Trump supporters , CD3 DFL

A new study reveals the disturbing truth about the base of Trump’s support

How do we know anything at all about the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020? Are they mostly racist? Sexist, homophobic, xenophobic? Are they white working-class males who suffer from status anxiety as the U.S. population grows more diverse? Are Trump supporters wealthier voters or poorer? Are they anti-elites, or elites themselves? Are working people becoming the core of the Republican Party, as Senator Josh Hawley proclaimed on election night? Or did Joe Biden bring them back into the Democratic fold?

Answers to these questions traditionally come from exit polls supplemented by what we hear from political commentators, labor union officials, and community leaders. An NBC poll (February 21, 2021) reported that the news is not good for labor progressives:

The GOP is rapidly becoming the blue-collar party.
In the last decade, the percentage of blue-collar voters who call themselves Republicans has grown by 12 points. At the same time, the number in that group identifying as Democrats has declined by 8 points.

Inside the minds of the people who actually think Trump handled the pandemic well

Countless critics of President Donald Trump, from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives, have been arguing that Trump deserves to be voted out of office on Tuesday, Nov. 3, because of his wretched response to the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis has killed more than 227,900 people in the United States and over 1.1 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

But journalist Olga Khazan, this week in an article for The Atlantic, offers some reasons why many White males in Trump’s hardcore MAGA base actually admire his coronavirus response. And as absurd as their reasoning is, Khazan’s piece is still an interesting read.

“Some 82% of Republicans approve of Trump’s coronavirus response — a higher percentage than before the president was diagnosed with the virus,” Khazan explains. “This is despite the fact that more than 220,000 Americans have died and virtually every public health expert, including those who have worked for Republican administrations, says the president has performed abysmally.” Continue reading.

Why Cognitive Dissonance Makes Trumpsters Flee To Their ‘Bizarro World’

One of the most jarring aspects of watching Fox News or One America News Network is the mental gymnastics President Donald Trump’s supporters must perform in his defense. Being a Trump supporter often means defending the indefensible. Journalist Anne Applebaum describes those extremes in an article published in The Atlantic, stressing that their defenses of the president require a total defiance of logic and reason.

Applebaum cites Trump loyalist William B. Crews as one of the wildest examples. Crews, Applebaum notes, was an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. Crews, the Daily Beast‘s Lachlan Markey recently reported, was angry because Fauci’s messages on the coronavirus pandemic sometimes conflicted with what Trump had to say — and Crews responded by attacking Fauci on the Red State website using the pen name “Streiff.”

As “Streiff,” Applebaum notes, Crews also defended Trump on everything from the Ukraine scandal to the George Floyd protests. Continue reading.

The Memo: Trump furor stokes fears of unrest

Fears are rising across the political spectrum that the nation is close to coming off the rails amid uproar over recent comments by President Trump.

Trump has twice declined in recent days to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses November’s election. His remarks are without any clear precedent.

The comments come at a time when the national fabric is being strained by a number of other factors, including the coronavirus pandemic, protests over racial injustice and a political battle over replacing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last week. Continue reading.

They ‘just want to watch the world burn’: Psychological analysis reveals the 14 key traits that explain Trump supporters

As he himself said even before he won the presidential election in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Unfortunately for the American people, this wild-sounding claim appears to be truer than not, at least for the majority of his supporters, and that is something that should disturb us. It should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.

In all fairness, we should recognize that lying is sadly not uncommon for politicians on both sides of the political aisle, but the frequency and magnitude of the current president’s lies should have us all wondering why they haven’t destroyed his political career, and instead perhaps strengthened it. Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven’t sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and we can be sure that such a revelation would have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man’s political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While there have been various popular articles that have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below. Continue reading.

Trump Supporters Disrupt Early Voting in Virginia

A group waving Trump flags and chanting “four more years” created a commotion at a polling location in Fairfax, Va. A county official said some voters and staff members felt intimidated.

A group of Trump supporters waving campaign flags disrupted the second day of early voting in Fairfax, Va., on Saturday, chanting “four more years” as voters entered a polling location and, at one point, forming a line that voters had to walk around outside the site.

County election officials eventually were forced to open up a larger portion of the Fairfax County Government Center to allow voters to wait inside away from the Trump enthusiasts.

Election officials said that the group stayed about 100 feet from the entrance to the building and, contrary to posts on social media, were not directly blocking access to the building. But they acknowledged that some voters and polling staff members felt intimidated by what some saw as protesters. Continue reading.

Trump and allies ratchet up disinformation efforts in late stage of campaign

For President Trump and his allies, it was a week spent spreading doctored and misleading videos.

On Aug. 30, the president retweeted footage of a Black man violently pushing a White woman on a subway platform under the caption, “Black Lives Matter/Antifa” — but the man was not affiliated with either group, and the video was shot in October. White House social media director Dan Scavino shared a manipulated video that falsely showed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seeming to fall asleep during a television interview, complete with a fake TV headline.

And Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican, released a video splicing together quotes from activist Ady Barkan — who has Lou Gehrig’s disease and uses computer voice assistance — to falsely make it sound as if he had persuaded Biden to defund police departments. Continue reading.

Standard metrics won’t suffice. Here’s how to measure Trump’s failures so they register with right-wingers.

After a recent column about President Trump’s lackluster economic record, my inbox flooded with furious, incredulous emails from Trump fans. They all knew, in their gut, that their charismatic leader’s achievements — on the economy, public health or any other arena — must be the greatest ever.

Because he’d said so, after all.

Sure, 29 million Americans are claiming unemployment; at least 183,000 have died from the coronavirus; and some 20 percent of small businesses that existed pre-pandemic are closed. But no matter the statistics, no matter the citations from government agencies or private analysts, Trump followers refuse to accept that this president’s legacy might be in any way lacking. Especially compared with his predecessor! Continue reading.

How Trump inoculates his supporters against reality

Donald Trump has failed at almost every venture he has undertaken. That started long before his presidency, with a string of business failures. Nevertheless, he has excelled as a con artist. That is demonstrated by the question that has haunted so many of us over the last four years: why are his supporters so loyal, no matter what he says or does?

A lot of ink has been spilled over that question. Much of it has focused on what makes his supporters so vulnerable to a con job. But in an expansion of his term “epistemic closure,” the writer Julian Sanchez has provided us with insight into how Trump inoculates his followers from reality, truth, and facts.

Chaos, Fear, And Shared Irrationality: Why Supporters Still Cling To Trump

A looming question in today’s political climate is: Why do Donald Trump’s devotees continue to support him despite the carnage of his well-documented failures? Although we are in the middle of a deadly pandemic that is surging and not contained, Trump seems to maintain a base support of 35 percent to 40 percent. What are the psychological factors that influence or underpin his supporters’ attraction to him? And might this provide some perspective on how to change these supporters’ minds?

Multiple psychological factors seem to influence and explain his supporters. We have divided these factors into four major categories: Rebelliousness and Chaos; Shared Irrationality; Fear; and Safety and Order.

Rebelliousness and Chaos

Some Trump supporters have a strong desire for rebelliousness and chaos, and view Trump as the perfect vehicle for achieving their personal goals. These supporters tend to become “anti-establishment and anti-government,” even when it is against their best interest. Many are unhappy with their station in life and believe chaos in the political system will bring them important gains. They seek immediate and sweeping changes and believe a rebellious attitude and rebellious behavior are what is necessary. They would rather have chaos, even dangerously or regressively so, than the status quo. Continue reading.

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