Reasons Why So Many People Still Support Trump
“This administration isn’t just targeting the laws that protect us they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.”
Its incomprehensible to many of us that people could support a president who, in Bernie Sanders words, is compulsively dishonest, who is a bully, who actively represents the interests of the billionaire class, who is anti-science, and who is trying to divide us up based on the color of our skin, our nation of origin, our religion, our gender, or our sexual orientation.
Based on various trusted sources and a dab of cognitive science, its fair to conclude that there are three main reasons for this unlikely phenomenon.
1. Trumps followers believe theyre better than other people
Nationalism, exceptionalism, narcissism, racism. Theyre all part of the big picture, although its unfair to simply dismiss Trump people as ignorant racists. Many of them are well-educated and wealthy. But well-to-do individuals tend to feel entitled, superior, uninterested in the people beneath them, and less willing to support the needs of society. Thus many wealthy white Americans are just fine with Trumps disdain for the general population.
Poorer whites also feel superior, in the sense that theyre reluctant to give up their long-time self-assigned position at the top of the racial hierarchy.
2. Theyre driven by hatred for their perceived enemies
3. They refuse to admit they were wrong
So now what?
FALL FUNDRAISER
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One Answer To The Question ‘why Do Evangelicals Support Trump’ Is That They Don’t Or At Least Not All Of Them
As a student of American evangelicalism, I am frequently asked how Christians can support Donald Trump. I stop myself from going into lecture mode. Most people want a sound bite, not a disquisition.
So heres the short answer: Ever since 1980, when Ronald Reagan told a Dallas gathering of 15,000 evangelicals, you cant endorse me but I want you to know that I endorse you, white evangelicals have voted for Republicans, who mostly promise to enact their agenda.
Mostly theyve been disappointed. In November 2016, when Trump won election to the White House, abortion was still legal, gay couples had the right to marry, government regulations inhibited the free market and the U.S. embassy to Israel remained in Tel Aviv.
Trump promised to change all that.
Despite his personal shortcomings, evangelicals believed him. He selected a solid Christian as his running mate, and his track record as a businessman proved he got things done.
God uses imperfect messengers, evangelicals reasoned, and if King David an adulterer who arranged to have his partners husband killed could still accomplish great good, why not the 45th president?
So it was a realpolitik calculation that drove so many white evangelicals to the Trump-Pence ticket. It was also stoked by economic uncertainty, cultural anxiety and a sense of social marginalization that festered through the Obama years. They wanted an affirmation of their status, and Trump offered one.
We used three sorting criteria.
Reminding Them Of Their Patriotism Helped Bolster Their Support For Us Democracy Including The Peaceful Transfer Of Power After An Election
The House committee investigating last years attack on the Capitol started public hearings last week, continuing its inquiry into the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex. Central to this investigation are questions about whether then-President Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to attack and disrupt the certification of the election, potentially overturning the result.
Some might argue that Trumps Jan. 6 speech to his supporters reflects his broader pattern of dismissing presidential norms including the peaceful transfer of power, which is central to democracy. Before the 2016 election, for instance, Trump would not publicly commit to accepting the results as legitimate if he lost. He made before the 2020 election, raising questions about whether he would cede power.
Our research in fall 2020 investigated which factors might affect whether American voters would support or oppose Trump remaining in office if he lost which would violate fundamental democratic principles. Political scientists have long studied public support for democratic norms and procedures, such as allowing disliked groups to hold rallies.
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Center For Religion And Civic Culture
This piece was originally published by Religion News Service.
As a student of American evangelicalism, I am frequently asked how Christians can support Donald Trump. I stop myself from going into lecture mode. Most people want a sound bite, not a disquisition.
So heres the short answer: Ever since 1980, when Ronald Reagan told a Dallas gathering of 15,000 evangelicals, you cant endorse me but I want you to know that I endorse you, white evangelicals have voted for Republicans, who mostly promise to enact their agenda.
Mostly theyve been disappointed. In November 2016, when Trump won election to the White House, abortion was still legal, gay couples had the right to marry, government regulations inhibited the free market and the U.S. embassy to Israel remained in Tel Aviv.
Trump promised to change all that.
