Most of us knew that. We now have the benefit of hindsight to see that this was part of the larger op, one that was bigger than maybe even Trump himself knew. But at the time it just looked like another crank spouting off. I wasn’t on Twitter at the time. I was of the opinion that Twitter isn’t real life, it’s just a guy spouting off online. Now I know better, but there are still millions of people who believe that what happens online isn’t serious and doesn’t really matter (unless it validates their priors).
I grew up near New York City, and have lived in small Midwest cities for the past twenty years.
I get what you’re saying. I did exaggerate a bit. There are some — “low-information voters” — who knew little of Trump other than the three things you listed, until the primaries started heating up, circa February 2020.
It’s hard for me to see anything Trump had already done nationally (including his persona on The Apprentice) as anything but vulgar and low-class. I admit, that’s my elitist, well-educated bias showing.
But are you telling me any of these voters failed to watch a news TV show, or listen to the radio, or read a newspaper, or a website, between February and November 2020?
And did any of them (the many, many twice-Trump-voters) live in a cave for the ensuing four years?*
*(Interesting parallel, perhaps, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Okay, just maybe, you can justify the first…but the second?).
Sure, but apparently @Bootb didn’t. And millions more may have also somehow missed this obvious sign of Trump’s unfitness for office. Fair enough – but after watching events from 2016-2020, they no longer have the excuse that all they knew about him was that he was some rich guy from NYC who starred in The Apprentice.
Donald Trump is a salesman, and a very good one. I’m not sure if he has any beliefs of his own, but he can instantly read and conform to the beliefs of those around him. He gains their trust, gets what he wants from them, and moves on. I don’t think he knows where Obama was born, and I don’t think he cares. By pretending to care he got followers on Twitter, and contributions to his campaign.
Once you see through it, it’s obvious; but on lots of people, it works. Especially when you appeal to people’s worst and most hateful impulses.
It also means that his followers did not get what they wanted. They did not get a fascist, they only got someone who would pretend to be a fascist for as long as it was convenient.
None of which is meant to excuse Trump or his followers, or minimize the damage they did.
Most people also know that Trump was one of the few people who actually lost money in the casino business, yet he continued to claim what a great business person he was. Believe that was covered in the news quite a bit outside of the NY area.
Well said.
I still wouldn’t used the word “fool” for this process — it implies a fundamental contrast between what one expects, and what one gets.
Is there a better word? I can’t think of one at the moment. (This gets us deep into philosophies of individual culpability as rooted in exposure to geographically and historically situated cultures vs. universal human brain tendencies that may or may not be countered through curiosity- and diversity-focused education vs. commercial and social media brainwashing vs. you’re just an asshole, straight-up…)
Sure, for his run in 2012 I can understand. For his run in 2016 you’d have to be living under a rock to have missed all his high profile “birther” nonsense and other bullshit.
One big issue that I see is that people approach the topic with one special issue overriding everything else, something that they understand and care about (say guns, or abortion, or white grievance). They care overwhelmingly about one of those things, but you can’t really pick a-la-carte from the RW information sphere. So they end up buying a whole bunch of other bullshit that they don’t know or care about.
Not to let anyone off the hook… again, we tend to believe what we’re prepared to accept… but some of these people are just not equipped to handle the disinfo being thrown at them. And Fox knows it. So they end up being extreme on a broader range of issues than they otherwise might, and conversely they hold a broader range of opinions that they simply cannot back down on.
It’s bad. it’s really bad.
I’m willing to extend a measure of grace to those who voted for him the first time around.
But the buck stops there.
In '20, people either voted for him because of who he was or in spite of who he was.
It’s hard to respect either group.
I’d say “brainwashing”. “Fooling” someone, as you say, involves telling them that Not X = X, just long enough for them to fall for it. It also usually is a single instance, the old “Fool me once, shame on you” line. Like, if you gave me something to eat, and told me it wasn’t very spicy, but you secretly added a ton of hot peppers to it. Sure, I ate it, and it burned my face off, so you fooled me, good job. I believed it wasn’t spicy, because of your lie and my lack of additional information, but I never thought “Hey, it’s not spicy” after the fact, or “Hey, I actually like spicy food”. Tricking me into eating it once doesn’t change my fundamental beliefs, and when I see that I’ve been tricked, I’ll stop trusting you.
