Explain how Trump has so much support (4 Viewers)

[Bayouboy]

I would like some layman answers to the question "How does Trump have so much support, right now"? The final two word are important context.

I somewhat understand how he became a "force" prior to the 2016 election. There were many factors that allowed him to gain steam. Anti-establishment and not being a true politician was a big turn on to some voters on the right at the time. He talked a good game and somehow found a way to the Presidency despite acting "unpresidential". Trump's time in office had some victories for the Republicans and the economy was humming prior to COVID.....but the shirt show that happened on a daily basis with him firing executive staff (that didn't agree with him) and the overall chaos that was the White House certainly should've had an effect on his supporters. This was all BEFORE losing the 2020 election and what ensued. What happened after the 2020 election is well documented and, in my opinion, should have buried him as a candidate for office for eternity.

With ALL of what happened since the 2020 election, how can he still have half of the country (give or take) as supporters? Had all the election denying, countless gaffs, and the attempt to circumvent the Constitution had not occurred and had he regrouped and formed a strategy to compete in 2024, I could see a lot of his supporters continuing to follow him and his message. But I can't get how so many Americans can overlook what happened in front of their own eyes. I am truly bewildered.

I realize this is a mostly left leaning community, so maybe you folks do not have a clue either but would like to hear opinions. Especially, if you still support Trump through all of the mess.

 

[bird]

Good but long read
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………This is not typically true for politicians. Yes, they need to attract attention to have sufficient name recognition, but that is just a first step.

A politician needs attention as a means of getting people to like him and vote for him. Of course, if you are only concerned with maximising the amount of attention you receive, there are all kinds of things you can do to get that attention.

The problem is that, in the traditional model, not all attention is good. There are ways to get attention – running through your district naked – that are foolproof for the limited goal of getting attention, but would probably hurt you in your attempt to persuade your neighbours to vote for you.

Trump’s approach to politics ever since the summer of 2015, when he entered the presidential race, is the equivalent of running naked through the neighbourhood: repellent but transfixing.

In that race to become the Republican nominee, his competitors found the entire spectacle infuriating.

No matter what they did – unveil a new plan for tax policy, give a speech on America’s role in the world – the questions they faced were about Donald Trump. Tim Miller, who worked on Jeb Bush’s campaign, recounts that he had a staff member track in a spreadsheet all of the media mentions of Bush.

By far the biggest category was mentions of Bush reacting to Trump.

Trump was the attentional sun around which all the other candidates orbited, and they knew it. There was no way to escape the gravitational pull, no matter what they did.

And of course whatever you said about Trump – criticism, sarcasm, praise – it was all just further directing attention to Trump.

Unlike love or recognition, attention can be positive or negative. Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him.

Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse.

There was a deep logic to this approach. Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of highlighting issues where he and the Republican party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.

Here’s a concrete example: in 2016, polling tended to show that Republicans were more trusted on the issue of immigration than Democrats.

Trump wanted to raise the amount of attention paid to the issue, and to that end he was constantly saying wild and hateful things on the topic.

In the first few minutes of his very first speech, he accused the Mexican government of “sending” rapists and other criminals to the US, an accusation both ludicrous and offensive enough that it immediately led several businesses and organisations (including NBC, which aired The Apprentice) to cut ties with him.

But that was just the beginning. As a standard part of his stump speech, he infamously promised to build a wall across the entire 2,000-mile expanse of the US-Mexico border and, even more absurdly, claimed he would make Mexico pay for it.

In June of that year, a Gallup poll found 66% of Americans were opposed to building a wall along the whole southern border.

You would think, given those polling numbers, that Trump would not keep hammering the issue. But his continued insistence on the policy reliably attracted attention to the issue of immigration, in which, as a general matter, Republicans had an advantage over Democrats.

When he attacked the Mexican-American heritage of a federal judge who was ruling on a lawsuit, it was despicable and bigoted, but also another opportunity to attract attention to immigration.

Public attention, particularly in a campaign, is zero sum: voters are going to have only a few things in mind when considering candidates, and which issues they are focused on will be one of them.

At the end of the 2016 campaign, when Gallup asked voters to volunteer words they associated with each candidate and then rendered the responses as word clouds – with the size of the word corresponding to the frequency of response – Hillary Clinton’s word cloud was entirely dominated by “emails”, while Trump’s featured “Mexico” and “immigration” among the top responses.

This is how Trump won his narrow electoral college victory – by (among many other factors) pulling off the improbable trade of persuasion for attention, likability for salience………

The loudest megaphone: how Trump mastered our new attention age

The old model of political debate is over, and spectacle beats argument every time. How did we get here?

www.theguardian.com

In answer to the question “how did we get here?”…

Humans have cognitive issues. Besides cognitive dissonance they do not, arbitrarily, think and process information rationally. This does not mean that they cannot rather it means that they are selective either consciously or subconsciously in the decision to process rationally.

Bernays knew this and, indeed, anyone involved in convincing the public does know this. The keys lie in matching positive and negative concepts and approaches. This is, imo, precisely what charlatans do. In the US when you add in civic theomythology which includes American exceptionalism and “rugged individualism” the American people are particularly susceptible to the rise of a charlatan. I would even add in the impact of religion to the mix.

In addition, imo, the human brain and mind lag in evolution behind technological development. The yearning for a non-existent time when every person “knew their place” and things were simpler demonstrates this disconnect between exterior change and the ability to process change on the interior. While we are seeing this phenomenon in other countries I do not believe that other populations are quite as susceptible. This may be due to much longer histories including the random wars that marched across Europe. As for Asia, Africa and so on they may be closer to the US than Europe in terms of disconnect.

 

[Booker]

There's a documentary on Netflix right now about the Jerry Springer show. I probably only watched Jerry Springer maybe two or three times ever, but I watched the documentary, and suddenly Trump made sense. Springer was the definition of trash TV, but ended up being the number one show on TV, and this is the post-Springer electorate.

People didn't watch Springer to see him solve people's relationship problems or fix stuff, they watched to see the problems exploited and the relationships incinerated to the ground, like they were watching a fireworks show. It was never about the ramifications of ambushing a guest, it was about that dopamine rush of watching the guest get ambushed.

It's the same thing with Trump -- "Greenland, Panama, Gulf of America, what will he do/say next? Tune in tomorrow to find out." Will he actually do anything to improve people's lives? Of course not, and most likely quite the opposite (especially if we run into another serious crisis if we're to take anything from his pandemic response). But it's a lot more entertaining to watch a building get demolished in an instant than watching it get built over a year, and he'll keep his base entertained, and they'll love him for that.

 

[Bayouboy]

There's a documentary on Netflix right now about the Jerry Springer show. I probably only watched Jerry Springer maybe two or three times ever, but I watched the documentary, and suddenly Trump made sense. Springer was the definition of trash TV, but ended up being the number one show on TV, and this is the post-Springer electorate.

People didn't watch Springer to see him solve people's relationship problems or fix stuff, they watched to see the problems exploited and the relationships incinerated to the ground, like they were watching a fireworks show. It was never about the ramifications of ambushing a guest, it was about that dopamine rush of watching the guest get ambushed.

It's the same thing with Trump -- "Greenland, Panama, Gulf of America, what will he do/say next? Tune in tomorrow to find out." Will he actually do anything to improve people's lives? Of course not, and most likely quite the opposite (especially if we run into another serious crisis if we're to take anything from his pandemic response). But it's a lot more entertaining to watch a building get demolished in an instant than watching it get built over a year, and he'll keep his base entertained, and they'll love him for that.

This is GOLD!!! Perfect analogy.