I would love to hear back from some Trump supporters (no attacking, I am truly curious to understand)
We have so much factual/video evidence of Trump either flat out lying and denying his mistruths combined with his self grand standing that I often wonder how a true “team red” Trump supporter can rationally support the man (not the ideals, the man). How are you not embarassed to say you support him?
Is there ANY evidence that he has ever taken responsibility or even admitted ANY failure, being wrong or shortcoming? Does it not bother you that in his view he is the smartest, greatest, most tremendous man/POTUS ever?
Is it simply impossible in today’s political climate to state that you support the GOP ideology but can recognize the man is in a very “clinical sense” a known pathelogical liar?
Yes all politicians lie, I get it… but Trump lies on an unprecedented scale… about everything and sometimes about things that simply do not warrant the lie. Reagan lied/forgot about the contra stuff, Clinton didn’t have sex with that woman and Bush Sr said no new taxes… but Trump is on a whole different level, do most Trump supporters know this or do they REALLY think he is 100% framed by the fakenews?
Do you recognize how his video documented stance has changed 180 degrees on the pandemic (which would actually be understandable if he did not lie about it and now give himself a 10 out of 10 in his response to the virus) or do you really think its all fake and trickery by media video editing?
Mike Pence (who i believe is likely more dangerous than Trump) fits the mold of a republican that “true” conservatives can get behind and despite the fact that i fervently disagree with him on most of his GOP ideals, I do not think he is a particularly egregious liar, con man or all around horrible person.
So conservatives, please tell me… is it just the tribal / team red nature of it all and if so, WHAT would he have to do short of murder on live TV to see him as a malignant cancer on our country?
As a conservative (albeit a non-Trump-supporting 3rd party voter,) yes - it’s about 90% explained by tribal redness-versus-blueness. Couple that with the fact that most of the trends favor liberals - America looks to be getting bluer and bluer as the decades go on, and conservatives are already significantly outnumbered - and many Trump voters are willing to overlook just about anything in the name of political survival.
When you’re drowning, you don’t nitpick over whether the life preserver thrown to you is a shape that you like. When you’re skydiving and your main parachute fails, you don’t nitpick about the ugly design that your backup chute comes in. Choosiness went out the window a long, long time ago for the floundering GOP.
(Now, whether Trump *is *indeed a life preserver, or a dagger to the heart of the GOP, is a different question, as is also why they don’t reject Trump and promote Pence instead, who would support mostly the same agenda but in a much saner way, is a mystery too.)
I can no longer call myself a conservative and I’ve definitely never been a Trump supporter, but what I’ve heard from conservative commentators (the relatively sane/reasonable ones) is that you have to ignore what he says and look at what he’s done, and judging by that they give him a pass. They at least consider him better than whoever the Democratic Party nominates. Things like tax reform, nominating judges, border security (ignoring the splitting of families, sometimes forever), and so on. But the lying and stupid tweets and all that, even they admit it’s not good. Just not enough to not support him.
Qanon and other psychos probably think that all of his lies are a clever way to confuse and disrupt the Deep State ™ as he fights to protect real Americans. I’m only guessing, I can’t listen or read any of that crap long enough to form an informed opinion. It’s too much for me to stand.
To understand the Trump mindset, just take a look at some of the posts written by Dopers here (and I don’t mean this as a “both sides do it,” but just as a "look at it from their shoes):
My point not being as a “gotcha,” but rather, to illustrate that…that’s exactly how Trump voters feel, just in reverse. Blue-Red tribalism is so intense these days that just about nothing one’s own side does can be so bad as to make Blue jump over to Team Red or vice versa. That’s why Trump voters aren’t abandoning their guy. They’ll stick with him to the bitter end.
You correctly capture the intensity of hatred, but you completely and absolutely miss the mark as to why the respective parties make those statements.
Democrats didn’t go batshit absolutist simply because Republicans are the other team. This goes deeper than that. Trump is uniquely horrible, he’s verifiably done uniquely horrible things. I know you know this to be true.
There is some cadre of Republicans who are as tribal as you say… they’re against Democrats just because they aren’t Republicans. But they also say things like “Trump’s done bad things, but Hillary did worse, or she would have done worse things.”
When you ask them to explain “worse”, the responses you get point to things that simply aren’t real (qanon, “post-birth abortions”, or rank hypotheticals “we’ll become Venezuela”, or things that simply reveal an immature concept of “bad” (but her emails).
Tribalism exists, and it’s a factor, but it’s a big error to pretend it works the same way on both sides. It’s another big error to omit the fact that Trump supporters believe in a constructed false reality. They simply believe things that are made-up and imagined.
Having said that, I’ll contradict something I wrote above. Now, 3 years into the Trump presidency, many Democrats indeed have categorically written off Republicans. But it’s not, as you seem to think, because they’re Republicans. It’s because they’ve marched in lockstep to all the crazy, cruel, and delusional bullshit Trump has dished out over the past 4 years. They have proven themselves to be bad-faith governing partners because they are uninterested in governing society as a whole. They have shown themselves a pirate crew determined to loot wealth and power in the interest of preserving their own supremacy. This isn’t something I’d have said in the pre-Trump era, but it’s something they’ve demonstrated through complicity with the Trump crime racket.
