Explain how Trump has so much support (2 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.

 

[Sendai]

Yes, that is the inane argument you're making, that I already addressed specifically as the rhetoric around it clearly illustrated what the actual intent was, and generally.

Not sure why you thought just repeating it would help. It didn't.

You seem to have difficulty understanding that over a billion Muslims weren’t banned. And eight specific countries with ill will that happened to be predominantly Muslim isn’t a global ban n Muslims.

 

[MT15]

You seem to have difficulty understanding that over a billion Muslims weren’t banned. And eight specific countries with ill will that happened to be predominantly Muslim isn’t a global ban n Muslims.

So because Hitler didn’t target American Jews, he didn’t actually have a problem with Jews? After all there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish people in the US that weren’t targeted by Hitler.

That’s your argument?

Ignoring that Christians from the targeted countries weren’t banned, but were welcomed.

You actually don’t believe in freedom of religion and a lot of other ideals from our Constitution.

 

[RobF]

So because Hitler didn’t target American Jews, he didn’t actually have a problem with Jews? After all there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish people in the US that weren’t targeted by Hitler.

That’s your argument?

Ignoring that Christians from the targeted countries weren’t banned, but were welcomed.

You actually don’t believe in freedom of religion and a lot of other ideals from our Constitution.

How gullible does someone have to be to buy the line that the targeted countries "happened to be" predominantly Muslim?

I mean, even leaving aside that they repeatedly said the quiet bit out loud.

Sendai competing with Joe for the crown of most "totally not right wing but just happen to swallow every line they drop" guy there.

 

[DaveXA]

How gullible does someone have to be to buy the line that the targeted countries "happened to be" predominantly Muslim?

I mean, even leaving aside that they repeatedly said the quiet bit out loud.

Sendai competing with Joe for the crown of most "totally not right wing but just happen to swallow every line they drop" guy there.

Pretty much. This mushy morality too many conservatives use is full of hypocrisy.

 

[bird]

You seem to have difficulty understanding that over a billion Muslims weren’t banned. And eight specific countries with ill will that happened to be predominantly Muslim isn’t a global ban n Muslims.

You seem to have a problem understanding that Trump wanted to ban all Muslims but when he couldn’t he specifically overlooked Saudi Arabia. That also applied to Bush2. Beyond that the people of those countries are not the government of those countries. Even more you overlook that the threat from our own RWNJs is far more likely than individual Muslims.

 

[TampaJoe]

So because Hitler didn’t target American Jews, he didn’t actually have a problem with Jews? After all there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish people in the US that weren’t targeted by Hitler.

That’s your argument?

Ignoring that Christians from the targeted countries weren’t banned, but were welcomed.

You actually don’t believe in freedom of religion and a lot of other ideals from our Constitution.

What are you arguing? What’s your point? I get that Sendai is pointing out that it’s possible that the travel ban might have been targeted at terrorists and not Muslims in general. So are you disagreeing?

 

[MT15]

Pretty much. This mushy morality too many conservatives use is full of hypocrisy.

Full blown abandonment of our Constitution and Bill of Rights isn’t any kind of morality, I would argue. It’s just support for authoritarianism.

 

[DaveXA]

Full blown abandonment of our Constitution and Bill of Rights isn’t any kind of morality, I would argue. It’s just support for authoritarianism.

It's certainly not, but they use their warped sense of morality to justify their actions all the time.

 

[bird]

The problem with “morality” is twofold. The first is that it is focused almost exclusively on sex to the exclusion of almost anything else borrowed from the Torah and/or NT. That means that the responsibility part of the law is ignored. The second is that morality is always “for thee, not for me” otherwise the RW would have prevented Trump from running the first time.

Of course, there are copious laws regarding theft, killing, perjury etc but they only apply, generally, to the poor. Wealth is a free pass for actions causing damage to the poor. The laws derive in the long past to scripture but more recently to the enlightenment.

 

[Optimus Prime]

 

[Optimus Prime]

How is this possible??

 

[coldseat]

How is this possible??

More proof that it was never about the economy. It was about the hate.

The hate is off the charts right now, that's why Republican voters love Trump so much.

 

[UriUT]

More proof that it was never about the economy. It was about the hate.

The hate is off the charts right now, that's why Republican voters love Trump so much.

