Why some people adore Donald Trump

[lpetrich]

This is what some people's adoration of him seems like to me:


Thank you, Trump. Thank you because I am joyful. Thank you because I am well. No matter how old I become, I shall never forget how we received Trump two days ago. Centuries will pass, and the generations still to come will regard us as the happiest of mortals, as the most fortunate of men, because we lived in the century of centuries, because we were privileged to see Trump, our inspired leader. Yes, and we regard ourselves as the happiest of mortals because we are the contemporaries of a man who never had an equal in world history.

The men of all ages will call on thy name, which is strong, beautiful, wise and marvelous. Thy name is engraven on every factory, every machine, every place on the earth, and in the hearts of all men.

Every time I have found myself in his presence I have been subjugated by his strength, his charm, his grandeur. I have experienced a great desire to sing, to cry out, to shout with joy and happiness. And now see me--me!--on the same platform where the Great Trump stood a year ago. In what country, in what part of the world could such a thing happen.

I write books. I am an author. All thanks to thee, O great educator, Trump. I love a young woman with a renewed love and shall perpetuate myself in my children--all thanks to thee, great educator, Trump. I shall be eternally happy and joyous, all thanks to thee, great educator, Trump. Everything belongs to thee, chief of our great country. And when the woman I love presents me with a child the first word it shall utter will be : Trump.

O great Trump, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifies the earth,
Thou who restorest to centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical chords...
Thou, splendour of my spring, O thou,
Sun reflected by millions of hearts.

-- A. O. Avdienko, edited here (Modern History Sourcebook: Hymn to Stalin, Stalin and the "Cult of Personality")


From a year ago, The rise of American authoritarianism - Vox: "A niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what's driving Donald Trump's ascent. What they found has implications that go well beyond 2016." Authoritarianism -- it's a very good predictor of support for him. He poses as this great hero who will destroy enemies and keep out undesirables.

Feldman developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism: four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy, order, and conformity over other values.

• Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
• Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
• Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
• Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?

Feldman's test proved to be very reliable. There was now a way to identify people who fit the authoritarian profile, by prizing order and conformity, for example, and desiring the imposition of those values.

It's evident from the likes of 'Hail Trump!': Richard Spencer Speech Excerpts - YouTube

 

[RavenSky]

"adore" and "Donald Trump"... just reading your headline makes me retch.

 

[Will Wiley]

Here is why one black woman seems to adore him. But then I guess most leaders have people who adore them. Obama did, Hitler did, Stalin probably did, Bush probably did.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt3szm70ZLs[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Well golly... Will Wiley really showed us.

 

[ideologyhunter]

I'm with OP. I will never, never, never, ever understand the appeal this 70-year-old child-man has for his -- at this point -- 36%. (At least that's encouraging.) He doesn't cast a spell, he releases a stench.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'm with OP. I will never, never, never, ever understand the appeal this 70-year-old child-man has for his -- at this point -- 36%. (At least that's encouraging.) He doesn't cast a spell, he releases a stench.

Alpha male bully. That simple. He is the dumb, but popular high school jock/bully.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm with OP. I will never, never, never, ever understand the appeal this 70-year-old child-man has for his -- at this point -- 36%. (At least that's encouraging.) He doesn't cast a spell, he releases a stench.

Alpha male bully. That simple. He is the dumb, but popular high school jock/bully.

What you are saying is that he appeals to people who, emotionally and intellectually, never progressed beyond high school.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Alpha male bully. That simple. He is the dumb, but popular high school jock/bully.

What you are saying is that he appeals to people who, emotionally and intellectually, never progressed beyond high school.

Not saying that. Some people are just wired certain ways. Trump is a modern business version of Beowulf. Some people react well to bravado.

 

[funinspace]

What you are saying is that he appeals to people who, emotionally and intellectually, never progressed beyond high school.

Not saying that. Some people are just wired certain ways. Trump is a modern business version of Beowulf. Some people react well to bravado.

