Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:17 pm
What makes a Trump supporter? We know he peeled off the no high school and only high school degree Republicans. But that’s not all. He has plenty of educated supporters. So what gives?
The one thing all of his supporters have in common is that they are easily manipulated, no matter their education level or status.
Donald Trump appeals to the conspiracy-oriented fringers and the resentful, doomed by the kind of epistemic closure brought on by Fox News and the conservative media’s refusal to deal with reality. They are easily tricked by claims of being a victim, something they inherently seem to relate to.
Here’s an up close look at a few of them. Buckle up.
Sopan Deb, a Donald Trump campaign reporter for CBS News, reported Monday on this scary exchange with a Trump supporter, who believes anything found on the Internet, anywhere on the Internet (a clear inability to discern reliable information from unreliable, which makes total sense):
This is an actual exchange I just had with a Trump supporter here in Ohio about Khizr Khan. On camera. pic.twitter.com/KWnahBCHmv
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) August 1, 2016
Michael Grunwald, Senior writer at Politico, Editor-at-large at The Agenda and author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (a must-read if you haven’t), reported in a Monday tweet storm on this interaction with a crazy lady/conspiracy believer/tin-foil hat wearing “bag lady” Trump supporter:
They were complaining how wimpy R's like their senator @JeffFlake are afraid of PC race-card liberals, when a crazy lady interrupted. 2
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) August 1, 2016
She was 60ish with bright red hair, face caked in makeup. She blurts out: "Did you see Flake said Trump delegates should be exterminated?" 3
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) August 1, 2016
Needless to say, @JeffFlake has not said Trump delegates should be exterminated. 4
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) August 1, 2016
The senators were anti-immigration right-wing Flake skeptics, but they kind of hemmed & hawed like they had been accosted by a bag lady. 5
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) August 1, 2016
But she's insistent. "Flake is as bad as the liberals. I'm telling you, none of the precinct captains will be with him in 2018." 6
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) August 1, 2016
It occurred to me that "precinct captain" would be pretty sophisticated for a bag lady. And she was an #RNCinCLE delegate. So we chatted. 7
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) August 1, 2016
Her name was Sandra, and she was for Trump because she was very scared and very angry. "Not angry," she told me. "PISSED OFF!" 8
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) August 1, 2016
Not angry, but “pissed off”? Thinks a sitting Republican Senator ordered the extermination of Trump delegates, because Internets? Talk about a disconnect from reality and a love-affair with a perceived victimization.
The press is left stunned by the impervious-to-facts beliefs of a Trump supporter because it’s hard to believe that people simply do not care about and/or refuse to believe facts.
Trump supporters believe things like this:
Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes defended Donald Trump comparing his “sacrifices” to those who served our country by saying Trump lost two marriages because he worked so much, “You know what, creating jobs caused him to be at work, which cost him two marriages. Time away from his family to sit there and invest.”
Yes, it wasn’t the infidelity or Trump’s insecure need to replace each woman when she came into her own power or voice or aged out of his Silent Cheerleader Doll role. It was “creating jobs” – you know, the jobs he often doesn’t actually pay people for doing. President Obama has set actual historic records for consecutive months of private sector job growth, and not once has he whined about his sacrifice. Also, he’s still married.
I’ve met quite a few Trump supporters on my own, and I can’t explain their cultish devotion to this little Oz of a man. Some of them are intelligent people, people I respect aside from this issue. But one thing is consistent – they all believe total faslehoods and cling to conspiracies regardless of contradictory evidence presented to them.
This is the culmination of many years of epistemic closure come to fruition. The closing off of information, the teaching their voters that they can’t trust anyone but Fox News, the “unskewed polls”, the paranoid belief in a “liberal media” lying to them, a belief that the world is against them — these are the traits of a Trump supporter.
The Republican Party built the Trump cult the long hard way, over decades, by playing the victim to avoid responsibility for their actions and by exploiting resentment and fear to get out the vote for their policies that often harm the very people they are deliberately manipulating.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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