Despite his personal shortcomings, evangelicals believed him. He selected a solid Christian as his running mate, and his track record as a businessman proved he got things done.
God uses imperfect messengers, evangelicals reasoned, and if King David an adulterer who arranged to have his partners husband killed could still accomplish great good, why not the 45th president?
But here is another answer to the question of why evangelicals support Trump: They dont, or at least not all of them.
Our goal was to educate reporters for the 2018 midterm election where white evangelicals again voted overwhelmingly Republican and beyond.
We used three sorting criteria.
Michael Cohen On Why Republicans Support Trump: ‘we’re Stupid’
Michael Cohen has offered a blunt explanation for why Republicans, including himself, have supported President Donald Trump despite his numerous wrongdoings and attempts to dismantle Americas democracy.
During an appearance on MSNBC, Trumps former longtime fixer and personal attorney told host Joy Reid that he predicts Trump, if he loses, will claim the Nov. 3 election was rigged and use Attorney General William Barr to invalidate ballots that he will say are fake in order to stay in office.
He doesnt care about the Constitution of the United States, he said. He believes that hes above everything.
Reid noted that Trump cant do these things alone and that Cohen and many others went along with Trump for a long time. She asked, Why do they do it?
Because were stupid. You know, were a bunch of sycophants, Cohen said without hesitation. Hes very much like a cult leader. When youre in his good grace, you believe that you have this enormous amount of power, which you do, and he somehow manages to convince you to use that power for bad.
“He’s very much like a cult leader,” Michael Cohen says of President Trump. “When you’re in his good grace, you believe that you have this enormous amount of power, which you do and he somehow manages to convince you to use that power for bad.”
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Trump Supporters Explain Why They Believe The Big Lie
For many of Trumps voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. Its more of an attitude, or a tribal pose.
About the author: Sarah Longwell is the executive director of Republicans for the Rule of Law, publisher of The Bulwark, andhost of the Focus Group podcast.
Some 35 percent of Americansincluding 68 percent of Republicansbelieve the Big Lie, pushed relentlessly by former President Donald Trump and amplified by conservative media, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They think that Trump was the true victor and that he should still be in the White House today.
I regularly host focus groups to better understand how voters are thinking about key political topics. Recently, I decided to find out why Trump 2020 voters hold so strongly to the Big Lie.
For many of Trumps voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. Its more of an attitude, or a tribal pose. They know something nefarious occurred but cant easily explain how or why. Whats more, theyre mystified and sometimes angry that other people dont feel the same.
As a woman from Wisconsin told me, I cant really put my finger on it, but something just doesnt feel right. A man from Pennsylvania said, Something about it just didnt seem right. A man from Arizona said, It didnt smell right.
Perhaps thats because the Big Lie has been part of their background noise for years.
The Miseducation Of Donald Trump Voters
If my Dad were alive todayand fifty years youngerI suspect he’d be a Trump voter.
My father got a high school education, enlisted in the Army, and fought in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he was hired by American Airlines, the only company whose paychecks he would ever cash. In forty-plus years on the job, he went from working as a mechanic to flying transcontinental routes as a flight engineer .
He earned enough to move his family from Yonkers to Long Island, with its affordable houses and good schools. His own father had been an immigrant pick-and-shovel man. My Dad did him one better by following the playbook common to men of his moment and mindset: learn a trade, work hard, play by the rules, and things will work out. On the day he dropped me off at college , he was still badgering me to learn TV repair, plumbing, or heating and air conditioning. College was fine, but its benefits seemed nebulous to Depression-era guys like Dad. It wouldn’t hurt, he insisted, to have “a skill to fall back on.”
Yet none did. Now, at last, there’s an emerging, rueful understanding that possibly Trump’s support is not a function of racism, bigotry, and xenophobia. “It is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay,” observed William Galston in the Wall Street Journal. “We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores.”
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Illinois Governors Race Poll Shows Darren Bailey With A Big Lead Over Richard Irvin
In fact, its almost like none of it happened or matters. Large numbers of Illinois Republicans still put Trump on a pedestal alongside arguably the partys most revered president of the 20th Century, Ronald Reagan, a product of downstate Tampico.
