Are Trump supporters so far in they can't back out?

Great Debates
21

I’m a guy who leans slightly right, but who is no fan of Trump.

I think a large reason conservatives don’t chime in on discussions such as these is that this board is so far left, with a membership percentage that is so heavily left, that they don’t even bother. Just look at your post:

and

and

and

and then you want to note that “I’m just an innocent guy trying to understand.”

But you’re not just an innocent guy trying to understand.

This will be a feeding frenzy the first time someone tries to defend their position on Trump. And I’m sure they’re largely saying, “why bother?”

22

I think he was voted in by people who tired of being screwed by the government and having a lot of things they find offensive forced upon them. They truly don’t care if they too get screwed by his actions, mostly because they perceive that they’re going to get screwed by the government no matter who is in the White House.

So they vote in a guy who’s promised to turn everything on it’s ear. They love that the rest of America is offended by everything he says and does. The more groups of people he screws over, the more they love him. And they feel vindicated watching the wailing over truly offensive things being forced unto a segment of society usually on the other side of that equation. They are lapping it up and see no need to question their choice.

They truly don’t care that he lies constantly, has his kids in government, owes money to the Russians, in business with the Chinese, swears at rallies, jails children. None of it matters to them. They didn’t hire him to be anything other than what you see!

(Just one opinion, of course!)

23

This goes, though, to a gross misunderstanding of what the other side wants. Treating Hispanic people ruthlessly isn’t a straw that will break the camel’s back; Trumpists see it as a really positive development. It was a campaign promise, and the promise was kept. This is what they voted for, so why would it be “the thing” that changes their minds?

24

Fine-criticism accepted.
Please re-write the OP in a way that would encourage Trump supporters to explain what it would take for them to no longer support him, if you please?

25
  1. I never said that.
  2. What I am is a man who wonders where people’s limits are when it comes to politics.
26

Sorry, kinda busy right now, being lectured on civility by a guy who brags on grabbing women by the pussy.

27

Exactly. To the trumpists, everything is going along fine. The brown people are being put into camps, [del]the SS[/del] ICE is being given the power needed to protect us from evil Mexican rapists, the moochers on the teat of the American Economy are getting kicked off and pretty soon Amerika will be back like it was in The Good Old Days. Why should they abandon their Chosen One? They are WINNING.

28

It’s not hard to find it - it’s just hard to actually read it without instantly responding “No, that’s not why - it’s just racism”. You guys aren’t listening.

This.

It can’t be done. No discussion of Trump on the SDMB is going to get anything besides 95+% “posts like this”. And at least one Pitting.

That’s how it is.

Regards,
Shodan

29

That’s a natural consequence of trying to defend the indefensible.

30

You *could *try presenting an argument instead of preemptively whining. But we never get to see one, do we?

31

Maybe if we had a protected thread for people to discuss why they support Trump, like the “Positive Gun Use” thread in MPSIMS?

32

See that’s an interesting discussion because it can be applied to both sides. I’ll be honest- I was a huge supporter of the previous president. if you asked me the same question, what would make me pull away from him,my honest response would be: I can’t really think of anything other than him completely reversing position on a majority of stances (and by majority, he would need to be worse than the Republican opposition, not just equal). I might abandon him for a sufficiently serious personal failure- spousal, child abuse- because then his VP, who also has consistently similar policy positions, would take the wheel.

I assume that most people have a similar decision making process As stated elsewhere, Trump is acting consistently with his campaign. His policy IS his tone. If you supported him then, I see no reason why you would not support him now.

33

Trumpism is based on racism and sexism. Those people will support him because there’s nowhere else to go. That is his core.

But other supporters are simply following their tribe–they support him strongly while their tribe does. But tribal support need not be forever. If the tribe removes its support, Trump’s support will be reduced to his core racists and sexists.

I don’t pretend to know what would cause that tribe to change its mind. I’m simply noting that many people support him because most of their community does. Much of their social signaling and media is an attempt to keep the tribe unified around supporting Trump. So they are feeling pressure to abandon him, but it might a long while before they actually do.

In reply to both:

But this board does have a spectrum of political opinion. The problem is that the “conservative” label has been more and more narrowly defined in political discourse.

In any rational political system, I’m on the right. I support family values, meaning that I support policies that enable adults caring for children to care for them better. I support limited government, meaning that I support policies that prevent interference with the lives of private citizens. I support fiscal responsibility, meaning that I support budgetary and monetary policies that enable economic growth. I think character matters, meaning that I think our leaders should be moral, ethical, and just.

But “conservative” has come to mean anti-abortion and anti-birth-control (making it harder for families to care for their children, and increasing government interference into private lives), mandatory patriotism (increased government interference), anti-immigration (increased government interference and stunting economic growth), anti-gay (government interference and makes our society less just), pro-cronyism (graft hurts our economy and morality), low tax revenues (with the corresponding debt service stunting growth), and yet the federal taxes I’m personally paying have gone up (double whammy of worsening mine own financial situation while worsening the overall economic).

