Opinion: The Real Trump Mystery. How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? (NYTimes guest article)
Opinion: The Real Trump Mystery. How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? (NYTimes guest article)
“Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right. Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, ‘To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.’ Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.”
Taggard on
I have been watching, and it appears that Trump’s support comes from his followers who show some (or all) of these 5 characteristics:
1) Racism
2) Bigotry (anti-LGBTQ+)
3) Misogyny
4) Fear of losing privilege due to shifting demographics (slightly different than racism)
5) They got theirs, so don’t care if anyone else does (this applies to everyone from immigrants who have succeeded to million/billionaires)
In addition, all Trump supporters have a complete lack of empathy and think of no one but themselves.
Yeah, those add up to close to half of the voters in this country.
Castle-Fire on
Every MAGA Republican should read this and *actually* think about what it says, don’t just dismiss it!
After an analysis of hundreds of surveys, Jacobson concluded:
Republicans and Trump voters downplay the importance of the crimes charged, and large majorities refuse to admit that Trump committed such crimes anyway.
In the abstract and before the fact, a conviction on any of the felony charges would be projected to devastate Trump’s support. But after Trump was convicted in that case, the share of Republicans and prospective Trump voters who said they would not vote for a felon fell sharply.
Not only do a substantial majority of Republicans deny that Trump ever committed a serious crime as president, but an even larger majority of them also believe he should be immune from prosecution if he did.
Jacobson describes the logic of truth denial among MAGA supporters of Trump:
Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. That is, it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing but that the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.
When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge.
*Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right. Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, “To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.*
Gardening_Socialist on
Lots of people are as mean and stupid as he is.
deviousmajik on
Publications like the New York Times have been giving him cover or been trying to make it seem like a close race for clicks and profits. Journalists have not been doing their jobs.
naotoca on
The biggest reason is of course that the GOP has a massive built-in handicap in the flawed Electoral College system we have in the United States.
PleasantParfait48 on
Our country is filled with mean, stupid people.
styrofoamplatform on
My parents are Trump supporters. Theyre suburban Boomers who are literally glued to Fox News and News Nation all day who tell them illegals are bringing drugs by the assload into our cities, burning them down, and women are murdering newborns and calling it abortion. They also see their dollar isn’t going as far as it used to. They’re scared and angry, and Trump comes along and says 1) it’s the Democrats fault and 2) He’ll fix it. When I try to tell them otherwise they think I’m naive.
doublestitch on
Maybe NYT’s habit of sanewashing and both-sidesing has something to do with it.
bravetailor on
Maybe ask your paper’s editors.
LevitationalPush on
because apparently a large proportion of Americans are willfully ignorant bigots.
from_dust on
My parents are in a cult. A religious one, not a political one, but the results are the same: a steady stream of alternative reality propaganda *destroys* critical reasoning capacity, and undermines every facet of resonable discourse. Once people trust the leadership of the cult, they elevate that trust over literally EVERYONE else.
Because Trump came in as a “political outsider” a lot of people trusted him from day one, so they bought into his own concocted reality. And they’ve been along for every revision and excuse ever since. At this point they look to Trump the same way a kid Googles answers for homework- they’re not doing the critical reasoning and due diligence they owe themselves because its far easier to put the mind on autopilot and just trust the now-divine arbiter of truth.
Ironically, while their reasoning is on autopilot, they will still work furiously to support the cognitive dissonance they’ve bought into. Now, many have been so thoroughly programmed and ingrained in this deluded thinking that they’ll spit out their own propaganda and consume it, hook, line, and sinker. Its a self reinforcing paradigm that is deeply resistant to even the most blatant and incontrovertable facts.
The only solution i know of is for the person involved to WANT to do the work of critical self reflection, so…. good luck with that.
Stunning_Mortgage988 on
A very high percentage of minimally developed white people.
pdxisbest on
I think information bubbles are at least as important. Even mainstream media is shying away from reporting on the streams of gibberish he bloviates from his fetid gob. Right-leaning channels edit his diatribes to make it seem coherent. In all cases, no one is seeing the real DT.
Frankie6Strings on
For my (deep) rural west TX family the answer is Rush Limbaugh on AM radio for years followed by FOX News on dish. Rush’s “lamestream media” talk merged nicely with FOX News talking about “liberal media” and then finally with Trump’s “fake news” rhetoric. As a result, what some people “know about Trump” is simply dismissed outright as leftist propaganda.
rokr1292 on
>“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Howitdobiglyboo on
>Our own research on extreme antipathy toward the political system — what we term a need for chaos — shows that such emotions are rooted in feelings of loneliness and being stuck in your place in the social hierarchy. Essentially, having an unfulfilling life and not being able to change that. American politicians and many European counterparts have not been able to remedy such feelings, and we are seeing the result of that.