This is all so very fascinating to me. As a member of “team purple” I have to say that tribalism is so bad for politics and our country.
I just cannot wrap my brain around the idea that you MUST support all ideas of your party.
Why is it wrong to have centrist ideas today?
I am an avid law enforcement supporter but support legalizing pot (and I have not had any since college but the tax revenue could be great) and think for profit prisons are one of the most evil institutions in america.
I support some immigration policies but think the “border wall” is a stupid and ineffectual idea along with a massive waste of money.
I am very pro military but probably swing into isolationist ideologies in terms of policing the world.
I am 100% in favor of free college but would support a flax/consumer tax.
I would support some form of UBI but only if it replaced Welfare
And finally I am pro alternative energy but do not even think about taking away my guns or my lifted F350 diesel
Oh and I roll my eyes most every time AOC talks… But Trump might be the anti-christ (if i were not agnostic )
Plenty of Trump supporters, and conservatives, feel intense ire over Democratic platforms that are in every way real and substantiated. Things such as: The teaching of multiple genders or fluid gender identity and transgenderism, gay pride/gay marriage, abortion rights, the gradual erosion of Christianity and increase of non-Christian religions or atheism, increased gun control (which, by the way, I support), naturalized citizenship or, at the least, lessened prosecution of illegal immigrants, feminism, single-payer healthcare, liberal judges on the courts, etc.
Whether they *ought *to feel anger over such things is a different topic. But these are, in every way, genuine platforms and policies supported by a great many Democrats. They are not made-up fictional things like QAnon or the pizza parlor child trafficking ring. They are 100% real, substantial, platforms. Many millions of Democrats themselves would acknowledge - quite proudly - that they support one, several, or all of the platforms listed above.
Many of the examples you give above are based on bigotry, hatred, xenophobia, or similar phenomena. Cultural grievance, in other words. Which was the motivating factor for Trump support, above everything else.
My point is, Trump supporters aren’t concocting up made-up stuff to get angry at Democrats about. (Sure, some of them circulate QAnon and other nonsense, but you’ll find radicals in every party/movement.) They are, by and large, angry at Democrats for supporting things that Democrats themselves very openly acknowledge that they support.
One has to recognize that most of those poster are motivated not by a dislike or even hatred of Republicans in general but of trump in particular. I’m a lifelong Dem having “defected”, only once at the presidential level (and that was to vote for Anderson in 1980). By contrast, the Republicans scorn is directed at Democrats generally, to the point where they’d vote for a suspected child molester if he had the “R” after his name.
There was also, I suspect a deliberate indulgence in hyperbole on the part of some of the anti-trump posters. Some, but not me. ZOMBIE MANSON-2020
Right, just like how most white Republicans opposed Civil Rights in the 60s, most Republicans opposed gay rights in the last couple of decades, and most Republicans oppose trans rights now. This isn’t a defense, by any means.
It is a defense though. Not one you or I would accept because we both feel that it’s bigotry but they don’t see it that way. They have seen the world defining gender in a narrow, simple way their entire lives, a way that was socially accepted almost universally, and what you and I see as acceptance they see as trying to normalize something crazy and obscene. I think it’s ignorant and as a person with trans friends who struggle it pisses me off, but to them it’s legit.
Basically, if you ask someone why they do something and they give you an answer that doesn’t satisfy you, you can’t turn around and claim that the answer is invalid. The answer doesn’t have to make sense to you, it only has to make sense to the person giving the answer.
It’s clear that trumpism goes deeper than tribalism and deeper than bigotry. It partakes of a cult, in which the leader holds a kind of hypnotic hold over his followers, such that they will truly do anything he tells them to and believe anything he says even if it is the dead opposite of the last thing he said.
There are reasons to support a conservative platform (though they are arguable). There aren’t reasons to worship trump. But worship is what he both demands and gets.
HMS Irruncible gave you an answer with which I agree entirely (excerpted below). But I want to say specifically: I did not tout the rotting corpse of Charles Manson as candidate out of an anti-Republican sentiment. I did not tout the rotting corpse of Charles Manson as candidate out of determination to support a side other than the Republican side. I did not tout the rotting corpse of Charles Manson as candidate out of tribalism.
I touted the rotting corpse of Charles Manson as candidate, out of the certain knowledge that the rotting corpse of Charles Manson would make a better President than Donald Trump.
Real people who describe themselves as “Trump supporters” are almost always ignorant and inarticulate; they cannot be discussed in sentences with phrases like “rationally explain.”
Trump supporters at SDMB talk about voting for Gary Johnson, or talk about being “forced to vote for the awful Trump” because the Ds ran Hillary. And they’re happy to have any R in charge: they want their right-wing judges, right-wing tax cuts, right-wing hatreds, and Guns, Guns, Guns.
So the way Ds feel about Trump is the way Rs feel about every single Democrat. Got it.
If you think all Ds march in tandem on the issues, I wonder which D debates you were watching? Biden, Gabbard, Bloomberg — are these all fringe leftists? How many guesses do we get for your preferred “centrist” candidate? Gary Johnson?
But you’re correct about the Rs: they certainly move in lock-step. In the R debate 4 years ago, I was startled when Fox’s blonde rock star started her question about health care with “As Republicans, of course you all want to abolish Obamacare.”
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