Why don’t they get brown shirts as well?
But the Thanksgiving turkey cost $400, and a simple hamburger in an airport costs over $3000! The country is going to hell!
Apparently all you need to lead a banana republic is a snappy uniform, or at the very least, distinctive headgear with cheap embroidery. What ever happened to those spiked helmets anyway?
Steven Pinker describes this phenomenon well, at 1:31:00 in this conversation (with John McWhorter) from five years ago:
Before concluding the economy is all roses and rainbows, consider gas prices and interest rates are coming down from relatively high places. Inflation is still high and might stay so for another year, housing and construction markets suck, and central banks are weak enough from printing Covid money and poor budgeting to greatly affect interest rates, which may not go down all that quickly. The rare inverted yield curves now in most major countries smell like recession. Which, by odd coincidence, is the name of Trump’s new cologne. Notes of fast food, flop sweat and cheap ramen.
I can’t even. Full on Nazi bullshit:
The irony is his wife (wives?) and mother are/were immigrants.
Not to mention the entire country was made by immigrants.
And yet, he’s the front runner for his party. Says a lot about that party.
We all know he means brown immigrants though.
I’ve been thinking about why Trump is still a viable candidate and of course it’s not any one thing. I really do think there’s a chunk of Americans who feel as though they’ve not had a voice for a while, and with Donny they feel as though what they say matters. We have no choice but to listen to them now. And they’re right, we really have no choice but to listen to them. And of course Trump has made it acceptable for them to tap into the darkest recesses of their minds and voice what would have been unacceptable a few years ago. Poisining our blood?
I don’t remember who said it, but with fascism you replace policies with aesthetics. It’s all about how it makes you feel.
It looks to me like Trump has gone full Voldemort He only wants purebloods in the country. His crew of Death Eaters love him, and his Slytherin supporters think this is a great idea.
I’m not sure how anyone can vote for the embodiment of pure evil, but hey, that seems to be the human condition to have a certain percentage of horrible people in a society.
Has anyone looked closely at the back of Trump’s head recently?
First (Ivana) and third (Melania) were; Ivana was from Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), and Melania from Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). His second wife (Marla) was from Georgia (the state, not the country 
).
And, IIRC, his mom was Scottish. So much so that English was actually a second language for her.
I work at a law firm crawling with Trump supporters. The only way I can tolerate it is the fact that I am the only attorney in two satellite offices; I am able to avoid the stupidity in the main office.
But last week I had lunch with my boss to negotiate next year’s salary.
Ostensibly, he is a gentleman. He has been faithfully married to his beautiful wife for more than 20 years. He has raised three boys into successful men. Two are members of US military academies, and the oldest works in finance in New York City. He doesn’t drink alcohol or use profanity, and has wisely invested his money. He owns more than a dozen properties and has even invested into restaurants. Although his father was a dentist, I’m pretty sure it’s fair to count him as a self-made millionaire.
He is also very much a Republican. In fact, he ran for Congress last time, although he lost in the primary. He billed himself as a Trump republican, although it seemed to me that, privately, he was not a fan.
At lunch, having secured my raise, I ventured into politics. Basically, I asked him if his party was really going to have Trump as a candidate.
What followed was the propaganda that is serving as a cover for Donald right now.
He started with a comment about how Chris Cuomo said it wouldn’t be that bad to have Trump as president (because I’m sure that he’s hanging on Chris Cumo’s every word). Never mind that Cuomo lost his job on CNN and now has to say provocative things to get any sort of attention.
Then he explained that at this point in the presidency trump and Biden have done equally well. Never mind that stock market is higher, unemployment is lower, and Trump never passed any sort of infrastructure bill.
It’s also a pretty ridiculous way of praising Trump. It’s kind of like saying that the titanic was a lovely cruise after two days
He also argued that Kamala Harris has been a “disaster” as a vice president. Strangely, she’s the only vice president who has been expected to do some sort of noteworthy accomplishment in the role. It’s pretty notorious for not being worth more than a bucket of warm spit.
And, he blamed Jack Smith, when I mentioned trump’s criminal trials. He told me that Smith had waited too long, and was dismissive when I suggested that taking down that head of a criminal enterprise is not as simple as the state prosecutions he compared it to.