“Conservatives” have made their tent small and uncomfortable, and then wonder why so few people are in it.

34

I mean that’s really the point. You can’t say ‘What are the limits of Trump supporters?’ because Trump supporters aren’t monolithic. Stonebow would defend Obama through pretty much anything and I was not on his page after he killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, so I didn’t vote in 2012. (I’m not a fan of extra-judicial killings regardless of the intent.) I’m sure there are Trumpians that are the same. There are some that would stand by him if he personally drove a tank over a kindergarten graduation while laughing maniacally and saying ‘Thus to the enemies of Trumpistan.’ and there are some that have probably left him over the handling of family separation (not as many as I would like unfortunately, and they might all go back to him in time.)

35

And this is part of the problem. I’m also a guy who “leans slightly right”. I’m Canadian, not American, but I voted for the Conservative party is every election up until the last two Federal elections, and the recent Ontario election, because I’m one of those who leans slightly right, who also recognizes that the parties on the right have gone completely insane in the last 15 years or so. I’ve put effort into trying to rein in the worst excesses here in Canada, only to watch the Crazy Wing of the party repudiate virtually everything the party used to stand for.

So I’m not some raving loonie hippy-dippy who sees fascists in every Bush.

The problem is, there are lots of people who either actually support what is being done, or who literally don’t care about any of this crap, so long as their taxes are getting cut. Neither of those groups are likely to give a thoughtful, honest response.

The rest are the types who actually believe Trump’s nonsense, and those types are just generally incapable of writing a thoughtful response.

Which is exactly my point.

I’ve tried to engage people on these issue in other venues, and it’s always a complete failure, no matter how blindingly obvious the issues are. Ontario just elected a “fiscal conservative” who promised to increase spending, lower the deficit, and cut taxes, and more than 40% of the voters just didn’t see any problem with that.

And that’s just math. Forget trying to talk about something more complicated, like ethics and morality.

Feel free to try, but expect failure.

36

I’ve never noticed the right leaning board members here being shy about expressing their opinions in the face of disagreement.

37

I never said they were, and I believe I did ask what each Trump supporter’s turning point would be, if there actually was a point at which they would actually drop their support of him. I am not in favor of posts that dismiss his supporters as a whole-I find them counterproductive.

38

There’s a documentary called The Brainwashing of My Dad that discusses the way the media he chose to consume changed the filmmaker’s father from a lifelong Democrat to an “angry right-wing fanatic”. The doc came out in 2015, so it predates the 2016 election and its aftermath. Some of it is too simplistic, but it’s interesting in its discussion of brainwashing techniques. I believe it’s on both Netflix and Amazon Prime.

39

Imagine for a moment you’d asked this question a year ago. Also imagine if you’d posted a list of possible “points”, and asked them to choose which one would stop them from supporting Trump:

[ol]
[li]Banning Muslim immigration[/li][li]Nominating incompetent people for cabinet posts[/li][li]getting into a trade war with Canada[/li][li]praising Kim Jong-Un[/li][li]putting toddlers in a concentration camp[/li][/ol]
Would you have really expected anyone to say, “Nope, no problem!” to everything in that list?

And yet, here were are a year later, and they’re all perfectly okay with all that, and so much more.

40

I’m not a Trump supporter, but the reaction to the current border issues has been an interesting one for me to observe.

While I think that Trump has chosen one of the more cruel possible policies, and done so mostly out of hate and cruelty, I also realize that there are only bad options available here.

If you keep kids together with their families, then you can’t keep them incarcerated for a long time, justifiably, because it’s cruel to keep kids in jail for months on end.

If you let families with kids out of detention (which was effectively the previous policy), then some of them are just going to disappear into the country. And it also is an incentive for more people to bring their kids with them. Which, hey, I’m mostly fine with. I approve of greatly increased immigration and am an advocate of (eventual) open borders. But I’m well aware that there’s zero political will for moving in that direction.

I can see why he and his supporters think that a wall is a great solution to this. If there’s a giant wall that is really hard to get over, then things aren’t any better for refugees, but all the pain and heartbreak and violence done to immigrants is Somebody Else’s Problem.

I can simultaneously believe that Trump is an asshole, but also that there’s no coherent immigration policy that we can seem to agree on as a nation, and that pointing out how much of an asshole Trump is doesn’t get us any closer to that.

Also as a somewhat more right-leaning member of the board than the average poster (I’m probably in the “moderate democrat” range, nationwide), I can confirm that there are issues that I simply won’t talk about on this board because it feels unproductive (or, at least, which every time I am dumb enough to talk about them, I reconfirm that it was dumb to do so). For every person who is interested in a conversation, there are five people telling me I’m a moron and misconstruing my posts.

It feels to me like this has gotten worse over the years, although that might be because I’ve moved to the right compared to the board over the years.

Could be because I’ve become more of a moron, too. I mean, I don’t think that’s the reason, but the wisdom of the crowd says so.