Sunday, May 13, 2018

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What's wrong with Trump voters

The Republican Southern Strategy

"What is wrong with these people?" That's the title of a recent Jennifer Rubin column about Trump supporters---and she's a conservative.

Jonathan Chait answered that question in May, 2016:
Most voters don’t follow politics and policy for a living, and it’s understandable that they would often fall for arguments based on faulty numbers or a misreading of history. But a figure like Trump is of a completely different cast than the usual political slickster. He is several orders of magnitude more clownish and uninformed than the dumbest major-party nominee I’ve ever seen before. (That would be George W. Bush.) As low as my estimation of the intelligence of the Republican electorate may be, I did not think enough of them would be dumb enough to buy his act. And, yes, I do believe that to watch Donald Trump and see a qualified and plausible president, you probably have some kind of mental shortcoming.
That is, most Trump supporters are stupid.

Kevin Drum today:
...back in 2016, when National Review published its famous “Against Trump” issue, I read through the entire set of articles to look for folks on the right who were against Trump at least in part due to his rather obvious and deliberate appeal to racial animus. There weren’t many: David Boaz was the lone dissenter, along with two others who mentioned it in passing. That was it. That particular strain of Trump’s worldview, which was clearly one of his most toxic, simply didn’t seem to bother anyone, even on the “respectable” right. Or, if it did, they weren’t willing to risk saying so.
That is, most Trump supporters are also racists. Maybe not the burn-the-cross-on-your-lawn kind, but willing---even eager---to vote for clearly racist candidates like Trump.

Most Trump supporters also apparently don't have a problem with the administration's homophobic tendencies: see this and this

Or that he's a confessed sexual predator and a compulsive liar.


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