Reminds me of:
>6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
I could easily make a case that the Trump cult has all of these elements present.
HonoraryCanadian on
The power of propaganda. My MAGA family member believes literally anything the wintnut news tells her. Any spin or excuse or rationale they give is true, anything again that is clearly biased or made up. Everyone in her circle gets that same spin, gets it from their news and their websites and their politicians. They repeat it among themselves and so it becomes their truth. It’s crushing to watch someone apply reasonable logic to wildly false premises and so come to a hateful conclusion. But so it goes. It’s absolutely a cult because it is fully impossible to challenge those premises from the outside. They’ve built their own independent reality, a mirror universe of our own, and can’t be talked out of it.
Hootshire on
The cognitive dissonance has gone so deep that some MAGAs brains might literally pop if they accept the truth.
55redditor55 on
I knew this was a NYT article from the title, I can answer, it is possible because the media made it possible. They zoomed in on any mishap Biden had to the point he dropped out of the race, on the other hand, they just keep working for Trump making his insane statement seem like policy talk.
I know Trump= clicks for them, and probably they will never have the level of engagement they have when he is in politics; but that just speaks of a failed business model and a failed society that let billionaires buy every single means of communication.
AgileInformation3646 on
Ooooo! I know this one! Pick me! Pick me!
Decades and decades of underfunded public education has resulted in large swathes (dare I say the majority) of Americans having no actual clue in fuckall how their government works. Americans aren’t educated how their own democracy operates, much less how any other country functions. They know who Hitler was and what he did, but they don’t know how he came into power or what fascism actually is.
Our nation is like a ship. Right now, it’s like the government is the head of the ship and everyone else are just passengers. And every four years, we elect people based on rather superficial qualifications (how well they speak, how they dress, etc) rather than on actual policy and experience. Why? Because most Americans don’t understand actual policy. And we have a ship full of Americans who keep putting people into power who are largely inexperienced and have zero understanding themselves of how government should function. And yet they think that somehow by electing based on a cult of personality that the one person and their very limited staff will be able to turn the direction of an entire country.
Instead, what we NEED is to turn those passengers (the average American citizen) into crew members. We need a citizenry who is civilly educated and engaged. They, in turn, would elect people who are also civilly educated and engaged. But instead, we’re a bunch of uneducated do-nothings who refuse to learn how to sail the ship, much less pick up an oar, and instead rely on the ship owners to do it for us.
And until we can fix our education standards, then I’m afraid we’re simply fucked.
Trump has said a lot of stupid things over the years, but one thing he said that hits the nail on the head is that he loves the uneducated. Now you might see more clearly why that is.
BikerJedi on
Hey, New York Times, suck it! When are you going to start covering Trump fairly? You make excuses for his fascism over and over.
bramletabercrombe on
this is rich coming from the NY Times with their longtime slogan when it comes to Trump “All the weird that is fit to wash”
Overall_Sleep_5925 on
1. Electoral college. Whether he wins or not Harris will run away with the popular vote.
2. Fox News and propaganda.
3. Social factors, identity, and the “politics is sports” concept. You’ve always been republican, everyone around you is a republican, your mother, father, brothers, sisters, and best friends are republican. You will always be a republican. They’re your team and you root for them.
4. Racism
coloringpad on
You might be surprised to hear this, but any of the factors regarding ignorance, racism, or idolizing this lump of orange ooze aren’t really the driving reason for most of it.
It’s fear.
Specifically, the fear-mongering that has been taking place on Fox news, AM radio, and lots of other sources. You see, since the inception of Fox, fear is a very real emotion they have tapped into and cultivated. And you, you communist Democrats, are the reason behind every suffering, every dollar that isn’t in their wallet, every person that entered this country. They fear immigrants because they don’t like that they can’t understand the language, and it ruins their universal understanding of how they want their world to be. You are a group of people who have no problem allowing babies to be murdered, letting criminals roam the streets, making their taxes so high because you give their money to undeserving despots and welfare queens. You are, to them, something to be afraid of. And fear sells.
Fear drives every bit of their retoric. Mix fear with religion, and you have a whole group of people seeking someone who will save them.
And just like that, this monster comes along and they truly believe he can fix everything, because he tells them he can.
Fear is an adrenaline rush, pumped into you like heroin from the concerned talking heads that are paying attention on the news FOR you, and point at the problem, which is coated in blue and ready to let anarchy reign. But oh, the excitement of overcoming all you fear will be solved if only people would let their savior fix the problem.
It makes me sick to think that anyone would forego democracy and let people suffer and die for the sake of quelling their own fears. They want a wall around their world.
Make it a habit to ask them what they are afraid of…. The answers will reveal more about them than simple labels.
And always ask yourself, what are you afraid of? Then be truthful with yourself: Are you willing to fight, despite your fears, because what you believe in matters so much to you?