I'd expand on that some, as the Vox article does a good job discussing authoritarianism and its attraction. Sure El Cheato provides bravado, but he coupled it with simplistic authoritarian memes that sold well as compared to HRC's and Pres. Obama's much more nuanced descriptions of the threats. He sold a simpleton answer to fear along with a hefty does of theater. But he also tapped into a lot of deep seating anxiety of the sinking middle class. The HRC portion of the Dums really aren't offering anything other than re-hashed talking points of the last 30 years, and Don the Con played to this group in a way that normal Repugs pretty much can't. And I think that most people figure that the HRC rail line had its tracks firmly planted in the same old path. The standard trickle down piss hasn't been well received for quite a while. So Don the Con ripped up the play book, and borrowed from some of the left side about trade, WS, and not starting wars of no value. The fundagelicals probably didn't believe he would actually do much different than the standard Repug on these, so it didn't scare them off. And they felt sure that Don the Con's SC picks would be far more to their liking. Besides, HRC was the only other choice, so only the anti-Christ could do worse to them. And the same pretty much goes for the Greedy Old Pervert grouping...take on WS...yeah and Santa is coming next Christmas, right down the chimney. Many of this sinking middle class were so confused that they wanted to keep their ACA but hated ObamaCare...go figure. Many of these people were supposedly so angry that they would vote to shuffle the presidential deck, but then ignored their Congressional Critters even though they control the purse strings. If there were really so many angry votes, then they really were lots of stupid votes... These people grabbed what they hoped would be a life vest. Sadly, it will more likely turn out to be a sand bag.

 

[J842P]

Not saying that. Some people are just wired certain ways. Trump is a modern business version of Beowulf. Some people react well to bravado.

I'd expand on that some, as the Vox article does a good job discussing authoritarianism and its attraction. Sure El Cheato provides bravado, but he coupled it with simplistic authoritarian memes that sold well as compared to HRC's and Pres. Obama's much more nuanced descriptions of the threats. He sold a simpleton answer to fear along with a hefty does of theater. But he also tapped into a lot of deep seating anxiety of the sinking middle class. The HRC portion of the Dums really aren't offering anything other than re-hashed talking points of the last 30 years, and Don the Con played to this group in a way that normal Repugs pretty much can't. And I think that most people figure that the HRC rail line had its tracks firmly planted in the same old path. The standard trickle down piss hasn't been well received for quite a while. So Don the Con ripped up the play book, and borrowed from some of the left side about trade, WS, and not starting wars of no value. The fundagelicals probably didn't believe he would actually do much different than the standard Repug on these, so it didn't scare them off. And they felt sure that Don the Con's SC picks would be far more to their liking. Besides, HRC was the only other choice, so only the anti-Christ could do worse to them. And the same pretty much goes for the Greedy Old Pervert grouping...take on WS...yeah and Santa is coming next Christmas, right down the chimney. Many of this sinking middle class were so confused that they wanted to keep their ACA but hated ObamaCare...go figure. Many of these people were supposedly so angry that they would vote to shuffle the presidential deck, but then ignored their Congressional Critters even though they control the purse strings. If there were really so many angry votes, then they really were lots of stupid votes... These people grabbed what they hoped would be a life vest. Sadly, it will more likely turn out to be a sand bag.

Yeah, I agree, it is definitely more complicated than him being attractive to authoritarian types. Pretty much every electoral season the Republicans put up extremely right-wing, authoritarian machos, and Trump dealt with that offering in the primary. It was a unique combination of being authoritarian *and* tapping into the economic anxieties of the sinking middle class as well as using the electorates disdain for Washington.

Anyway, the problem with Trump isn't that he is a right-wing authoritarian (he is, of course, but so are your typical Republican nominees). The problem is that he is a con-man and a man-child with a thin skin. He was very clearly going to engage in the grossest forms of cronyism, and that should have been obvious to anyone with a brain.

There was a great article by Matt Taibi in the Rolling Stone about a year ago during the primary where he really hits the nail on the head on several aspect. First and foremost, Trump took advantage of the fact that normal people look with scorn on the beltway insider bubble:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-donald-trump-unstoppable-20160224

Trump is no intellectual. He's not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn't learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football.

But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.

That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

But they've all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

Also, what a lot of liberals ignored was that he was out-lefting them. They concentrated on the crazy racist shit he would say, but the problem with the left is that it has become increasingly clear that you can provoked them into losing their shit just by trolling them on race. The funny thing is, the guy mostly says what Republican candidates believe except he was overt about it. Anyway, the main thrust of his rallies were always populist/economic issues.

Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump's campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content.

