
The racist sexist meth head or anyone overly exposed to lead.
The good Christian church goer wrapped around abortion and contrary to the pillar of individual freedom is desperately trying to arbitrate their own sense of morality on others.
The gullible uninformed coworker that doesn’t tune into politics all that much but they’re a crowd pleaser and all his coworkers talk about is how great Trump is, so must be true. They’re not educated all that much and so struggle to use critical-thinking to discern truth from falsehoods.
The grifting pillow salesmen who recognized dumb people are easily grifted so starts feeding the choir and selling them merchandise in one form or another. Bannon fits this.
Deadbeats who love fake it til you make it and see that it worked for Trump. They love that their lifelong habits of bullying are validated by him and so feel empowered.
Funny you mention pillow salesmen: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/15/mypillow-ceo-expand-lindell-tv-network-trump
He will maintain the social order of your community.
Women will lose their rights in a variety of ways, making them dependent on their men.
Public Education will become worse, keeping the economic status of families where they are.
Police will be allowed to be as corrupt as they want to be and will be able to oppress disadvantaged groups as they want to.
I’d guess a majority of people are dissatisfied with the status quo, and Trump represents chaos, change. It’s not a rational decision, but whatever your reason for dissatisfaction, Trump is about as far from a conventional establishment candidate as you could find.
I’m not suggesting, at all, that Trump would fix any of these issues; in fact, he’d exacerbate many of them. But Biden, Hillary, and now Harris are the ones who’d continue many of them. And I’m also not saying that all of these are real issues, but his base thinks they are:
- wealth inequality. The rich have provably, measurably, been getting richer, social movement has all but stopped, and many middle class are losing ground
- the loss of traditional jobs, and thereby, ways of life. Midwest small town life, where everyone knows everyone, has been dying as the jobs that support them fade away through automaton and consolidation under corporations. The faces you see in town are often strangers, and worse, strangers who look different from you, are a different color, and often are speaking a language with their buddies that you don’t understand.
- healthcare in this country is abysmal
- all you read about in the news is about people fighting for things you find disgusting: children wanting to be a different gender, people wanting to marry their own gender (which forces you to imagine what the sex is like, and this makes you uncomfortable), even more people who don’t look like you or who talk differently coming into the country - overrunning and irreversibly changing your way of life.
- the climate is changing, and is making things worse, and is noticeable within living memory. This isn’t gramps remembering everything as the glory days; this is you, remembering that there used to be more snow in the winters, or we didn’t used to have to fight with so much drought.
- if you’re gen-z or younger, the future looks bleak. You can’t afford housing, healthcare, or many of the things your parents enjoyed.
- the past 50 years have been a constant slide into a culture you don’t understand. Every few months, you’re told you can’t use words that you did when you were kids. It used to be “cowboys and Indians;” and then you couldn’t call them Indians, it had to be “native Americans;” and then, once you got used to that, you were told you couldn’t call them “native Americans” anymore, and it had to be “indigenous people.” Gays had to be homosexuals, and then LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA or LGBTQ+ or god knows what it is this week. And it’s all you hear about in the news anymore.
- not only are the Blacks still upset about slavery, but now they’re talking about making you pay them for it?
- whenever you see cops on TV, they look more and more like police in some banana republic, with military gear… almost as if they’re paramilitary, and that makes you uncomfortable
- all that stuff crazy Eddy talks about - tinfoil hat stuff - keeps getting confirmed by the news. Your computer is spying on you, tracking you, watching everything you do and reporting it to some corporation, selling it - and the government only has to ask and they can get all of that. There’s no privacy anymore.
- it seems as if there are fewer small businesses and more giant corporations. The local grocer shut down when Walmart put in a store - heck, a lot of mainstreet stores did - leaving mainstreet a hallow shell. I mean, sure, you shop at Walmart, but you aren’t really connecting the dots or take responsibility. It’s easier just to blame The Corporations.
- but there’s also a new generation who does nothing except bitch about how they can’t get any good jobs that pay a living wage or provide healthcare, the greedy little bastards
- women are uppity, and don’t know their place. They’re not making babies, like they should, they’re competing with you for jobs.
- vegans want to take your hamburgers away
The country just isn’t as good as it used to be, and it’s not because of your behaviors - shopping at Walmart, shopping at Amazon, joining Facebook and using GMail and Google search, driving your gas-guzzling hemi pickup (which is actually a work truck because you helped your buddy move his couch once) - it’s because of some indistinct them: immigrants, politicians, corporations, gays, blacks, Millenials, The Media. And here’s a guy who says he’s going to fix all that, and boy did he piss off all those people who represent everything you hate. He turned the Supreme Court around! Things were finally going the way you wanted.
And above all of that are the Christians. They’ve been indoctrinated to believe in hierarchy: woman above child, man above women, and God above man. Having a king just feels right, an earthly authority who, with a wave of a pen, can turn the tide against progressives. I honestly believe that having a dictator - a sympathetic dictator - is a subconscious desire for most people brought up as Christians. They believe in hierarchy; it feels right.
That is a very good explanation right there. Very comprehensive, emphatic.
I would love to hear a design, a plan from the progressive left to solve these problems, a narrative that somehow manages to adress these fears these issues and offer another way for “disgruntled right wing conservative Christian average joe” and make left ideas more attractive and understandable to them. Because in the end, a progressive left has better solutions to problems than the right. Unfortunately it seems as though there is no such thing in the U.S.
