About every week someone tries to explain to the rest of us why Trump is as popular as he is amongst his base. Today I’ll take my whack at it.
I think it’s a simple triumvirate but a perfect storm: religion, minorities, and Fox.
Christianity
Even though Trump is obviously nowhere near being a Christian himself, he espouses strong support for Christianity. Christians have long loved feeling persecuted, even here in the U.S. where they’re by far the dominant religion, and Trump plays into that saying the government needs to support their religion instead of denying it with all that “freedom of religion” BS. So people lap that up and fall back to the old saw “God uses imperfect people” to explain why Trump himself is so ill-behaved banging porn stars while his wife is pregnant and all that “grab them by the pussy” stuff.
Minorities
Trump has built on Reagan’s fantasy that the minorities are taking advantage of the hard working Euro-white people. Reagan sold this vision of the welfare queen living off the largess of the U.S. government and transitively off your personal hard work. He’s switched out Reagan’s black people for any non-Euro nationality and he’s fueled the idea that everything wrong with the U.S. right now is the fault of those folks. This goes into more detail about all the crazy stuff they blame on immigrants. They honestly think they’ll get a raise at their job once the undocumented people are gone.
Fox News
The third piece of the puzzle is Fox News which keeps trumpeting the same falsehoods and using outrage to stir up emotions. It’s presented by guys in navy blue suits or pretty blondes so you are inclined to trust it and think it’s actual news. And they carefully avoid showing Trump in his full-on dementia moments and quickly cut away so that his base can keep believing he’s just a no-nonsense guy getting it done.
The Perfect Storm
And since all of this is based on emotion instead of reason and facts it’s very powerful. The Dems can’t complete because, let’s face it, reality is way more boring.
And that’s it. There’s a lot of nuance, but that’s the nut of it. As they say it’s not rocket science.