His pitch is: He's rich, he won't owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won't do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.

He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets.

Trump; GOP Primaries; 2016
Trump may travel to campaign stops on his own plane, but his speeches are increasingly populist as he rails against money in politcs, big pharma and insurance companies. Dennis Van Tine/Corbis
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act.

Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. "The insurance companies," he says, "they'd rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding ...  It's so hard for me to make deals  ... because I can't get bids."

He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that's impossible because of the influence of the industry. "I'm the only one that's self-funding ...  Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers."

Trump isn't lying about any of this. Nor is he lying when he mentions that the big-pharma companies have such a stranglehold on both parties that they've managed to get the federal government to bar itself from negotiating Medicare prescription-drug prices in bulk.

"I don't know what the reason is – I do know what the reason is, but I don't know how they can sell it," he says. "We're not allowed to negotiate drug prices. We pay $300 billion more than if we negotiated the price."

It's actually closer to $16 billion a year more, but the rest of it is true enough. Trump then goes on to personalize this story. He claims (and with Trump we always have to use words like "claims") how it was these very big-pharma donors, "fat cats," sitting in the front row of the debate the night before. He steams ahead even more with this tidbit: Woody Johnson, one of the heirs of drug giant Johnson & Johnson (and the laughably incompetent owner of the New York Jets), is the finance chief for the campaign of whipping boy Jeb Bush.

"Now, let's say Jeb won. Which is an impossibility, but let's say ... "

The crowd explodes in laughter.

"Let's say Jeb won," Trump goes on. "How is it possible for Jeb to say, ‘Woody, we're going to go out and fight competitively' ?"

This is, what – not true? Of course it's true.

What's Trump's solution? Himself! He's gonna grab the problem by the throat and fix it by force!

More importantly, though I think Trump revealed how weak the conservative ideology really is in America. Or at least, that no-one really cared about "conservative principles" aside from a few Ayn Rand fanatics / economic illiterates. This is the best part of the article, IMO:

"I'm a free-trader," he says, "but you can only be a free-trader when something's fair."

It's stuff like this that has conservative pundits from places like the National Review bent out of shape. Where, they ask, is the M-F'ing love? What about those conservative principles we've spent decades telling you flyover-country hicks you're supposed to have?

"Trump has also promised to use tariffs to punish companies," wrote David McIntosh in the Review's much-publicized, but not-effective-at-all "Conservatives Against Trump" 22-pundit jihad. "These are not the ideas of a small-government conservative ... They are, instead, the ramblings of a liberal wanna-be strongman."

What these tweedy Buckleyites at places like the Review don't get is that most people don't give a damn about "conservative principles." Yes, millions of people responded to that rhetoric for years. But that wasn't because of the principle itself, but because it was always coupled with the more effective politics of resentment: Big-government liberals are to blame for your problems.

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame. For a generation, conservative intellectuals have successfully pointed the finger at big-government-loving, whale-hugging liberals as the culprits behind American decline.

But the fact that lots of voters hated the Clintons, Sean Penn, the Dixie Chicks and whomever else, did not, ever, mean that they believed in the principle of Detroit carmakers being able to costlessly move American jobs overseas by the thousands.

And I must admit I've definitely been feeling some shadenfreude watching the Paul-Ryan types having to suck it up. Honestly, watching Paul Ryan act as Trump's lap-dog may be worth the entire ordeal...

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

And I must admit I've definitely been feeling some shadenfreude watching the Paul-Ryan types having to suck it up. Honestly, watching Paul Ryan act as Trump's lap-dog may be worth the entire ordeal...

Lap dog? Trump was out selling Ryan's plan, not the other way around.

 

[J842P]

And I must admit I've definitely been feeling some shadenfreude watching the Paul-Ryan types having to suck it up. Honestly, watching Paul Ryan act as Trump's lap-dog may be worth the entire ordeal...

Lap dog? Trump was out selling Ryan's plan, not the other way around.

I meant more from an "optics" perspective, because Ryan cannot afford to raise the ire of Trumps base of support.

And sure, Trump will totally do what the right-wing extremists propose to him, despite his populist rhetoric during the campaign, the man has zero interest in policy. I do think the Ryan's of the republican party are playing with fire, though. We shall see what become of Paul, and man who I truly believe is evil.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Lap dog? Trump was out selling Ryan's plan, not the other way around.