Vote. Fight. Preserve our democracy.
Summerwages on
The NYT has successfully championed DJT by pretending he was just another Republican candidate…
DramaticWesley on
To be honest, if you did any real research, you knew he was a despicable person even back in 2016.
27 Comments
“Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right. Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, ‘To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.’ Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.”
I have been watching, and it appears that Trump’s support comes from his followers who show some (or all) of these 5 characteristics:
1) Racism
2) Bigotry (anti-LGBTQ+)
3) Misogyny
4) Fear of losing privilege due to shifting demographics (slightly different than racism)
5) They got theirs, so don’t care if anyone else does (this applies to everyone from immigrants who have succeeded to million/billionaires)
In addition, all Trump supporters have a complete lack of empathy and think of no one but themselves.
Yeah, those add up to close to half of the voters in this country.
Every MAGA Republican should read this and *actually* think about what it says, don’t just dismiss it!
After an analysis of hundreds of surveys, Jacobson concluded:
Republicans and Trump voters downplay the importance of the crimes charged, and large majorities refuse to admit that Trump committed such crimes anyway.
In the abstract and before the fact, a conviction on any of the felony charges would be projected to devastate Trump’s support. But after Trump was convicted in that case, the share of Republicans and prospective Trump voters who said they would not vote for a felon fell sharply.
Not only do a substantial majority of Republicans deny that Trump ever committed a serious crime as president, but an even larger majority of them also believe he should be immune from prosecution if he did.
Jacobson describes the logic of truth denial among MAGA supporters of Trump:
Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. That is, it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing but that the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.
When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge.
*Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies, right. Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold. As Michael Patrick Lynch, a philosopher who studies political beliefs put it, “To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational.*
Lots of people are as mean and stupid as he is.
Publications like the New York Times have been giving him cover or been trying to make it seem like a close race for clicks and profits. Journalists have not been doing their jobs.
The biggest reason is of course that the GOP has a massive built-in handicap in the flawed Electoral College system we have in the United States.
Our country is filled with mean, stupid people.
My parents are Trump supporters. Theyre suburban Boomers who are literally glued to Fox News and News Nation all day who tell them illegals are bringing drugs by the assload into our cities, burning them down, and women are murdering newborns and calling it abortion. They also see their dollar isn’t going as far as it used to. They’re scared and angry, and Trump comes along and says 1) it’s the Democrats fault and 2) He’ll fix it. When I try to tell them otherwise they think I’m naive.
Maybe NYT’s habit of sanewashing and both-sidesing has something to do with it.
Maybe ask your paper’s editors.
because apparently a large proportion of Americans are willfully ignorant bigots.
My parents are in a cult. A religious one, not a political one, but the results are the same: a steady stream of alternative reality propaganda *destroys* critical reasoning capacity, and undermines every facet of resonable discourse. Once people trust the leadership of the cult, they elevate that trust over literally EVERYONE else.
Because Trump came in as a “political outsider” a lot of people trusted him from day one, so they bought into his own concocted reality. And they’ve been along for every revision and excuse ever since. At this point they look to Trump the same way a kid Googles answers for homework- they’re not doing the critical reasoning and due diligence they owe themselves because its far easier to put the mind on autopilot and just trust the now-divine arbiter of truth.
Ironically, while their reasoning is on autopilot, they will still work furiously to support the cognitive dissonance they’ve bought into. Now, many have been so thoroughly programmed and ingrained in this deluded thinking that they’ll spit out their own propaganda and consume it, hook, line, and sinker. Its a self reinforcing paradigm that is deeply resistant to even the most blatant and incontrovertable facts.
The only solution i know of is for the person involved to WANT to do the work of critical self reflection, so…. good luck with that.
A very high percentage of minimally developed white people.
I think information bubbles are at least as important. Even mainstream media is shying away from reporting on the streams of gibberish he bloviates from his fetid gob. Right-leaning channels edit his diatribes to make it seem coherent. In all cases, no one is seeing the real DT.
For my (deep) rural west TX family the answer is Rush Limbaugh on AM radio for years followed by FOX News on dish. Rush’s “lamestream media” talk merged nicely with FOX News talking about “liberal media” and then finally with Trump’s “fake news” rhetoric. As a result, what some people “know about Trump” is simply dismissed outright as leftist propaganda.
>“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
>Our own research on extreme antipathy toward the political system — what we term a need for chaos — shows that such emotions are rooted in feelings of loneliness and being stuck in your place in the social hierarchy. Essentially, having an unfulfilling life and not being able to change that. American politicians and many European counterparts have not been able to remedy such feelings, and we are seeing the result of that.
Reminds me of:
>6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
There are alot of other parallels with what we see in the Trump cult with [Umberto Eco’s list](https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html)
I could easily make a case that the Trump cult has all of these elements present.