I think that's the same poll that I saw last week from nbcnews. Trump is a net negative in practically every category that were asked. Except, immigration, which was a +12. Further still, while perception of dems congressmen were down considerably from dem respondents, the opposite is true of republican congressman. Republicans are enthusiastic about what congress is doing.

With that in mind, Republicans and right leaning independents truly are embracing this hate parade, and ignoring the incompetence and cruelty. The driving force is xenophobia. And that's not just Republicans.

 

[zztop]

How Professional Wrestling Explains Donald Trump’s Washington

His approach to politics is imbued with pro wrestling’s showmanship. It explains why Hulk Hogan showed up at last year’s Republican convention and why Trump’s past GOP convention appearances will seem indistinguishable from some of the wrestlers’ grand entrances this weekend in Las Vegas.

“When he ran for office for the first time, you can tell there was a lot of professional wrestling involved in it,” Dave Meltzer, the preeminent American wrestling journalist, told me. “And this [latest] one, even more.”

But it goes far deeper than that. Professional wrestling at its core is designed to be a fight between the good guys — “babyfaces,” in wrestling parlance — and bad guys, or “heels.” And while modern wrestling usually isn’t as cut-and-dry anymore, Trump operates under the same thinking, framing his endeavors, allies and enemies along those lines.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Interesting article
=============
A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

The results shocked a lot of people concerned about the rising threat of autocracy across the world, including me. Yet, on reflection, I don’t think we should be surprised.

The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.

Recent work in anthropology and primatology shows how this wiring evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive alpha males.

Yet over the course of our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primate cousins, we learned to work together to counter those bullyboys, organising to diminish their influence.

This is sometimes seen as a process of self-domestication – a hypothesis with roots in the writings of Charles Darwin. Today, there’s strong evidence to support this view: not only do we cooperate to a broader extent than any known species, but even our faces – which are flatter and lack the prominent brow ridges associated with higher testosterone levels – suggest a reduced tendency towards aggression than that seen in our closest genetic relatives, such as chimpanzees.

There’s another set of features that researchers today argue evolved as we started to cooperate more widely. They’re known as learning biases.

Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful.

These are known as conformity and prestige biases respectively – and can have strong effects on how we perceive information.

The psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated this in some classic experimental work on visual judgment: when asked to compare lines on a piece of card, participants agreed that a short line was the same length as a longer one once they’d heard other people in the group say it was.

These biases probably evolved to help us coordinate more effectively, as we would have needed to in order to hunt big game, for example.

This might explain why, in both preindustrial and modern societies, adolescents tend to emulate the behaviour of the most athletic people, whether that athleticism is expressed in hunting or sports.

Yet those same biases, combined with our trusting natures, leave us vulnerable to exploitation by autocratic leaders. I believe that having mostly eliminated overt aggression, ancient societies ended up inadvertently improving the chances of individuals who were skilled at manipulating others in subtler ways.

Some people call this trait proactive aggression, others, machiavellian intelligence, or the ability and inclination to dominate not with violence, but via social manoeuvring and deceit.

We accidentally favoured, and continue to favour, those who pretend to cooperate until they don’t need to pretend any more – what you might call our “invisible rivals”.

Machiavellian people are particularly effective at using our biases against us. Influencers such as Andrew Tate, who featured as a popular source of information in the Channel 4 survey, are adept at using their success and popularity to sell their ideas to their followers, carefully avoiding any balancing viewpoints.

And it’s the young, the impressionable and perhaps those most unhappy with themselves who are more likely to trust them.

Strongmen such as Donald Trump work in a similar way. They use deceit and manipulation to create total trust in their abilities, and then use that trust to propel themselves into positions of power – often then betraying the people that supported their bids, as Trump has done multiple times.

Today’s authoritarian leaders have not only these age-old tools at their disposal, but vast networks for deploying their information-based agendas.

Trump’s recent attacks on the worlds of science and education, promoted on Truth Social, his own social media platform, and boosted by his acolyte Elon Musk, are a case in point.

Despite the novel means of dissemination, such actions are just the latest sallies in a long history of wars over trust and belief.

When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, for example, they deemed certain areas of scientific study “bourgeois” and substituted them for ideologically acceptable ones.…….

Are we hardwired to fall for autocrats?

