I still can’t get my mind around the election results; but there’s something that’s nagging at me: when I see shots of folks at Trump rallies, it looks to me like they believe, immediately and uncritically, everything he says. How can they not know that he’s a liar?
flex has a comment on Mano’s blog that lists some things that one of their coworkers has said, including “Trump was never convicted of any crime.” How can anyone not know that he was?
The only thing I can think of is that they get all their information from Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk (or worse). Is there anything we can do to get the truth out to these people? (I’m not doing jack shit by posting this on FtB. I’m “preaching to the choir” as they say; but I don’t know what else to do.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice_(American_TV_series)
(or, wishful thinking by uninformed people who think in slogans)
I think this gets at the crux of what I’m concluding about the election.
Lots of people are saying the Dems didn’t craft the right message, the Dems didn’t try to appeal to the right people, the Dems had a bad strategy, etc.
I suspect that it didn’t matter what the Dems did, because too many voters are vacuum-insulated from any messaging the Democratic Party could have put out through any medium. People tend to stick to their own bubbles more now than ever before, and those bubbles have become more polarized. The biggest bubbles are Twitter and right-wing podcasts. Democrats never had a chance.
I could be totally wrong, but that’s my guess based on the evidence I see.
I actually think I can answer that question….
It’s motivated reasoning from the media he consumes (or the ideas of close friends or relatives) which provided excuses for such a bizarre statement. While I don’t know precisely what he believes, I can create possibilities out of whole cloth:
Carroll Defamation Case: That was a civil suit, and no doubt a trumped-up claim to begin with. Carroll was probably happy at the time to be treated so royally by Trump. There was no crime. (No, I don’t personally believe this, but I can believe that some people might.)
Daniel’s Hush Money Case: Trump was blackmailed into paying the money, the only crime which occurred was Daniel’s threatening to reveal her client. This doesn’t count as a conviction, it’s a miss-carriage of justice. (Again, not my opinion.)
New York Business Fraud case: That case is still pending appeal, there is no conviction there. (Which shows a certain amount of ignorance about how courts work.)
I can’t say that these are exactly the reasons my co-worker made the claim. Like I wrote, I didn’t inquire.
But I can see how my co-worker could be exposed to all the news about Trump’s legal battles and yet still make a claim that Trump was never convicted of a crime. And while I may think he’s a bit incredulous, he has a college degree, holds down a fairly well-paying job, and speculates in bit-coin. He may be ignorant, but he’s not stupid. Yet, at some point, he was memetically inoculated against believing the facts of Trump’s convictions were true. What is worse is that the above memes re-enforce Trump’s claim that Trump has been more persecuted than any other man in history.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon explains better than I could her oft-repeated idea about this: most Trump Chumps don’t believe the more outrageous claims he makes, they just adopt and parrot them as “tribal signifiers” showing that they belong to the in-group prioritizing “owning the libs” over truth or realism.
In which light, they’re even more impossible to communicate with.
Jimmy Kimmel did a man on the street bit on Wed, asking people if they planned to vote. They’d begin with “So it’s Wednesday the 6th, Election Day, did you vote today or do you plan to?” I know they cherry picked it for the “comedy” but the fact that they got anyone to agree that they planned to and did not question that Wed was Election Day — all I can do is throw up my hands. All but one said they were voting for Harris, and the one asked, “Who’s running?” And google’s top search on the election was some variation of “did Biden drop out?”
I’ve had a few thoughts about what’s going on. I can’t discount the size of the right wing media machine. That’s just billionaires funding billionaire interests. We’re not going to do anything about that even if we get money out of politics in a direct way. They’ll always be telling people how to think. It’ll only end when we finally get less wealth inequality.
Mostly it comes down to this.
– Trump is a mysoginist and a racist. A particularly vile example of both.
– Trump is incompetent.
– Trump is a reflexive liar.
– Everyone who voted for Trump knows these things. And they’re okay enough with all of them that not only do they disregard them, they’re willing to raise him up on a pedestal and give him the presidency.
– People who voted for Trump will not tell you they voted for Trump because he’s a racist and mysoginist.
– These other issues are the ones to approach people on. Whatever the issue is, Trump will do worse than nothing for these people unless they’re already rich. Every issue is like the “pro-life” abortion issue: grown women die so they can pretend to save imaginary babies. Tariffs lead to higher prices for us. Pushing fossil fuels leads to nothing for workers, profits for companies, and a less habitable planet. Deregulation leads to paying dozens of times more later to clean up the messes. Etc.
– The Democrats would do better on all of these issues. How do I know that? Because electing a deceased canine pet to the presidency would cause less chaos and do less damage than Trump will. Not even hyperbole, although I wouldn’t lead with that idea.
– When you meet a Trump fan you know, congratulate them on their guy winning. And casually ask what they won on November 5th. What do they expect him to do for them?
– Ask how they’re feeling about him next summer after he’s been all over the news for months for acting like a nasty old crank (but don’t use those words) and not doing a damn thing to deliver on what they wanted.
– Mention the Democrat policies in the area they care about and be willing to explain them. You’ll have months to learn so this won’t be too hard.
– Let them stew for a few years knowing their guy is screwing them, too. Don’t bring it up very often or they’ll fight you on it. Just give them a gasp of oxygen once in a blue moon to contrast with the bullshit they’re drowning in. If you ever had any chance of reaching them, something like this is probably how to do it.
If you look at the total votes, Trump got 3mln less votes than in 2020, but Harris had the lowest votecount since 1988, IIRC. So the problem is that a lot of people who voted for Biden stayed at home now. The weak dems are part of the problem.
Actually, I think I can answer that one…
I think a person can reach that opinion without being trapped in a bubble or ignoring the world around them, I think it can happen through the motivated reasoning offered by their environment, probably started by media but amplified by their social circle (friends/family). Let me give some hypothetical examples of how this individual reached that conclusion:
Carroll Sexual Assault and Defamation cases: This is a civil case and doesn’t count as a conviction. Besides it happened so long ago that these were probably trumped-up charges in order to hurt Trump. She probably liked it at the time. (To be very clear, this is not what I think.)
Daniels Hush Money case: This was blackmail by Daniels. The transaction was complete, and Daniels shouldn’t have offered to sell her story. Trump should have sued her. This conviction doesn’t count. It’s a miscarriage of justice. (Again, not my thoughts.)
New York Business Fraud case: This case is still under appeal, so Trump is not convicted. (This shows an ignorance of how the law works, but I can see people saying, “he’s not convicted until all the appeals are over.”)
The above opinions, held by someone, could encourage them to make the statement that Trump has never been convicted of any crime. After all, the above opinions are that two of them are not crimes and the third is still in process. I’m not saying these are the opinions of my co-worker, but they could be and I can see how he got them.
As much as I think my co-worker is wrong, I cannot think he is stupid or ignorant. He graduated from college and is holding down a fairly well-paying job. But he has been memenically inoculated against any consideration that Trump may have brought these lawsuits on himself by his own actions. Which feeds into the narrative that Trump is the most persecuted man in the entire world, ever. My co-worker may not believe the hyperbole, but they may well believe that Trump is being persecuted.