The power of propaganda. My MAGA family member believes literally anything the wintnut news tells her. Any spin or excuse or rationale they give is true, anything again that is clearly biased or made up. Everyone in her circle gets that same spin, gets it from their news and their websites and their politicians. They repeat it among themselves and so it becomes their truth. It’s crushing to watch someone apply reasonable logic to wildly false premises and so come to a hateful conclusion. But so it goes. It’s absolutely a cult because it is fully impossible to challenge those premises from the outside. They’ve built their own independent reality, a mirror universe of our own, and can’t be talked out of it.
The cognitive dissonance has gone so deep that some MAGAs brains might literally pop if they accept the truth.
I knew this was a NYT article from the title, I can answer, it is possible because the media made it possible. They zoomed in on any mishap Biden had to the point he dropped out of the race, on the other hand, they just keep working for Trump making his insane statement seem like policy talk.
I know Trump= clicks for them, and probably they will never have the level of engagement they have when he is in politics; but that just speaks of a failed business model and a failed society that let billionaires buy every single means of communication.
Ooooo! I know this one! Pick me! Pick me!
Decades and decades of underfunded public education has resulted in large swathes (dare I say the majority) of Americans having no actual clue in fuckall how their government works. Americans aren’t educated how their own democracy operates, much less how any other country functions. They know who Hitler was and what he did, but they don’t know how he came into power or what fascism actually is.
Our nation is like a ship. Right now, it’s like the government is the head of the ship and everyone else are just passengers. And every four years, we elect people based on rather superficial qualifications (how well they speak, how they dress, etc) rather than on actual policy and experience. Why? Because most Americans don’t understand actual policy. And we have a ship full of Americans who keep putting people into power who are largely inexperienced and have zero understanding themselves of how government should function. And yet they think that somehow by electing based on a cult of personality that the one person and their very limited staff will be able to turn the direction of an entire country.
Instead, what we NEED is to turn those passengers (the average American citizen) into crew members. We need a citizenry who is civilly educated and engaged. They, in turn, would elect people who are also civilly educated and engaged. But instead, we’re a bunch of uneducated do-nothings who refuse to learn how to sail the ship, much less pick up an oar, and instead rely on the ship owners to do it for us.
And until we can fix our education standards, then I’m afraid we’re simply fucked.
Trump has said a lot of stupid things over the years, but one thing he said that hits the nail on the head is that he loves the uneducated. Now you might see more clearly why that is.
Hey, New York Times, suck it! When are you going to start covering Trump fairly? You make excuses for his fascism over and over.
this is rich coming from the NY Times with their longtime slogan when it comes to Trump “All the weird that is fit to wash”
1. Electoral college. Whether he wins or not Harris will run away with the popular vote.
2. Fox News and propaganda.
3. Social factors, identity, and the “politics is sports” concept. You’ve always been republican, everyone around you is a republican, your mother, father, brothers, sisters, and best friends are republican. You will always be a republican. They’re your team and you root for them.
4. Racism
You might be surprised to hear this, but any of the factors regarding ignorance, racism, or idolizing this lump of orange ooze aren’t really the driving reason for most of it.
It’s fear.
Specifically, the fear-mongering that has been taking place on Fox news, AM radio, and lots of other sources. You see, since the inception of Fox, fear is a very real emotion they have tapped into and cultivated. And you, you communist Democrats, are the reason behind every suffering, every dollar that isn’t in their wallet, every person that entered this country. They fear immigrants because they don’t like that they can’t understand the language, and it ruins their universal understanding of how they want their world to be. You are a group of people who have no problem allowing babies to be murdered, letting criminals roam the streets, making their taxes so high because you give their money to undeserving despots and welfare queens. You are, to them, something to be afraid of. And fear sells.
Fear drives every bit of their retoric. Mix fear with religion, and you have a whole group of people seeking someone who will save them.
And just like that, this monster comes along and they truly believe he can fix everything, because he tells them he can.
Fear is an adrenaline rush, pumped into you like heroin from the concerned talking heads that are paying attention on the news FOR you, and point at the problem, which is coated in blue and ready to let anarchy reign. But oh, the excitement of overcoming all you fear will be solved if only people would let their savior fix the problem.
It makes me sick to think that anyone would forego democracy and let people suffer and die for the sake of quelling their own fears. They want a wall around their world.
Make it a habit to ask them what they are afraid of…. The answers will reveal more about them than simple labels.
And always ask yourself, what are you afraid of? Then be truthful with yourself: Are you willing to fight, despite your fears, because what you believe in matters so much to you?
Vote. Fight. Preserve our democracy.
The NYT has successfully championed DJT by pretending he was just another Republican candidate…
To be honest, if you did any real research, you knew he was a despicable person even back in 2016.