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Very few people voted for Trump based on his policy decisions. Most people just see him as a Washington outsider who speaks his mind and that's where it starts and ends. They like him as a person.
They like him as a person.
Which is ridiculous in my opinion because the dude is such a big piece of shit. But I guess that explains why we're all in this position.
They like that he gives them permission to be the hateful assholes they are.
People flabbergasted how anyone could "like Trump as a person" don't realize that the average American worker spends 6 - 7 days a week stuck in traffic, working overtime, working side jobs, struggling to maintain a house or family, and gets all their news and information from a few minutes of social media and talk radio every day.
Most people have not seen the countless clips and stories of Trump's incompetence and rotting brain, they see what Facebook wants them to see, or what their friends say, and they don't really give it a lot of thought. The average Trump-voting conservative might not be very informed but they genuinely aren't all bad people. Just dumb people.
If you're here reading lemmy or reddit, you're someone who can read lemmy and reddit on a friday afternoon and that means that some part of your life allows for such luxuries, or you already have formed a strong opinion and have tuned your recreational reading to match. This isn't the case for everyone.
We need to understand this fact a lot better to undo the polarization that the real evil conmen have set up in this country.
I had family members who were planning on voting for Trump and all it took was talking about his failed policies and playing a few clips of him saying how he really feels about things like guns and poor people and they changed their mind. That simple. Do not underestimate your powers to change hearts and minds.
I remember growing up hearing that most people voted for the candidate they thought they could sit down and have a beer with. Then I started paying attention to politics and kind of forgot this really basic idea. It's almost like a trap, the more you educate yourself, the more you assume that other people are doing the same thing. Then you're flabbergasted when people vote against your preferred candidate since it seems so obvious. But seriously, look at the last few decades of presidents:
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Bill Clinton seemed more relatable and someone you could have a beer with than Bush Sr, then also with Bob Dole.
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Dubya, bless his dumb little heart, felt more down to earth than Gore or Kerry.
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Obama was infinitely cooler than McCain or Romney.
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Trump, as much of a jackass as he is, certainly seems more fun to hang out with than Hillary.
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The major outlier here was that Biden beat Trump. It kind of goes to show you just how bad Trump fucked up. Had he just somewhat competently managed COVID, there's a good possibility he would have won in 2020.
Most people don't give a shit about appointing Supreme Court Justices, immigration policy, monetary policy, disaster preparedness, etc. They just wanna look at a politician and say "Yeah, they'd probably be my friend if we met" and that's it.
Edit: this made me think of this Dave Chappelle stand-up before he was an asshole. https://youtu.be/KQ2dquaHO7Q
Most people don’t give a shit about appointing Supreme Court Justices, immigration policy, monetary policy, disaster preparedness, etc. They just wanna look at a politician and say “Yeah, they’d probably be my friend if we met” and that’s it.
It goes deeper and worse than this. Worse as in, for our long-term survival.
The problem is as a species we are incredibly vulnerable to this kind of effect, because we are not nearly as advanced or logical as we like to imagine. We have brains that serve only one purpose, which is invent a story to explain your feelings, and that story doesn't even have to make sense. This was an amazing adaptation a half million years ago for surviving the natural world.
But we're very far from the natural world, and the same responses that helped us figure out how to survive dangers are now being exploited to hoist people to positions of power at the cost of our environment, our health and happiness and our promise of a future.
And it's about to get so, so much worse. We're about to get thrust into an era of LLM's just fucking with people's emotional storytelling to a fantastic degree. Our world is teetering on climate collapse and every person is withdrawing further and further from socializing with each other and we're barreling towards a world where nobody will have any idea what's real or not and education will become less and less valuable.
I've been watching our world for decades now, and I am seeing this trend mature and I'm very worried for all our futures.
That's both disturbing and interesting.
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Those with college education and who are politically active tend to lean towards the left, it's good to remember that. A lot of people, especially right-leaning people, have no fucking idea what policies they're actually voting for and operate purely off vibes and buzzwords.
They like him as a person.
Despite the obvious fact that he wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire. He's not only a shit person, we have more evidence that he's rotten to the core than most people currently alive.
Yes, yes I know there are murdering dictators worse than trump. But if we only consider the context of currently living US politicians you'd be hard pressed to find anyone else you could write thousands of objectively factual pages about their immorality
These people think that everyone in government is a secret pedo rapist, I'm sure having someone flaunt their immorality feels comparatively more moral. The problem obviously being that not everyone is govt is actually a pedo rapist lmao.
Trump is a native of New York City.
I live in New York and can attest that it's incredibly diverse. I doubt that I could get 90% of New Yorkers to call themselves Yankee's fans.
Trump lost his hometown by 90% of the vote because he's a terrible person who is hated by rich and poor alike.
Exactly. Trump supporters vote for a brand. His actual policies, words, and actions are a very distant second to the support they have for the Trump brand, which as you said is seen as a truth teller and adversary to the "elites" in DC.
Tribal action vs. principled action. Humans have been dealing with this since forever. Lots of people are unable to act on principle and default to follow the leader of the tribe they identify with, ditching their self-proclaimed principles. Some people are willing to ditch the tribe to uphold their principles. And so on and on our eternal struggles continue.
"Hold my beer" voters. And they get off on giving the middle finger to "elitists" (aka informed voters)