Trump’s appeal to the MAGAts stems from his neediness.
Ron DeSantis, like Donald Trump, is a racist bully. Do MAGAts adore Ron? No, because he clearly doesn’t care two cents about whether or not they adore him. (He wants their votes to get the power–that’s all he wants from them.)
But Trump, while doing the racism they love and the bullying they love, actually–and quite desperately–needs their adoration. He has to have their applause and their cheers in order to get through his days. He feeds on the adoration and more crucially, cannot do without it.
He needs them. And this makes them love him in a way that they could never love DeSantis or Chris Christie or any other GOP bully-boy. They love his viciousness, his spitefulness, and his cruelty. But what really hooks them is that they are important to him in a way they could never be important to any other Republican on the scene.
Trump is theirs and they are Trump’s. It’s an interdependency.
It is Trump’s black-hole-of-need psychological dysfunction that has led to his success. And it means that no one currently on the scene has any chance of replacing him.
I agree. They get that warm ‘he’s on my side’ feeling—completely unearned because of course he despises them at the same time that he needs them. But they can easily delude themselves that he respects them, and that He is Theirs.
Also, they don’t have to admit any of this (even to themselves) because Trump has always come complete with Plausible Deniability. ‘I don’t vote for Trump because I love his vicious racism, I vote for him because he’s such a great businessman!’
(It’s astonishing that millions of Trump fans will still make that claim with a straight face. But it’s a fact that they do and will go on doing so. To a great extent this is due to Mark Burnett’s epic redefinition of Trump in The Apprentice. If the human species remains viable on the globe in five hundred years, I predict that Burnett will figure in their history as the man who did the most harm to humanity in all of the 21st century.)
When reality television started gaining popularity in the late 1990s, I jokingly declared this was the downfall of civilization. I was just joking! It wasn’t supposed to come true.
Heh. Yeah, feeding people faked storylines populated by people pretending to be something they’re not does no harm when it’s clearly labeled “fiction.” But the same, labeled as “reality,” seems to scramble brains in an alarming way.
Many who call Trump “a great businessman” may actually know that he’s not anything akin to a competent (let alone great) entrepreneur. But having that plausible excuse for supporting him is too valuable for them to ever give it up.
Plenty of people just as fond of bullying and just as racist as Trump have presented themselves to the electorate over the decades. But a vote for David Duke or George Wallace or Richard Spencer could never be disguised as anything other than a vote for a racist. You’ve got to have that sweet plausible deniability, the way they have with Trump.
When I heard about ‘The Apprentice’ I just thought that it was an absurd idea. When I discovered that DJT was the ‘star’ that sealed the deal. Never watched it.
I saw somewhere that his star might be removed on the sidewalk in Hollywood. Could not agree more. To consider this fool a star is a disgrace to those that deserve that.
I have always assumed that the only reason 90% of the population knew about him before he started running was The Apprentice, which I never watched, either. I understand that most of New York has hated him since at least the 1980s.
I will confess to having watched The Apprentice quite a bit. I found it entertaining without ever falling under his spell. I never, for even a nanosecond, thought he would - or should - become President.
My introduction to Trump was coverage of the mutual hissy-fit between him and Leona Helmsley (a competition to see who could be the more loathsome). Killed whatever minuscule interest I might ever have had in The Apprentice.
My introduction to Trump was visiting the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, in about late 1990. My first impression was “too gaudy and wayyy over the top.” Although I’m pretty sure that Trump had little to do with the fine details, I’m sure that he had some input. And we saw that gaudiness later, with how he decked out his apartment in Trump Tower, and later, Mar-a-Lago.
I graduated from high school in Arlington, Virginia in 1977. Hatred of him was already present at that time and in that area. I think it’s safe to say since before the 1980s.
But that just plays into his fans’ idea that the Hollywood elite liberal lunatics are against Trump not for political reasons but because he is a star and they are just jealous. Leave it alone and let more enlightened people spit on it.
It’s a pretty good bet he is not the only deplorable there.
