‘How could they! How can millions of Americans vote for Donald Trump?!’
Being a Brit who has made my home in America, I am often asked this kind of question by friends back home, where according to a recent opinion poll, over 70% of people had an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
Instead of asking why so many Americans support someone so obviously beyond the pale, perhaps, I gently suggest, one might ask what it is about Trump that puts him beyond the pale in the first place?
Apologists for Trump usually start off by, well… apologising for him. Yes, he’s crass, they admit. Okay, he’s abnormal, they will say, with a monstrous ego to boot. He is vain to the point where everything is always about him.
I don’t doubt any of that. But nor do I doubt that many of those leaders we are allowed to admire, such as Winston Churchill or FDR, were short of self-belief, either. Have you listened to a speech by Barack Obama?
Why is it that Trump’s self-centeredness puts him beyond the pale, but not the egotism of others?
Rather than sneer at Trump’s self-belief, is there not something admirable in someone who has bounced back from defeat to be within a whisker of a historic second, non-consecutive term? If he wins, might we not at least for a moment admire the fact he would be only the second person in America’s history to achieve this?
‘But what about his policies?’, my free market friends interject. ‘He’s not a proper free market conservative.’
I agree. I’m not a fan of Trump’s proposal to impose a 10% tariff on all imports. It would make America, and the world, poorer. I also worry about what a second Trump term might mean for America’s spiralling national debt and for Ukraine.
But is it really Trump’s policy positions that make you think of him as being off limits?
Look at what happened to US national debt on Joe Biden’s watch – up by trillions of dollars in just four years. Think of what the CHIPS Act has done to undermine global supply chains. Does any of that put the Democrats similarly outside of polite society?
If the thing that makes you anti-Trump is his qualified support for Ukraine, fine. But did you feel the same way about Germany’s Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, when Germany sat on the fence over the supply of arms to Kyiv?
If it is Trump’s policies that account for your antagonism towards him, at least apply your antagonism consistently.
To understand Trump’s appeal, don’t think like a think tanker. In fact, don’t think in terms of policy positions at all.
Trump’s supporters across America are often the kind of folk that don’t really follow politics, and when they do, what happens in Washington DC is only part of the picture. Politics for them is first and foremost about what happens in their state, or even their local school district.
When they think of distant DC, they assume it is in the hands of a cabal of career politicians, out of touch with America and taking them for granted. Heck, why not send Donald Trump along to shake things up a bit?
Trump, many of his supporters believe, is a necessary corrective to a broken system. Trump’s abrasiveness thereby becomes part of his appeal.
Washington gave them inflation and uncontrolled immigration, and while they might not know in detail what Trump intends to do about it, he might at least try more than platitudes.
The more that people who earn a living in DC complain about how awful he is, the more they validate this view.
On support for Ukraine, or the issue of eliminating tax on tips, Trump might not stick to the script. But the more he veers off script, the more his supporters wonder why it is that on so many issues, so many politicians always seem to sound the same.
Of course, the people whose job it is to explain any of this to you – without necessarily agreeing or not – can seldom see it themselves. British journalists, almost as much as British diplomats, tend to analyse what is happening in America from the vantage point of Washington, but it turns out to be more of a blind spot than a vantage point.
To be in Washington, for them, is often the high point of their career. They simply cannot comprehend the millions of voters for whom Washington is at best an irrelevance, at worst a place to be despised.
The condescending forays British pundits make into ‘red’ states, only seems to reinforce their solipsism.
With a 50-50 chance of Trump being back in White House, rather than ask why millions voted for him, perhaps it might be time to question if the people whose job it is to inform you about what is happening in America are actually up to the job? Maybe you should start treating the mainstream media the way Trump and his supporters do?
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