It was increasingly disheartening for me, as it was for millions (probably billions), as the numbers rolled in on the U.S. election night. I’d heard about the “red mirage” — the tendency for Republicans to do well early as the polls are reporting results, which can give the illusion that they’re racing to easy victory — but while their numbers teasingly plateaued for a while, they then jumped up and kept rising. All the way to a win.
Really?
Trump?
The guy who said maybe people should inject bleach to fight Covid?
The guy who said there were “very good people on both sides” of a white power rally clashing with protesters?
The guy who looked straight at the sun?
They voted him in?
Again?
And it wasn’t just a blip this time, as his first election win could perhaps be argued to be, but with voters’ eyes wide open about who and what they’re dealing with in the man.
Or… were their eyes wide open?
Because other info was soon uncovered about how this played out, and it paints a different, and very problematic picture.
The questioning for me started with couple of interviews I saw of Trump voters in real time, as the ballots were coming in on election night. One interviewee was a young woman, confirmed under 21, who said that she voted for Trump because (and I’m paraphrasing here, but not by much) she thought the pro-choice side of the Roe vs. Wade issue was “just lies.” Other Democrat party tentpoles? “Just lies.” She said it seemed obvious to her that when Harris spoke, it wasn’t sincere. And that she, the young woman, votes for party before personality.
Another interviewee was a seemingly middle-aged male veteran who said that the troops don’t feel supported by Biden. And that the veteran feels, as do current and past soldiers and other Americans, that they want a strong leader who is respected as such by other countries like Russia and China.
I mean… where to start with any of that?
That Trump lies or misleads a demonstrably high percentage of the time that he says anything?
That long-standing members of that same party, high ranking military leaders who have worked with Trump in the past, were emphatically saying he was a danger to the country?
That Trump may speak sincerely but that doesn’t mean what he’s saying is good or accurate?
That you can’t vote for party over personality when the party is in itself now a cult of personality?*
… that you can’t say the person you voted for supports the troops when he has repeatedly insulted living and dead veterans, and that he can’t be respected as a strong oppositional leader by long-time international rivals when the primary one of those rivals took verifiable measures to help your candidate win in both elections he pulled off? (Psst! You know what people don’t want? More opposition. So you know what Putin helping Trump win means? That Trump offers less opposition. Connect the very few dots, sir.)
This was of course just two people, of the something like 79 million who voted Trump in. So not what you’d call a wide sampling. But it suggests that there may — may — be some willful ignorance of the facts at play by at least some voters.
Maybe many.
Maybe even a lot.
But furthering that problem is that their views are likely pushed and molded by certain media that offer highly spun versions of reality. We’ve known about that media for a while, but the problem is deepening.
Stephen Colbert said on his late night show shortly after election day that there was a verifiable big uptick in some telling online queries that shine a light on some of this. Even up to the day before the election, there were questions online including who Kamala Harris was.
What this seems to suggest is that wherever (at least some of) these uninformed people get their news from, it had not only been putting a positive spin on Trump, but had also been leaving out some very important details that a well-informed public should by rights have known. Those sources, at least in some cases, evidently didn’t even touch on who his opposing candidate was. So what else wasn’t being passed along or was knowingly being mis/dis-informed to sway the voting masses?
This would, after all, explain things like why a 21 year old thinks that all things to do with the Democratic party are insincere or “just lies.” It would explain how even a veteran with real-world experience in the military thinks that Trump supports and respects current, retired, and deceased soldiers, and that he’s a strong leader respected by rival nations.
This speaks to an even larger problem than another four years of Trump and whatever havoc he may cause this term: What does a country do when half of its voting population thinks that what they’re being told by their narrow media of choice is so wholly and infallibly correct that they don’t bother verify that reporting elsewhere?
How do you get people to open up their ears and eyes and minds to sources other than the precious few they stick to, in order to broaden and enrich their diet of information to be better (and more accurately) informed?
How do you get people to critically consider that there’s an objectively better choice for president between a successful career politician with lauded, vetted, practical plans to deal with some of a country’s issues, and a convicted 34-time felon, who has bankrupted six businesses including a casino, who is guilty of sexual assault, who has cheated on every wife he’s had including the current one, and who stated in the only debate leading up to this election that he didn’t have a plan because he wasn’t president yet, but that he had “concepts of a plan”?
Further, what if his supporters either don’t know about or believe those facts (and oh, so many more) revealing Trump as the man he is and not the one he claims to be, just because their horrible intake of news sources never mentions them?
If you tell a Trump supporter any of the litany of factual strikes against him as a good presidential candidate and that person tells you they don’t believe those details, and that they don’t believe the abundant evidence of it you can show them of their accuracy — entirely because what they choose to see and hear hasn’t said anything about them, and the person doesn’t believe any other sources — what do you do? What does a whole country do?
And what do you do when those sources of mis/dis-information are the ones getting to play kingmaker as a result of so many people, in a bit of Orwell’s 1984 come to life, ready and willing to believe what they’re told is real instead of believing what they can plainly see for themselves elsewhere?
This is part of what got Trump elected. And it’s going to be the roadmap for how Republicans will conduct business in the future, if they know it has a good chance of securing them a victory in other elections.
This is an enormous problem that the U.S. has got to somehow, some way, address, or Trump is just the tip of the iceberg for who and what will follow him.
*I don’t use the terms “cult” or “cult of personality” lightly. Trump has for some time shown qualities of a cult leader: Charismatic (to supporters) personality who claims to have special knowledge or authority, who demands loyalty and suppression of dissent (look how many have fallen out of his favour and been ostracized by him and his loyalists in past years), who uses manipulation, control, and financial exploitation over his supporters (the man used the official White House website to sell Trump-branded items with his signature on it, and more recently he’s offered up $10,000 Trump-branded watches and has been selling bibles that he signs).
Meanwhile, his supporters (including high-ranking members of the Republican party) have very cultist behaviour in regard to him: They are willingly isolated (ignoring any information other than what the leader or faithful sources tell them is true), they are hugely subject to groupthink (questioning and dissent is discouraged; believe only what you’re told to), and they will continue supporting him even when they’re harmed by his acts (in his first term: increased deficit, environmental protections removed, tried to kill Obamacare, delayed/mishandled Covid vaccine rollout, etc.) again and again.
In many key respects, Trumpism is literally a cult.