I have been trying for quite some time now to figure out why Pres. Trump is still popular. Yes, at the present time Biden is a little ahead. But even that is distressing. Why is Biden only a little ahead? To me the choice should be obvious.Yet about half the country still loves him.
Mr. Trump is clearly unfit for office. He lies continuously. He only cares about himself. And even shocking, surely his followers must know this. They aren’t dumb. Let’s face it.
Anyways, Mr. Trump is clearly appealing the racist faction of the party. That is not surprising. Every Republican does it. It is par for the course. But Pres. Trump is really doing that. Overdoing it, I tend to think. And my question is, could that be no accident?
He wants to be reëlected at any price. Why not?
I know he would never admit it, and neither would his followers. If interviewed, they would even deny it. But what other reason could there be for his popularity?
I know on another thread on these boards, I once read, perhaps a good section of U.S. voters are racist. I don’t remember where I read that (please help me, if you know). But could that have something to do with it?
I think plenty of people would admit it. Back before he was elected, but still on the campaign trail, every time he’d say something stupid/rude/racist and news crews would get reactions from people assuming they’d be offended and say they weren’t going to vote for him, we’d hear the same thing, over and over and over again “he just says what we’re all thinking”.
It might not be an outright admission of “I’m voting for him because he’s racist and so am I” but it’s certainly not deny the possibility either and a lot of people certainly said they were more than happy that he was going to build a wall to keep the Mexicans out and were on board with mass deportations.
And that’s the thing about Trump. If 10% of the US was racist and the other 90%, regardless of party correlation, weren’t, Trump wouldn’t be either, or at least not as part of his platform.
I won’t deny that his appeal to some voters in the general election is his racism, but for most of them it’s just the fact that he’s the Republican - or specifically not the Democrat. Likewise for single issue voters. I suspect there are a lot more anti-abortion voters than racist voters in the US and Trump gets their votes by default. In a primary, though? Yeah, I can’t help but think a majority of Republicans voting for him for anything other than name recognition have a xenophobic or racist streak.
I encounter a bunch of people who’s main argument goes something like this: “All government is a useless ineffectual waste. Both traditional parties are simply sucking at the public trough in their own way. Trump is pranking the system and I like that.”
To be sure, this deeply cynical argument was easier to maintain before COVID. But I think it explains a lot of Trump’s success in being elected and his popularity in e.g. 2016-2017.
It’s not necessarily his appeal to racism, but it’s his appeal to the idea of America as a white and Christian nation. The distinction being that those who believe in America that a country that runs on racial apartheid is probably a minority that couldn’t win national office, but the proportion of whites who are more comfortable with an archetypal white Christian male as president is considerably larger. I agree that many won’t admit it publicly and that these feelings and attitudes operate at the subconscious level.
Trump appeals to those who believe America is a white nation and that white Americans should not apologize or feel guilty for their past - because the past is that past and shit happens, so get it over it already. Though some probably are genuine racists, I think more are just racially insensitive and don’t believe that the past matters all that much in the present.
Some people are going to stick with him no matter what, because to do otherwise would mean admitting that they were wrong, about him or about the reasons they supported him. It’s psychologically easier for them to avoid or disregard any evidence that they were wrong.
The appeal of the Republican party since 1964 has largely been its appeal to the racist feelings of people who felt abandoned by the Democratic party’s support for civil rights in the 1960s. So, those “I vote Republican no matter what” voters are already doing it from a racist position.
They would be about 90 years old at this point, and, if they’re still alive, they became Democrats long before. Those who are still Republicans have decided that they’re comfortable enough with the racism to stay.
I think a lot of them are racist in that the results of the policies and candidates that they vote for end up being racist, but I dont’ think they perceive themselves, the candidates or the policies as racist.
To use an example, they aren’t voting for policies that punish and/or hinder illegal/undocumented immigrants because they specifically have a hard on for messing with Hispanics. AFAIK, they honestly are against the idea of people sneaking into the country and bypassing all the immigration stuff we have in place to regulate it, and in defiance of the laws against it. To them it seems like a giant middle finger to the concepts of law and order. They’d be against Canadians or Europeans doing the same thing, but as most Canadians don’t want any part of moving here, it’s not really an issue.
So in their mind, it’s not racist, as they’re not doing it with the intent of messing with Mexicans or other Hispanics.
Same thing with stuff like minority only scholarships. They want to do away with them not because they explicitly want to prevent minorities from going to college, but because they think that scholarships should be color-blind, and if that means all white students, then so be it.
I think for the most part, their attitudes are ones of extreme naivete, and/or ignorance of how the world actually works. For example, they don’t realize that a lot of minority students don’t have the home or community support structures that white students do, and that society and the educational system treat them differently. They assume (wrongly) that everyone is treated the same, and that the granting of minority-only scholarships is some sort of politically motivated exercise at the expense of better qualified students. Which if you are looking at it from a place of ignorance about how “qualified” is defined, it sure looks like it is a politically motivated thing.
Now I’m not convinced that the actual elected politicians are so ignorant; I bet a lot of them know what’s up, but choose to vote in a deliberately racist way because they’re more concerned with getting reelected than voting their consciences. We’ve seen them do that repeatedly since 2016, so I’m inclined to believe that they have no interest in dispelling the ignorance/naivete of their constituents, and in fact have a vested interest in keeping them in the dark, as it keeps them in power.
I don’t know about that- I live in NYC where there have been quite a few illegal Irish immigrants for as long as I can remember. ( I think in 2017, there were something like 50K in the US, not sure about now) and I’ve actually asked people who want to close the Mexican border “What about the illegal Irish? " and the answer was " They’re different” . "Different how? " I would ask, and no one would answer.
I think there’s a third group: those who are naive, ignorant, and uncritical enough to have been taken in by the lies and propaganda spewed forth by the first two.
Huh… I wasn’t aware there is an illegal Irish population in NYC. Around here (Texas), the vast, vast majority of undocumented/illegal immigrants are Hispanic, so pretty much stuff like illegal Irish are sort of theoretical at best.
Heck yes it’s his draw. A lot of people don’t really know what they want to see done about taxes or health care or infrastructure or whatever. But they do know who they hate. And having a leader who hates the same people they do is really all they care about. The country may blow its pandemic response or let Russia reform the USSR, but as long as Herr Donald hates the blacks and Mexicans it’s just fine to the racist base.
I think it is less about people overtly supporting him for his policies vs. they like how he makes them feel and they rationalize why they are OK with the specifics of what he says and does. It’s called motivated reasoning.
