Trying to Understand the Trump Voter

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

It has taken me a while to figure this out, but Trump supporters fall into a few categories.

Anti-Taxers

These are the people who don't really like President Vulgar, but who want lower taxes no matter what.  What they don't realize is that income taxes are already lower than they have been at any time since World War II.  Many of the these Trump supporters are self-employed, which means that they are paying their own payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare), instead of having an employer pay them.  Thus, their taxes seem high even though they aren't.

Other Single-Issue People

These include pro-gun people, anti-abortionists and conservative Christians.  The conservative Christians are especially hypocritical since Trump has very low morals and seems to care NOTHING about the poor.  As far as abortion is concerned, evangelical Protestants didn't even care about the abortion issue until the 1970's.  It was the Catholics who cared about abortion -- until the evangelicals decided to adopt the Catholic position.

Machismo

Some people just love Trump's in-your-face macho style.  They see him as a truth-teller (despite the fact that he has been caught telling lies almost every time he speaks).  They see him as being a "no-nonsense" person.  In my view, a no-nonsense person is Pete Buttigieg, not Trump.  To me -- and to many other people -- Trump is just crude.

Bad People

Yes, Donald Trump is an extraordinarily bad person.  He is shallow, dishonest, cruel and self-centered.  In order to support such a bad person, you have to be a bad person yourself, or have a bad element in your character.  The bad people in the country are the selfish, the racists, the misogynists, and the greedy one-percenters -- anyone who doesn't have a conscience.  Anyone who thinks that "looking out for Number One" is the right way to live is a bad person.

Long Live the Ignorant

Even such bad people, however, have their limits.  One thing that has been noted about Trump's supporters is that they didn't vet Trump before the 2016 election, and they don't want to know the facts about him now.  They don't want to know about his dishonest business dealings, or about his obvious racism, or about his assaults on women, or about his opportunism -- like when he became an ultra-conservative at the beginning of the presidential campaign in 2015, even though he had been a moderate before that.  They don't want to know about the thirty thousand lies he has told since he became president.  They don't want to know about the harm he is doing to this country and to the world by pandering to his base.

Donald Trump's supporters are the same kind of people who would have supported Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany.  They are the people who hold their societies back from progress.  In America, they appear to be about 40% of the total population.

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