But brainwashing is a much longer, more involved process. You don’t just trick me into eating the spicy peppers, you actually convince me to believe that they weren’t spicy in the first place. That’s what Fox et al. have been doing.
All true.
Most people — Ds and Rs — are attracted to some party’s policy stance (an issue our parents thought was important, or maybe our college roommate’s…).
The party we start to align with has other stances on other issues. For some, we always agreed, just never gave it much thought.
For other party stances, we might have been swayed either way…but now we align with what’s now “our” team (as amplified by commercial and social media). For a few stances, we never end up agreeing, but might in some situations find ourselves defending (perhaps a bit guiltily), because tribalism.
My problem with this — and where the Ds separate from the Rs — is that there’s a common theme running through so much of Trump, and Fox News, and (sadly) today’s Republican party: a lack of EMPATHY (and a lack of CURIOSITY — I see these as two sides of the same coin).
This reduces my tolerance for single- or double- or triple-issue voting as a reasonable excuse to vote for Trump or for the 95% of Republican candidates that support or enable him.
(I recognize that I could be accused of hypocrisy, by not extending my empathy to Trumpists. I admit I struggle with this personal challenge).
ETA: Horatius, good point. That actually helps me extend a bit more empathy toward these empathy-challenged folks. I really should direct more of my wrath toward Fox News and the like (but that doesn’t leave the actual voters off the hook — HMS Irruncible described the balance well, I think).
That’s not quite my impression of the right wing these days. They don’t convince you that the food wasn’t spicy, or that you like spicy food. In that moment between when you swallow the food, and before the burning sensation kicks in, they make another promise to you; “these new shoes will let you run as fast as Usain Bolt.” And you’re so preoccupied with how great that will be that you don’t really notice the burning feeling in your mouth. You buy the sneakers, lace them up, and start running. Before you notice that the new shoes are slower than the old ones, and give you blisters, they tell you that a shot of tequila will make your breath smell sweet. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It’s not that they believe the old lies, they’re just drinking from the firehose of new promises so fast that they never have time to think about whether any of the old promises were true or not.
Well, that’s certainly a part of it. No need for them to believe a lie if it passes by so fast they forget about it.
But at the same time, there are a lot of lies that they do believe. “COVID is just a bad flu”. “The GOP cares about children”. “Tax breaks for the rich will create jobs”. “The Democrats are the real racists”. The list could go on.
And there is a decent helping of blaming the liberals for dumping hot sauce in the food, or undoing your laces, and for spiking your tequila.
I really doubt this.
Agree with @Yookeroo. Also, everybody forgot about Trump’s idiotic maneuvering with the USFL in 1986.
I wanted Donald Trump as my fall guy. I would call it Donald versus Goliath. I would make their scheme Donald’s plan
Trump insisted he and Rozelle were friends. Rozelle insisted he and Trump were certainly not friends. Trump insisted Rozelle wanted him in the NFL. Rozelle insisted he would rather have maggot-infected fungus overtaking his cranial lobe.
Instead, it was America who got MAGAT-infected fungus overtaking our cranial lobe.
My daughter lives in North Carolina and is up here visiting us for the week here in the Seattle area. Her boyfriend came along too. I was happy to pay for both of them to come up here, because he’s a good kid (he’s only 16, she is 15) and he has never had a chance to travel anywhere.
He said that his relatives claim that the Pacific Northwest is a “liberal hellhole”. I just asked him to look around and judge for himself. He’s said he’d like to move up here someday.
I have no animosity toward him or even his family. They only know what they’ve been told in their bubble. When you’ve never been able to go see for yourself, it’s easy to believe their lies.
Say what? You are not describing sales. You are describing criminal behavior.
His followers got what they wanted and what he is: a fascist. There’s no pretense on either side of that equation.
I’m not. I grew up on the East coast, mostly close to Washington, DC. Even when I was a kid that far south of New York, we all knew what kind of scum Tan the Conman was.
No. They voted for him because of who and what he is and, more importantly, the prejudices he has which just so happen to be the same prejudices they have. The Central Park Jogger case is a prime example of his and their desire to operate on their prejudices, not facts.
Not mutually exclusive. Salesmanship activities, like many other kinds of activities, can be criminal in nature or not criminal in nature, depending on what they involve.