It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them

www.theguardian.com

 

[bird]

Interesting article
=============
A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

The results shocked a lot of people concerned about the rising threat of autocracy across the world, including me. Yet, on reflection, I don’t think we should be surprised.

The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.

Recent work in anthropology and primatology shows how this wiring evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive alpha males.

Yet over the course of our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primate cousins, we learned to work together to counter those bullyboys, organising to diminish their influence.

This is sometimes seen as a process of self-domestication – a hypothesis with roots in the writings of Charles Darwin. Today, there’s strong evidence to support this view: not only do we cooperate to a broader extent than any known species, but even our faces – which are flatter and lack the prominent brow ridges associated with higher testosterone levels – suggest a reduced tendency towards aggression than that seen in our closest genetic relatives, such as chimpanzees.

There’s another set of features that researchers today argue evolved as we started to cooperate more widely. They’re known as learning biases.

Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful.

These are known as conformity and prestige biases respectively – and can have strong effects on how we perceive information.

The psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated this in some classic experimental work on visual judgment: when asked to compare lines on a piece of card, participants agreed that a short line was the same length as a longer one once they’d heard other people in the group say it was.

These biases probably evolved to help us coordinate more effectively, as we would have needed to in order to hunt big game, for example.

This might explain why, in both preindustrial and modern societies, adolescents tend to emulate the behaviour of the most athletic people, whether that athleticism is expressed in hunting or sports.

Yet those same biases, combined with our trusting natures, leave us vulnerable to exploitation by autocratic leaders. I believe that having mostly eliminated overt aggression, ancient societies ended up inadvertently improving the chances of individuals who were skilled at manipulating others in subtler ways.

Some people call this trait proactive aggression, others, machiavellian intelligence, or the ability and inclination to dominate not with violence, but via social manoeuvring and deceit.

We accidentally favoured, and continue to favour, those who pretend to cooperate until they don’t need to pretend any more – what you might call our “invisible rivals”.

Machiavellian people are particularly effective at using our biases against us. Influencers such as Andrew Tate, who featured as a popular source of information in the Channel 4 survey, are adept at using their success and popularity to sell their ideas to their followers, carefully avoiding any balancing viewpoints.

And it’s the young, the impressionable and perhaps those most unhappy with themselves who are more likely to trust them.

Strongmen such as Donald Trump work in a similar way. They use deceit and manipulation to create total trust in their abilities, and then use that trust to propel themselves into positions of power – often then betraying the people that supported their bids, as Trump has done multiple times.

Today’s authoritarian leaders have not only these age-old tools at their disposal, but vast networks for deploying their information-based agendas.

Trump’s recent attacks on the worlds of science and education, promoted on Truth Social, his own social media platform, and boosted by his acolyte Elon Musk, are a case in point.

Despite the novel means of dissemination, such actions are just the latest sallies in a long history of wars over trust and belief.

When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, for example, they deemed certain areas of scientific study “bourgeois” and substituted them for ideologically acceptable ones.…….

Are we hardwired to fall for autocrats?

It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them

www.theguardian.com

Interesting. I agree. Basically, in a complex industrialized society it helps explain the rise of charlatans. And it reinforces something I believe is real which is the lagging of emotional and intellectual growth/evolution of the brain/mind when dealing with complexity. Complex is not the same as complicated. Complicated means, to me, a problem which requires multiple steps to solve and for which perhaps one has not been trained in or exposed to.

As an example, my brother-in-law split his tractor in order to repair its transmission. He watched You Tube videos and proceeded slowly. He took pictures of things as he progressed and carefully placing parts on the floor of his garage. And he was successful. That was a very complicated problem. A complex problem such as climate change is one where there is not a single correct answer per se. Yes, we know that limiting the impact of greenhouse gases is the “answer” but that answer tells us nothing about how to proceed nor does it provide any clues to unintended consequences. I think complexity contributes directly to the rise of charlatans.

It seems, therefore, that fear becomes the driver. Fear of missing out, fear of being an outcast, fear of change in multiple situations and conditions. Humans definitely evolved as noted in the article to learn cooperation which actually was more useful than violent aggression as complexity increased over time.

The veneer of civilization is very thin. What we see in the rise of rightwing authoritarian charlatans is an emotionally stunted wish based upon fear of complexity due to change. The veneer is under assault.