I meant more from an "optics" perspective, because Ryan cannot afford to raise the ire of Trumps base of support.

And sure, Trump will totally do what the right-wing extremists propose to him,...

But the right-wing extremists are the Tea Party and Trump is threatening the Tea Party caucus. Nothing the Trump Admin is doing makes any sense, other than continuing to say they want the wall.

...despite his populist rhetoric during the campaign, the man has zero interest in policy. I do think the Ryan's of the republican party are playing with fire, though. We shall see what become of Paul, and man who I truly believe is evil.

Reince Priebus is the one who played with fire (and went with party over nation and backed Trump) and Ryan is stuck with his situation, being in a job he never wanted in the first place, with a guy in the White House that is rather unpredictable, and of which, may have some massive skeletons nested in nice little Russian doll style in his closet.

 

[Opoponax]

I'm with OP. I will never, never, never, ever understand the appeal this 70-year-old child-man has for his -- at this point -- 36%. (At least that's encouraging.) He doesn't cast a spell, he releases a stench.

Alpha male bully. That simple. He is the dumb, but popular high school jock/bully.

Biff Tannen in real life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNvR5HwsBEc

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Lap dog? Trump was out selling Ryan's plan, not the other way around.

I meant more from an "optics" perspective, because Ryan cannot afford to raise the ire of Trumps base of support.

And sure, Trump will totally do what the right-wing extremists propose to him, despite his populist rhetoric during the campaign, the man has zero interest in policy. I do think the Ryan's of the republican party are playing with fire, though. We shall see what become of Paul, and man who I truly believe is evil.

It's more like a pack of neighborhood curs running loose, knocking over trash cans and chasing people.

And sometimes having dog fights among themselves.

 

[Elixir]

I meant more from an "optics" perspective, because Ryan cannot afford to raise the ire of Trumps base of support.

And sure, Trump will totally do what the right-wing extremists propose to him, despite his populist rhetoric during the campaign, the man has zero interest in policy. I do think the Ryan's of the republican party are playing with fire, though. We shall see what become of Paul, and man who I truly believe is evil.

It's more like a pack of neighborhood curs running loose, knocking over trash cans and chasing people.

And sometimes having dog fights among themselves.

Yabut they're representing the terrified snowflake 37% as if they are the majority. They can't afford to lose them, but can only continue to dominate the government with lots of help from Uncle Vlad and Breitbart. They are understandably quaking in their boots at the prospect of the public learning how to recognize FAKE NEWS and Russian trolls, so they're doing everything they can think of to keep that from happening.

 

[ronburgundy]

Yeah, I agree, it is definitely more complicated than him being attractive to authoritarian types. Pretty much every electoral season the Republicans put up extremely right-wing, authoritarian machos, and Trump dealt with that offering in the primary.

While his GOP competitors were all ideologically authoritarian, they all pretty much came off as being cowards and weaklings, too afraid to speak their mind. While all of their policies would treat women and minorities like they are useless garbage undeserving of rights, only Trump unapologetically talked to and about women and non-whites like they were useless garbage underserving of right.
That had HUUUGE appeal to many in the GOP base and to the many social conservative "blue collar" workers whose only previously allied with progressive Dem for pro-Union reasons.

It was a unique combination of being authoritarian *and* tapping into the economic anxieties of the sinking middle class as well as using the electorates disdain for Washington.

....

The problem is that he is a con-man and a man-child with a thin skin. He was very clearly going to engage in the grossest forms of cronyism, and that should have been obvious to anyone with a brain.

But that is just it. Trump's con that an amoral Billionaire like himself would ever do anything the reduce the power of billionaires over the working class was so obviously a fraud that only those who already found his "style" of mean hateful intolerance appealing would have the incentive to engage in the self-delusion to fall for the economic nonsense. Yes, he needed an economic con to give some people a way to rationalize it to themselves. But his authoritarianism and overt hateful intolerance is the chord that was struck which made those people want to find a way to rationalize voting for him.

I agree that the Dems should have gone after his economic con, but not so much because it was the root of his appeal, but rather to remove the con as something voters could use as moral cover, and force only those willing to honestly embrace his anti-progressive bigoted views as a their main basis for voting for him.