I think the problem is that I don’t hear many honest arguments in favor of Trump. I heard on Fox news Sean Hannity referred to the Bloomberg interview as one of the “greatest alltime moments on the campaign trail” praising Trump for schooling John Micklethwait and laying out a clear vision for America’s economic future. I have a hard time believing Hannity believes Trump performed well. Trump was evasive, insulted Micklethwait when he kept directing Trump to answer the question, and on top of that still doesn’t know how tariffs work. And if Hannity believes what he’s saying, I’d like to know in what reality Trump came off well in that interview.
And this is a problem I’ve encountered with many Trump supporters. The knowledge they possess is predicated on lies and ignorance. A lot of times I’m pretty sure they know Trump is lying but for some reason it doesn’t bother them. If you back a man who lies as easily as most of us breathe it’s hard to take you seriously. Assuming your arguments are honest, they’re insane.
They like the lies because they believe it irritates the other “team”. It’s a team sport. That’s all. It’s a game to most of them.
Of course the for some, it’s not a game. They’re hoping to implement project 2025 so that they can gain and maintain power and wealth for themselves. Trump lies? Great, so long as they can make money off him.
Hannity would eat a piece of Trump’s feces on live TV if he thought it would give him more power or money.
One reason Trump’s supporters accept his lies is because they are “directionally correct.” That is to say, the stories are BS, but they have a conservative slant so they are the good kind of lies to tell.
(Of course, the left occasionally does this - such as when AOC said about one of her lies, “It may be factually incorrect, but it is morally correct.” But it’s much less than the right.)
Faith-based politics; truth doesn’t matter, what matters is believing in what you want to believe as hard as possible. And crushing anyone who disagrees into silence. Concern for the facts or logical consistency is immoral, or outright Satanic for the more religiously inclined. Faith and worship of the Leader are the only virtues.
The Right is dominated by people who think that if you believe hard enough, refuse to accept dissent and deny facts hard enough, then you can make reality be what you want it to be. Just look at all the rightwingers worldwide who denied the dangers of COVID, even to the point of getting sick and dying themselves. They didn’t want COVID to be a threat, therefore their solution was to deny it was and try to out-stubborn it.
In the same way they think that if they claim Trump is telling the truth, a great leader and all that and believe it hard enough, then it will become true. And every time they deny an obvious fact in the process they are demonstrating a virtue, the virtue of faith. The harder they deny reality, the more virtuous they are. That’s how faith based reasoning works.
The other day one radio host was reading an article about the Trump address to a business group, where the writer indicates that a lot of the people who support him in the audience were still to this day saying, all those harebrained and extreme things he keeps proposing, they are not real proposals they are opening negotiating positions: he’ll first throw out the most radical unreasonable demand, so that the other side will have to come way closer to his side to settle and when the final product is more “moderate” it’s still a net win.
Obviously, these are people who admire a successful bully, who think imposing your will by intimidation IS just the way the world is, how stupid can you be to not want to do so, the Meek will inherit the dirt.
The latter is along the lines of Trump’s own N. V. Peale-influenced cosmology.
But even above that, Faith-based requires embracing that on the one hand there are tangible facts, and then on the other there’s capital-T The Truth that is not fact-checkable. So: We know this must be The Truth even if we don’t see it in our reality and have no proof or even have evidence against. Because we just know it must be so.
Disproving evidence? Our faith being tested. Hard material proof to the contrary? Just accidents of form, the transcendent substance is still The Truth and if we stay faithful it will be revealed.
This brings up an interesting question. Who the %$#! is Trump negotiating against here? He’s trying to get elected, so he’s negotiating with voters. Of course this radio host is just giving us a variation of “You don’t need to worry about what Trump says because he doesn’t mean it.” We got that in 2016 and we got that in 2020.
And he was kind of amazed that it was still working.
What he seemed to infer is that these supporters were buying that he’ll be “their” bully to force (the Democrats/China/Academia/Non-Musk Tech/etc) to yield further to their advantage.
I remember a critique often made of the Obama admin, that too often they’d start their discussion with Congress on a proposal already with what should have been the compromise position, so the opponents were able to cut it to pieces. Trump & Co. take the opposite tack, even after things seem to have been negotiated and ready to vote, saying “no, it can’t be good if the Dems accept it, let’s demand more”.
Ignorance is a problem. I’m particularly concerned about ignorance of the impact of isolationism and appeasement during the run up to World War II.
BT (before Trump), I had little patience for arguments against politicians on grounds of being liars. I doubt a strictly honest politician can gain a winning coalition. Think of Jimmy Carter’s segregationist dog whistles needed to be elected governor of Georgia, when he actually was for civil rights. Doing what you have to do is democracy.
Trump’s sheer volume of lies have reduced my tolerance of political lying. But lies are a human universal, besides being a hard thing to objectively count. I still can see advantages in moving the focus away from the lies to something else — especially if you are a parent of teenagers
Like a lot of successful pols, Trump plays both sides.
Trump is not a world builder. On his deathbed he isn’t going to be proud of his accomplishments as prez or anything else. He’s going to be complaining about injustice, being stabbed in the back by all of the bad people in the world. That’s his worldview.
Clinton and Nixon had a lot of the same traits to be honest. It’s an effective tactic. You’re not really fully for anything and the failures are always the responsibility of other people. Hey guy on the barstool, you there who’s always complaining about the state of the world (and not actually active or doing anything), I’m like you. I see that as being very relatable. Effective at governing, no. But Trump doesn’t deep down care about that. In his mind, even as President he was an outsider, running the country took time away from him tweeting and complaining about shit.