 

[coldseat]

Interesting article
=============
A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

The results shocked a lot of people concerned about the rising threat of autocracy across the world, including me. Yet, on reflection, I don’t think we should be surprised.

The way we evolved predisposes us to place trust in those who often deserve it least – in a sense, hardwiring us to support the most machiavellian among us and to propel them into power. This seems like an intractable problem. But it’s what we do in the face of that knowledge that matters.

Recent work in anthropology and primatology shows how this wiring evolved. Our ancient ancestors, like most primates today, lived in groups dominated by violent and aggressive alpha males.

Yet over the course of our biological and cultural evolution, unlike our primate cousins, we learned to work together to counter those bullyboys, organising to diminish their influence.

This is sometimes seen as a process of self-domestication – a hypothesis with roots in the writings of Charles Darwin. Today, there’s strong evidence to support this view: not only do we cooperate to a broader extent than any known species, but even our faces – which are flatter and lack the prominent brow ridges associated with higher testosterone levels – suggest a reduced tendency towards aggression than that seen in our closest genetic relatives, such as chimpanzees.

There’s another set of features that researchers today argue evolved as we started to cooperate more widely. They’re known as learning biases.

Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful.

These are known as conformity and prestige biases respectively – and can have strong effects on how we perceive information.

The psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated this in some classic experimental work on visual judgment: when asked to compare lines on a piece of card, participants agreed that a short line was the same length as a longer one once they’d heard other people in the group say it was.

These biases probably evolved to help us coordinate more effectively, as we would have needed to in order to hunt big game, for example.

This might explain why, in both preindustrial and modern societies, adolescents tend to emulate the behaviour of the most athletic people, whether that athleticism is expressed in hunting or sports.

Yet those same biases, combined with our trusting natures, leave us vulnerable to exploitation by autocratic leaders. I believe that having mostly eliminated overt aggression, ancient societies ended up inadvertently improving the chances of individuals who were skilled at manipulating others in subtler ways.

Some people call this trait proactive aggression, others, machiavellian intelligence, or the ability and inclination to dominate not with violence, but via social manoeuvring and deceit.

We accidentally favoured, and continue to favour, those who pretend to cooperate until they don’t need to pretend any more – what you might call our “invisible rivals”.

Machiavellian people are particularly effective at using our biases against us. Influencers such as Andrew Tate, who featured as a popular source of information in the Channel 4 survey, are adept at using their success and popularity to sell their ideas to their followers, carefully avoiding any balancing viewpoints.

And it’s the young, the impressionable and perhaps those most unhappy with themselves who are more likely to trust them.

Strongmen such as Donald Trump work in a similar way. They use deceit and manipulation to create total trust in their abilities, and then use that trust to propel themselves into positions of power – often then betraying the people that supported their bids, as Trump has done multiple times.

Today’s authoritarian leaders have not only these age-old tools at their disposal, but vast networks for deploying their information-based agendas.

Trump’s recent attacks on the worlds of science and education, promoted on Truth Social, his own social media platform, and boosted by his acolyte Elon Musk, are a case in point.

Despite the novel means of dissemination, such actions are just the latest sallies in a long history of wars over trust and belief.

When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, for example, they deemed certain areas of scientific study “bourgeois” and substituted them for ideologically acceptable ones.…….

Are we hardwired to fall for autocrats?

It’s human nature to trust strongmen, but we’ve also evolved the tools to resist them

www.theguardian.com

That gene was never passed on to me. As long as I can remember, I was always repelled by those autocratic, bully types. Their motives and methods, as well as their lying was always so obvious to me. That's why this current age of seeing so many in the US and across the globe fall for the same types of leaders (over and over again) is so baffling to me. Always with the "justification" of "both sides" to continue being blind to the obvious, their support of a bully, autocratic dictator and the other bullies that make up the autocrats party/support.

 

[Optimus Prime]

That gene was never passed on to me. As long as I can remember, I was always repelled by those autocratic, bully types. Their motives and methods, as well as their lying was always so obvious to me. That's why this current age of seeing so many in the US and across the globe fall for the same types of leaders (over and over again) is so baffling to me. Always with the "justification" of "both sides" to continue being blind to the obvious, their support of a bully, autocratic dictator and the other bullies that make up the autocrats party/support.

me too

I've always hated bullies and butt crevasses and the ones who enjoy being bullies and butt crevasses even more