Until he ran for president, Trump was a liberal Democrat. He was personal friends with the Clintons for crying out loud. (They were at his wedding to Melania!) Current Trump supporters definitely hated him before he ran for president.
ETA: Well, until the Obama years anyway. Trump seemed to lose his mind (along with half the country) when a black man entered the oval office.
This is, no joke, one of my actual theories.
A whole lot of people in our society have legitimately gone insane in the last 20 years.
It started with 9/11. A massive, shocking, scary event that few of us could do anything about. A lot of people seemed to undergo actual personality changes after that (Dennis Miller is the poster boy for this). Understandable, maybe, but not healthy.
Then there was Obama, as you mention. People still stressed over 9/11 and the War on Terror, and all the conspiracy theories flourishing in the years leading up to the 2008 election suddenly had their underlying racism stoked by Obama actually winning the election. There had always been some level of “The other party’s President is an idiot”, but with Obama, this just seemed to erupt like crazy. The anti-President comments became more plentiful, and more deranged.
And then there was Trump, who stoked all the fires of the above. Muslims were bad, let’s ban them from entering the country. Obama and the FBI were plotting against me. “Lock her up!” Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers. No attempt to calm things down, in fact, the crazier you acted, the more Trump liked you.
And then the pandemic. Fuck, at this point, I’m feeling a bit crazy, forget everyone else I see around me. You folks are all friggen’ nuts.
You forget Trump’s original crazy: I remember him as being one of the driving forces behind the “birther” stupidity. The whole Obama was born in Kenya thing. And this was just a few years after the Clintons attended his wedding.
Not to mention all the times mean ol’ Obama teased him.
Trump is an opportunist. He was a Democrat during the Bush years. Before that he was briefly in the Independence Party, and before that he was a Republican. He goes wherever he can grift (which may explain the connection to the Clintons…).
Ha! That’s fair.
That’s a theory that has a lot of merits.
I do think the long term effect of Trump was he brought in a lot of apolitical people into his side who never participated in the political process before or for a long time.
Bernie Sanders ran as someone who could bring in a new kind of voter whose apathy at an unfair system can be won over by hope and bold ideas of helping the people from the bottom up. He didn’t accomplish that but at least his was a message of optimism and ideas. Trump did bring in the previously apolitical voter but he won them over by fear and resentment politics.
And this is why our democracy hangs by a thread – the good guys move way too slowly to punish the bad guys.
Well, that was part of the flourishing conspiracy theories movement. There’s far too much crazy to enumerate it all individually! Hell, at one point, we had Alex Jones “torturing” an iPad, to “prove” that we care more about inanimate objects than people. And yeah, it was just about as crazy a video as it sounds. Ah, damn, the actual video was removed, but you can still see a comment.
Still not as crazy as Laura Ingraham trying to eat steak stuffed with lightbulbs through a straw. I thought that was a low point but she was still headed downhill from there.
Paul Gosar’s chief of staff was one of a group of crazies who tried to intercept a South Korean plane they believed was full of fake ballots for Biden.
Add in:
. . . and probably a few other things, and I think you’re right. To quote Tim Minchin, a hallowed philosopher: “We’re just fucking monkeys in shoes”. Put animals through traumas, add stressors to their environments, provide positive feedback for self-destructive behavior, and, well . . . on the whole they will respond in predictable ways.
I would add to this: the amplification of negative thoughts by broadcast and social media.
In modern psychology, broadly, we recognize that negative thought loops are destructive and can be overcome with effort.
How much of the general insecurity and feelings of outrage and hopelessness are being imparted by media in order to keep consumers engaged? Whereas the objective reality suggests many folks are actually doing fine?
Your daily ration of FUD; Fear, Uncertainty, Dread.
Forget not that Trump also took out full-page ads demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, and IIRC continued to insist they were guilty even after they had been exonerated. This was way back in 1989.
I think it actually started earlier than that, when we lost the Soviet Union as a common enemy.
The 9/11 incident certainly added a lot of fuel to the fire, of course.
You could trace it back even farther, to the early Cold War years of the late 1940s, the fall of China to the Maoist Communists, Sputnik, and the Joe McCarthy Red Scare.
Or even earlier to the first Red Scare in the early post-WWI era.
American History classes always manage to trace things back to ancient Greece and Romans.
ETA: Recommended reading: Witness to History, 1929-1969 by Charles E. Bohlen.
I blame the ones who came down from the trees. Damned groundpounders.
running coach-Proud Arborist
I blame the trees.
< Reports Senegoid to The Lorax. >