I never did get into the fact that trump has been compromised by a foreign government. There are just too many false beliefs I’d have to unwrap first.
Ultimately, I gathered that he gets soundbites from some favored right wing podcaster, and he’s happy to repeat them smugly as if they’re his well developed thoughts. Everything he was telling me was based on faulty information, but being very busy himself he is not going to verify the things that he is told. He has instead just chosen to trust the source.
I’m not exactly sure where he is getting his information, but I think this helps answer in part question of the OP. There are many people who are reflexively Republicans, who then receive plausible platitudes from their echo chamber, allowing them to continue to believe that he is going to be a normal president.
I wonder if the discussion with your boss would be better if started by asking what he feels the role of government is. Both domestically and internationally.
Then go from there to see if Trump is good for the job.
Just an alternative…I do not really know. I suspect he’d have dismissive answers for that too.
Better, ask him if he would hire Trump or represent Trump without money up front. 
Before he dovetailed into his defense of Trump, he did voice his initial support for Nikki Haley.
But when I expressed surprised about the Trump comments, he said that he was talking about what he thought the voters were going to do, not necessarily what was the smartest decision.
And that, I think, reveals another truth about Trump support. The Republican intelligentsia likely prefers some other candidate.
The problem is that they don’t think Trump is so bad that they wouldn’t support him if their preferred candidate was not selected.
There seems to be no standard by which they would reject the party.
To do that requires too much effort, I guess, into seeing what’s going on. I was initially a republican, and I still consider myself conservative leaning. But the Republican Party is not at all conservative, and I don’t understand why any savvy person who values democratic norms and a functional society would still affiliate themselves with such a fascist party.
I will say bravo Moriarty to bring that up with your boss.
I’m pretty lucky that I seem to work with a bunch of moderate people. I doubt any of them voted for Trump. Politics just does not come up. Why would I ask them? We do our jobs.
I can see that this is part of the problem. My brother is a-political. Doesn’t care, his vote won’t matter etc. We don’t talk politics. His Wife however I think is a Trump supporter. And from what I can tell, she is the needy bully in the relationship.
So, to answer the OP. One of the reasons I think is that people are afraid of hurting a personal relationship. I could NOT live with or certainly be married to a Trump supporter.
I would work to have them look at facts. But not for long.
The information is there, It’s unavoidable. Water is wet. Fire is hot.
Which makes one wonder what it is about Trump that they like better than Biden? Currently, your boss is doing fine economically under Biden. The stock market is at all-time highs. No onerous taxes have been applied to him.
That leaves social policy. Stop the gays and transgendered and whatnot.
I know you cannot answer for your boss. Just saying it is difficult to spot why people like him are so enamored of Trump apart from being closet bigots/racists.
ETA: Thanks for the detailed response. It is interesting.
Tax cuts for the wealthy are only coming from one party. That’s not to say racism isn’t a factor, or even the primary factor, for many GOP voters. But a selfish, amoral rich guy could want some more of those sweet, sweet tax cuts and Biden ain’t providing that.
Just a thought.
None. They would happily man the guard towers and usher the “mudbloods” into the gas chambers if asked.
I think this is fair.
Even though it’s utter trash. Even my boss isn’t making that kind of money. He goes to work everyday.
It really infuriates me. My boss wasn’t a beneficiary of the corporate tax cut; his company is an LLC. And he doesn’t make tens of millions of dollars per year, like the people who would actually be burdened by a more fair tax system.
But no doubt it’s drilled into his head - from all of the right wing messaging- that the republicans are the only chance to avoid having your entire fortune garnished by the government.
(My dad was like that. He used to complain about having to pay “39% of his income in taxes”. No dumbass; that’s just the top marginal rate. Your effective rate is much lower)
I think he has that paternalistic racism. I’ve heard him attribute the black crime rate to “their culture”, and he once criticized some protesting of a monument to Samuel Ashe, for whom Asheville was named, by describing his exploits as “having written some racist things”.
But he travels; he told me he was heading to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos next year. But I’m again expecting that this type of experience will just cement his view of American exceptionalism, and any attempt to equate their conditions with our actions decades ago would just be some form of liberal misunderstanding of the world.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
(Attributed to John Steinbeck but it seems he never said exactly that…still gets an important notion across I think.)