Thank you.
I would love to hear a design, a plan from the progressive left to solve these problems
Many of these things aren’t really “problems.” For example,
- The immigration issue is a red herring, a dog whistle. It’s not a real issue, at least not in the way it’s presented by conservatives.
- You can not satisfy both sides of the abortion issue.
- You can’t satisfy both sides of the genocide in Palestine.
However, if there’s one place Hillary really messed up, it was further alienating blue collar, fly-over country Americans. She mainly appealed to the coasts, and white collar workers. Kamala is going to have to double down on Biden’s efforts to win back the Unions, and really appeal to blue collar. Promising them new, better paying jobs in emerging technology sectors; new training without forcing them into higher-ed white collar office jobs. Not everyone wants to sit an office and work on a computer. But you can still promise to bring construction and manufacturing jobs for things like windmills and solar panels. Promise to put every effort into opening opportunities maybe not in exactly the same industry, but the same type of work. Lots of folks like working with their hands; if Kamala is smart, she’ll campaign on bringing new jobs that pay higher, with high skill overlap to what they’re doing now.
I honestly don’t think people like being coal miners. But they might like that lifestyle: hard, reliable work with consistent, reliable hours, and the ability to live in rural communities where their neighbors are people they work with and know.
Cops like prosecutors. While there are absolutely bad cops, and bad cop culture, when police work in the neighborhoods where they live, they tend to be compassionate and want to resolve issues. Problems start when you bring cops who live in the suburbs and have them police inner city neighborhoods: they don’t know the community, and the community doesn’t know them. When the majority of their interactions with a community are with criminal elements, they start to see everyone in the community as a likely criminal. Plus, there are often race issues, as the suburb and inner city demographics widely differ. She could focus on that, although she really wouldn’t have any direct control over local law enforcement policies, she could campaign to have task forces working on incentivize good policy.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I think Harris’s path to success is to try to appeal to as many sectors as possible (as I’ve described in examples above) without sacrificing the core liberal value of tolerance. She can’t win over the intolerant directly, but she might be able to convince some people that they’d rather have economic growth and opportunities than to stick it to some brown people.
Thank you for taking the time and effort to add something substantial to the political discussion. I think designing and discussing actual plans to improve peoples situation in a constructive manner is what’s needed.
The greatest danger lies in simplification of multi-faceted political issues and appealing to strong emotions such as fear and anger.
It’d be nice to see more constructive, balanced, respectful dialogue.
Most people I know support Trump because they perceive him as a “strong man”, which they value in a leader. They see Democrats as “soft”. They his wealth, his treatment of women, his treatment of employees, and his reaction to being shot as signs of strength. Another reason is they see him as being more supportive of their one true religion. He comes across as the chosen one and closer to God than most.
He comes across as the chosen one and closer to God than most.
This is the greatest hypocracy for which I cannot forgive Christian Republicans.
This is a man who, by his deeds and unrepentance for them, is the most unchristian of any candidate he’s faced. The only time he’s held a Bible was when waving it for a photo op, or when at a rally for Christians. He has set foot in any church in his adult life probably about the same number of times a I’ve read the Bible - which is few, but not many. And this, compared to men and women who attend their’s regularly.
He is the most un-Christian candidate to have campaigned for the Presidency in probably the entire history of the US. And these hypocritical bastards worship him like the golden calf.
What’s funny to me is that people are drawing connections from the Bible and the signs of the anti Christ to him. Lol.
Hey, I’ll admit, that little boy brought up by the fundamentalist father; who once Christmas asked for a leather case for his Bible; who really did read the Bible cover to cover, old and new testaments, multiple times - that little boy is looking at Trump’s base and seeing those warnings about the anti-Christ. It’s not Trump. He’s a foul person, but there are worse. It’s how his base is reacting to him that makes me think of the anti-Christ.
There have been plenty of cults of personality, but this isn’t another Pope, where, yeah, you kiss his ring but it’s God you worship. No, his base worship him. I’m an atheist now, but that Christian child in me is still a little wigged out.
I think the bible even warns them to be on the lookout for charlatans like him. I can’t remember the quote/chapter/verse tho.
Because they hear strong man and don’t realize it’s really strongman.
Accerlerationists want to burn it all
Mental illness.
You think he’s a messianic figure who will save us from the Satanic baby-killing cabal.
It would be nice for someone else to take the spotlight in the clown show.
Sincerely, the UK.
I’m not saying it’s a good reason, but people in flyover country get resentful when coastal elites don’t even try to hide how they see them as degenerate inbred racist morons and want to exert ever-increasing control over their lives and impose their values.
Pardon me for asking, but how exactly would voting Trump help with that?
Like thinking you need to go on a diet so you decide to go for a nice fat döner roll. Seems counterproductive.
It won’t, but it clearly annoys those damn smug city folk.
It won’t, really, but he says he’ll fight against the elites.
I live in Montana. Trust me, the people here see everyone else as inbred degenerates and want to exert ever increasing control over their lives 💀
Foreign powers (church or another country) basically paying to make you think you should do it
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You’re a rich, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, single, heterosexual, cisgender, male, incel and you have a worthless life and nobody loves you and you think it’d be neat to turn a democratic state into a fascist one.
