A supporter of U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attends a campaign rally in De Pere, Wisconsin, United States, March 30, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young
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):
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:
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.
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