I’d say go to right leaning communities and read what the rabble say. Take what libs say about him and his followers with a boulder of salt. Even the conservatives here are pretty lib. It’d be like asking the people at Free Republic or /pol/ why Dems love Bernie so much. Just gets ugly.
The question of why Americans are so angry and scared is an interesting sociological topic that doesn’t have a clear answer but you’ll find no end of of speculation, such as:
The atomization of society and the alienation of the individual.
Echo chamber media and the internet amplifies negative emotions. Angry memes spread the fastest.
Post industrial ennui.
Consumerist panic - never being able to keep up.
White male panic due to status decay.
Propaganda by the elite via the media for better control, or absent-mindedly through market forces, particularly post 9/11. If it bleeds it leads, so everyone just hears bad news.
Spiritual decay. Not only in loss of religion, but in the religious sphere as well. What do people really believe in anymore? What gives their lives meaning?
The death of marriage and the rise of single mother households, often blamed on feminism. Could be considered a subset of 1.
Widespread knowledge of the plutocracy and political corruption. Trump kills it on this one.
Americans consume drugs, TV, video games, and porn in vast quantities. Whether that’s closer to a symptom or a cause of social ills is debatable.
Perception in a decline of American power on the world stage, or the ability of America to do anything of import, e.g. infrastructure.
Something’s in the water, man. An endocrine disruptor maybe. It’d explain a lot…
Happiness studies are interesting. Often poorer countries rate higher than the so called advanced societies, maybe because instead of material things they have large extended families and networks of friends. You could declare a lot of American concerns first world problems writ large. Even if you hate your McJob it’s not like you have to trudge through 10 miles of countryside to fetch arsenic laced well water. A lot of the angriest people you’ll find are fairly well off, often college educated white collar workers. But how often do they see their family? Do they have any real friends, or just people they use to get ahead? Their idea of fun is drinking themselves sick, smoking up, and having sex with strangers. Always chasing the dragon. I may have digressed…
I think that is the most relevant factor here. Specifically, it is white working-class anxiety, about their declining prospects for earnings and security in an age of globalization, offshoring, automation, chain-stores and agribiz. And, this points up an important distinction: The Tea Party is more of an elitist than a populist movement, specifically a movement of “local notables” for local economic autonomy from both big biz/Wall Street and the Feds. But the Trump base is uneducated, his appeal is a genuinely populist phenomenon.
I remember the W campaign strategy in the late 90s of constantly telling us the economy was a mess and we were in dire straits, financially. If it is said enough times people stop challenging it and the concept is accepted. This is how the ‘GOP thought-issuing media machine’ works.
When I hear people complaining like this, I ask them how, exactly, they are worse off because of something the President did. Any president, for that matter. It is usually something they regurgitate from what they heard from someone, somewhere else, and involved no thought of their own.
I’m sure W was campaigning for the 2000 presidential election by 1999. I don’t remember anything noteworthy from that time, but surely he was indeed campaigning.