One of the big stories from this poll is it really shows Trumps continued hold on Republican primary voters, said Jim Williams, a polling analyst with Public Policy Polling, the North Carolina-based pollster that conducted the Sun-Times/WBEZ survey on June 6 and 7.
Nationally, Trumps grip on the Republican Party has come under question, particularly after he whiffed in his high-profile primary endorsements in Georgia, Nebraska, Idaho and North Carolina, where he failed to secure reelection for controversial Rep. Madison Cawthorn.
But the Land of Lincoln is solid Trump turf for Illinois Republicans, the Sun-Times/WBEZ Poll suggests.
I know theres been some speculation over the past several months as these primaries have played out whether or not Donald Trump and those Republican primary voters are still in lockstep with each other, Williams said. I think at least on the results of this poll, were seeing a lot of indications that they are.
Inside The Echo Chamber
Nothing like this concentrated core of media influence exists on the Democratic side. In polling by the Pew Research Center, the Public Religion Research Institute and others, Democratic partisans express confidence in a broad range of mainstream media outlets. As political analysts and strategists in both parties have come to recognize, that makes it considerably more difficult for Democrats than for Republicans to drive a coherent message to their base voters.
Democrats tend to trust a lot of different news sources, and even if most journalists at those news outlets have liberal perspectives or whatever, it is much easier to get people to believe what I want them to believe if I can funnel all the information through one outlet, like Fox, says Cox.
Dan Pfeiffer, who was the White House communications director for Barack Obama, is the author of Battling the Big Lie, a book released this month that analyzes that imbalance. He argues that, as the reaction to the January 6 committee demonstrates, Republicans are now
Yet even amid all these headwinds, almost all of the strategists and analysts I spoke with said it was premature to conclude that the hearings will have no impact on thinking among conservative and Republican voters. Abramowitz notes that polls already show some slackening in the intensity of Republican support for Trump, even if he remains the partys dominant figure.
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American Heartland: The Shock Of Being Left Behind
In 2017, when Adam Jadhav returned to his old home town of Henry, Illinois , his research found some of the maladies described by Lenz and Chatman. Some people longed for better days gone by. Some younger men were seething because they no longer had a place in the local economy.
But in an article published recently in the Journal of Rural Studies, he described something more subtle: a quiet despair in farm country.
Not so long ago, Henry was an economic hub in central Illinois. There were healthy family farms, and industries associated with the farms Caterpillar Inc. machinery factories, tire factories. And the town was 99% white, which allowed an unchallenged racism. Jadhav was harassed because his father, the United Methodist minister, was an Indian immigrant.
In recent decades, change has swept through Henry like a prairie storm. The economy has devolved. Opportunity, wealth and people especially young people have fled to bigger cities. Shops have closed. Churches have closed. And the people left behind mourn for whats been lost.
When Donald Trump ran in 2016, Jadhav said, the slogan Make America Great Again found an audience. Its not that Trump was popular to many, Jadhav said, he seemed a horribly flawed candidate. Still, Trump spoke to their values and insecurities, and Hillary Clinton didnt.
What comes next, now that Trump has lost? Jadhav is of two minds.
One Of The Better Presidents That Weve Had
Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed believed Trump should run again for president in 2024, with 28% suggesting it was time for the party to move on to another candidate.
But other Republicans considered potential presidential candidates would likely have a tough time beating the former president in an Illinois primary.
Just over half of the states GOP voters chose Trump as their choice in a theoretical 2024 Republican primary.
Considering the way everything is turning out now, how Joe Biden was going to be the savior and unifier and thats not happening, I think definitely will run, and hell have my support, said Joe Turkos, a 52-year-old South Loop resident who participated in the Sun-Times/WBEZ poll.
Hes probably in my opinion one of the better presidents that weve had at least in my lifetime, said Turkos, who manages a gym and came around and voted for Trump in 2020 after initially supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Aside from Ronald Reagan, I think he was the most effective Republican president because he governed more as a conservative, his America First platform. Its great. I liked how he was tough on China. He was tough on Russia. He was tough on Iran.
The poll found Trumps next closest rival among the states GOP voters is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whom 23% identified as their top choice for president. Trumps past running mate, former Vice President Mike Pence, drew support from only 6% of Illinois Republicans.
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