Trump Supporters Aren’t All Stupid – But They Are Delusional
The Republican nominee cares only about what benefits him, not those backing him.
When he interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris last week, Fox anchor Bret Baier asked a question designed to elicit a politically embarrassing answer.
It came after Harris noted that top former aides in Donald Trump’s presidency have pronounced him dangerous, unstable, and unfit for office.
“Why, if he’s as bad as they say, [is it] that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?” Baier asked. “Are they stupid?”
The question was disingenuous on two levels. Baier must know full well that Trump is as bad as they say; he also knows one reason voters support him is the dishonesty of his own network. But he aimed to lure Harris into offending voters with an impolitic answer, akin to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 reference to many Trump voters as “deplorables.”
Harris tactfully dodged: “Oh God, I would never say that about the American people.”
But what’s a fair answer from someone not running for office?
The Republican Party has once again nominated the most repellent figure in modern US history – a pathological liar, unabashed racist, convicted criminal, and adjudicated sexual assaulter who incited a violent insurrection against the United States. But that doesn’t necessarily make his tens of millions of supporters stupid.
Tom Nichols, a retired Naval War College professor who left the GOP over Trump, says many simply want to lash out at a modern world that has left them behind. “Resentful and detached from reality,” Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, they nurture “heroic fantasies of redeeming a supposedly fallen nation.”
Yet some of them have rational justifications.
Just over one-third of Americans – and three-fourths of white evangelical Protestants – tell pollsters they believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. By stacking the Supreme Court with right-wing justices, Trump, as president, engineered the end of constitutional abortion rights.
Grateful supporters have reason to hope for more in another Trump term. He claims he would veto a federal abortion ban but has a history of bending to core supporters on issues they care about more than he does.
Trump unequivocally cares about padding his own bank account. So do his wealthy allies. They know Trump would once again put cash in their pockets through cuts in taxes and regulations. This inviting outcome leads them to dismiss the prospect that Trump would erode the rule of law necessary for market economies to work. The likes of Elon Musk and Steve Schwarzman are not stupid; they are greedy.
The same goes for ideological zealots intent on shrinking government spending that helps others – for instance, editorialists at the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper I spent 17 years working for. They’ve never accepted the merits or permanence of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Trump has publicly defended these giant programs. But as the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reports, his myriad promised tax cuts would accelerate Social Security’s insolvency and force massive benefit cuts.
Those who fear majority rule – and prefer a friendly autocrat willing to use force on their behalf – also have reason to embrace Trump. Losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential contests has eroded Republican affection for free elections, and now Trump aims to make them less free.
Some Americans have always admired foreign dictators. So does Trump, who sides with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in his war of aggression against Ukraine.
But what about Trump backers with more temperate views, the regular Republicans who just want a little more hospitable and prosperous 21st-century America?
Their reasons don’t add up.
Some think the Trump menace has been exaggerated. They haven’t paid enough attention to his dark rhetoric about “vermin…poisoning our blood,” language straight out of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi playbook.
Some loathe inflation and think Trump would make the economy a little better. They haven’t considered that his actual proposals – tariffs, mass deportations, tax giveaways – would spike inflation, create labor shortages that reduce growth, and explode federal debt.
They can only hope Trump is lying about what he’ll do.
Emotional justifications from the aggrieved are even weaker.
Trump can’t make under-achieving young men better off in school or the job market. He can’t stop the US from becoming a majority-minority country. He can’t reverse the changing mores making us more secular and tolerant of those who are different, such as transgender people.
He can’t bring back 1950s America.
Nor does he care. Trump cares only about what benefits him, not his supporters. That’s why he keeps extracting their money in exchange for branded coins, watches, bibles, and other gifts.
Are they stupid to empty their wallets for this flagrant con artist? You be the judge.
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Some of them have fallen in the right wing media abyss, too. Material grievances, which are justified, have been routed into tribal anger. For example, I don't believe all the people who claim to care so much about abortion really care about babies. If they did, our policies to help struggling families would look a lot different. Abortion has become a tribal signifier. Also, I'm persuaded that some Trump supporters who have been negatively tagged (say, racist) want to believe that they're the good guys--so they make up/believe stories where he (and they) are the heroes. Regardless, I don't think we get anywhere without trying to understand each other, and both parties have let us all down repeatedly. Maybe the way out is a new party based on labor.
How not stupid are they? They’ve repeatedly and very successfully affixed blame for middle class collapse on the Democrats, while current circumstances are in fact the fruit of 40+ years of Reagan/Gingrich capitalism and politics. Our entire country is being commodified by the obscenely wealthy, but nothing is more important than owning the libs. Brilliant.