Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/31/teflon-tangerine.html
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What would the President have to do, to lose your support? Because he’s done it.
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No shit, Sherlock. Trump was never the disease, merely a symptom. His base, the slightly less than half of America for whom ethics is a distant concern or outright unimportant or who adore his racist, misogynistic, greedy, corrupt, get away with whatever he can attitude because to them predatory behavior is virtuous, and who think his not giving a fuck will magically translate into him fixing the economy, wiping Muslims off the Earth, bringing smug Europeans to their knees and getting brown people out of their towns and black people back under a boot…those people are the problem.
This isn’t some failure of communication. These people have fundamentally different values for right and wrong. You can’t convince people who themselves advocate apartheid, genocide, rape, disenfranchisement, religious crusade, unchecked greed and doing whatever you can get away with that a man who does those things is bad because he does them. They’re not getting distracted and then forgetting what he’s all about. It’s why they fucking voted for him.
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This isnt just about Trumps supporters. Its about how people in general chose to see what they want to see.
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CBO report on first GOP healthcare plan: 24 million people lose health insurance.
CBO report on second GOP healthcare plan: 23 million people lose health insurance.
Right wing media: CBO confirms that Trump’s new plan gives healthcare to a million people!
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After the election fiasco, I’m not sure how anyone can give any credence to Nate Silver vis a vis Rump at this point.
And continue to. I’ve had bizarre conversations with die-hard Trump supporters who say “gosh I think he’s just swell and the bestest ever and don’t know what everybody’s so upset about!” to which I respond with a litany of the awful things he’s done and said, and they simply say “I don’t believe it. If it was reported on CNN then it’s fake. The only things I believe are on FOX or Breitbart.” Even if I give them actual quotes, actual footage of Trump admitting to firing Comey to derail the Russia investigation or ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, they say no, that’s out of context, that’s just manipulated by the evil MSM that wants to ruin such a wonderful man.
If Trump literally murdered a man on camera, his base would shrug it off if it was first reported on CNN.
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That’d be the election where the results were within the margin of error of 538’s predictions, and where they were one of the few voices in the media arguing that it wasn’t a dead certainty for Clinton?
No idea.
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I’m pretty sure this has been litigated ad nauseum on boing boing, but Silver* was giving Trump better odds than ANYBODY before the election, even if it was still about a 30% chance. NYT, HuffPost were all giving Trump a <10% chance. He was the only pundit who saw that Trump actually had a good shot of winning the electoral college, even if he lost the popular vote by 1-2 percentage points.
*They’re actually not just Silver’s models, there are many people that contribute to them.
Edit: I would also say, 538 is pretty good about re-evaluating their assumptions and admitting when they get it wrong. As much as I love the NYT, WaPo and HuffPo, they aren’t as good at critical self evaluation AND they tend to miss the point when they do.
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Meanwhile, at the White House’s Media Damage Control Office:
" OK, boys, any one of you got a brilliant idea to distract the public from the last presidential shenanigans. I’m kinda dry.
- At this point, I propose videos of kittens.
- That’s… Actually it can’t be worse than what we’ve been trying.
- Yeah, and this time he won’t be able to undermine…
- Hey, guys, heard the news? Donnie’s been caught on camera eating kittens!
- Fuck this, I resign!"
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have not yet found a sin that disqualifies him from their continued support
Finding out that he employs illegal aliens at his hotels is about the only thing I can come up with.
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I know that with the stream of stupidity coming out of the White House it SEEMS like Trump has been there a long time, but in reality, he’s only been there a few months. He simply hasn’t had the opportunity to make people’s life worse yet. While there has been plenty of “inside the beltway” scandal, there hasn’t yet been any real reason yet for people who voted for him with the hope that he would improve the economy for them to change their minds and realize what a horrible mistake that they have made. It won’t be until after he joins Ryan in gutting medicaid and people’s lives take a turn for the worse that they see a reason to change their minds about him. Remember, “I deserve a break, but the undeserving welfare queens and food stamp fraudsters are one rung below me on the economic ladder.”
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I keep thinking about this, particularly as pictures of Manuel Noriega started flooding the internet, all of them with middle-aged women smiling and kissing his cheeks, or men cheering as he strode by. And I think about the scenes from My Brother’s Bomber (recently watched) with adoring crowds around Gaddafi. Reading history seems to be all about the personality of the dictator, picking apart their personal history, their career and rise through the ranks. If anything broader than that, it’s usually about the resistance or the dictator’s rich or powerful allies. Somehow the fact that a huge slice of the population loves these guys has always been lost on me. I admit that my memory for history is leaky, and filtered through pop culture memes of blatantly-obvious wicked dictators seizing power with a death-ray, as opposed to riding and populist wave. It’s all more disconcerting novel to me than it should be that there is a huge part of the U.S. that thinks that a lot of our critical institutions and procedures are not just superfluous, but actually standing in the way of the greatness of a charismatic (well…) leader, and were just waiting for a despot to pour their hopes into.
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An accomplished and experienced* confidence artist knows how to choose a core group of marks who’ll keep believing long after the scam has been exposed. It’s usually helped along by a bunch of “ropers” and shills who are in on the grift and who’ll stay in as long as they benefit. This is just that phenomenon operating on a massive scale.
[* 40+ years of conning people in full public view without a day in prison]
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I think that’s what we tend to miss. 90% of the voters probably can’t name anyone in the presidential administration besides Trump. They don’t read the newspapers, watch TV news, or participate in politics outside of once ever 4 (or if they’re very engaged) 2 years.
Is their life materially worse right now since Trump has entered office? Not really. So why should they care enough to change? Moreover, since presidential policy actions don’t make that much difference to people’s daily lives (with the possible exception of ACA and that they’ll notice once it’s actually gone), the odds are people’s approval of Trump will mostly be based on factors he has little influence on.
I think one has to be careful about falling into a trap. I remember many right-wingers falling into despair or apoplexy because Clinton seemed to be able to “get away with it”, no matter what he did. Of course, the voters didn’t approve of it. They just didn’t care.
Now it’s me trying not to explode or despair because… Trump is getting away with it, and the voters just don’t care.
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Simply put, the American Hard Right encompasses two main groups of voters. Those who willingly ignore their conscience because they’re terrified of globalization and change, and those who believe might literally makes right and anyone who gets mowed down deserves it for being too weak to stop it. It’s the latter no one on the Left or in the center wants to face make up a sizeable fraction of the US population. And they’ll keep ignoring it right up until the fascists are hanging gay people on Facebook, and then they’ll keep ignoring it if they’re not directly effected. The apathy of the American Left knows no limits. And the media is the group that is easily distracted.
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We make fun of Trump’s twitter, but he has a direct connection to his voter, close as a bedroom pillow, spouting propaganda 24/7.
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Cognitive dissonance is a bitch.
I’ve tried to ask people what they would think of Obama did what Trump did if they would be ok with it, but it doesn’t usually work out.
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This is what I’m very curious about. As you say, most voters are way more involved with their daily lives than politics, and don’t really pay much attention apart from big headlines here and there. They can shrug off most Trump stuff as “things happening to other people” or “political BS”. But if or when older and lower-class middle America sees their healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and SNAP go away, it’s going to be hard to ignore.
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