What unites Trump voters?

[Admin]

To understand the corruption, chaos, and general insanity that is continuing to engulf the Trump campaign and much of the Republican Party right now, it helps to understand the predicate embraced by many Trump supporters: If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies. During last week’s Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker insisted that life under a Biden presidency would be dystopian. Charlie Kirk, the young Trump acolyte who opened the proceedings, declared, “I am here tonight to tell you—to warn you—that this election is a decision between preserving America as we know it and eliminating everything that we love.”

President Trump, who closed the proceedings, said, “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens. And this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life or allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.” And in between Americans were told that Democrats want to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door” and that they “want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear.”

The Predicate Is Fear - The Atlantic

[Admin]

It’s been extremely common for news accounts to portray Donald Trump’s candidacy as a “working-class” rebellion against Republican elites. There are elements of truth in this perspective: Republican voters, especially Trump supporters, are unhappy about the direction of the economy. Trump voters have lower incomes than supporters of John Kasich or Marco Rubio. And things have gone so badly for the Republican “establishment” that the party may be facing an existential crisis.

But the definition of “working class” and similar terms is fuzzy, and narratives like these risk obscuring an important and perhaps counterintuitive fact about Trump’s voters: As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off. The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both..

The Mythology Of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support | FiveThirtyEight

[Admin]

Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven't sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy." Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and we can be sure that such a revelation would have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man's political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While there have been various popular articles that have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below.

'Follow Trump off a cliff’: Psychological analysis reveals 14 key traits of people who support the president - Alternet.org

• 15 different psychological explanations, a must read. 
  

[Admin]

But another prominent scholar of the American right believes Trump support among men, in particular, is rooted in something more psychological. Many white men feel that their gender and race has been vilified, says the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. Their economic prospects are bad, and American culture tells them that their gender is too. So they’ve turned to Trump as a type of folk hero, one who can restore their sense of former glory. Exposing themselves and others to the coronavirus is part of that heroism. Or as Kurtis told me when I asked him how he felt about Trump getting the coronavirus, “Trump’s willing to accept that risk to win for the American people. And Joe Biden is sitting in his basement.”

The People Who Love Trump's Coronavirus Response - The Atlantic

[Admin]

"Do not think Trump's current focus on the stolen election is an amusing side-show," Greenberg warns. "It is about Blacks and Democratic politicians in the cities using illegal voting procedures and stuffing ballot boxes to steal away Trump's great victory (in) his battle to save America. This survey shows what are the true drivers of GOP identity — the deep hostility to Black Lives Matter, undocumented immigrants, and Antifa. And imagine their reaction to the flood of unaccompanied children at the border, the guilty verdict in Minneapolis, and Black Lives Matter protests after each police shooting of unarmed Blacks." Greenberg adds, "There is no escaping the reality that Trump's Republican Party is a self-consciously and self-confidently anti-democratic, anti-immigrant party that will battle for the future of White people in a multicultural America. The Trump loyalists — again, two-thirds of the party — respond with deep emotion to the term, 'MAGA,' that captures their whole embrace of Trump's battle to make America great again. And it is an unfinished battle and campaign."

'An unfinished battle': Poll reveals the 'true drivers of GOP identity' — and the dangers for Democrats - Alternet.org

[Admin]

But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists' backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.

[T]he demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.

One dominant narrative about the rise of Trumpism is that it reflects a type of "working class" revolt, in which the feeling (and the reality) of economic precarity made Trump's fake populism seem like a viable solution to the country's problems. But such claims often obscure as much as they reveal about the rise of American neofascism and Trump's enduring power over his political cult members. Research shows that the median household income of Trump's voters is around $72,000 a year — significantly higher than the median household income in the United States as a whole. Other research shows that white supremacy, racial resentment and a desire to protect white privilege are the central or perhaps principal values and beliefs that motivate Trump's followers.

Trump supporters’ insecurity reveals a key fact about their beliefs: UC Berkeley sociologist - Alternet.org

[Admin]

Intangible fears are today more important than objective facts. In one of the most careful scholarly analyses of the 2016 election, the University of Pennsylvania’s Diana C. Mutz explained in a paper that the data simply did not support the thesis that Trump was being supported by those who were economically “left behind” and had lost jobs or seen their wages stagnate. She writes, “Candidate preferences in 2016 reflected increasing anxiety among high-status groups. … Both growing domestic racial diversity and globalization contributed to a sense that white Americans are under siege by these engines of change.”

Opinion | Why Americans aren’t giving Biden credit for a strong economy - The Washington Post

[Admin]

The entire Trump phenomenon was, from the very beginning, about conservative fear of losing America.  Study after study after study has found that Trump voters in the GOP primary and electorate are motivated by a concern that the United States is becoming literally unrecognizable: populated by people who look different and think differently than they do.

The fears of the base were reflected in the language of the elite. In 2016, the most famous intellectual case for Trump in 2016 was Michael Anton’s “Flight 93” essay — which argued that these changes were transforming the government in ways that handed more and more control over American government to the left. Anton spoke of a “bipartisan junta” that controlled the centers of power and wielded it against conservative institutions, a kind of soft coup against ordinary Americans backstopped by demographic change.

Trump indictment: Republican reaction reveals party gripped by paranoia - Vox