After introducing in the blog’s first article the behavioral origins of Donald Trump, I will now detail why Donald Trump’s supporters community remain so strong, in spite of all the non-sense and agressivity he displays.
We knew before the election that the U.S. is divided but we did not know how dramatically. The crack putting people apart is so deep, we should wonder urgently how to narrow it to prevent a grim future. Weeks after election day, polls show that only 3% of Trump’s voters think Biden won fairly. They continue to stick to Trump’s false claims, no matter the repeated rebukes he gets from judges, election commissioners, and even politicians of his side.
10 million more than in 2016
All counts done and certified, 74 million asked for more Trump in the white house when Biden gathered 81 million, less on his favor than against his opponent. Far from losing ground, the former President has summoned 10 million more people to cast their ballots on his name. This astonishing growing support came up “after the police killing’s of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that Trump did not denounce, after Trump’s zero-tolerance family separation policy, after Covid-19 ravaged the country, and after Trump’s impeachment”, analyze Fabiola Cineas and Anna North, Nov 7, 2020, from Vox online media.
The massive rejection announced before election day by many political experts did not occur. Trump has gone away with his heartless positions and violent policies, anti-democratic, unrespectful, and injurious attitude. It seems that he could step over all the elevated human values that used to define this country, and still his partisans would not reconsider their awkward fascination for him.
How is that possible? What happened to so many Americans? In other words, what is wrong with them? My research considers their behavior under a brand-new perspective, only emotionally based. One thing can already be drawn out: These people are not bad. They simply cannot do better.
Trump’s Partisans cannot do better
I insist on that point. Trump’s supporters cannot encounter the high human values we all look upon when we feel calm and serene. They cannot make the distinction between real facts and fake news. It is not a matter of willingness. It is a matter of inability. Here lays a key that should be handled. If we misunderstand the real underlying motives bringing up hate and violence, we will not be able to break the utterly destructive dynamic in constant progress over the past decades, not solely in the United States but worldwide, and we won’t be able to restore the unity of this nation.
Additionnal Scientific Explanation: I am the author of life-long research made upon the will to understand how come we, as a collective entity, cannot reach our desire of harmony, justice, and peace for all. Here is a tremendous discovery I had the luxury to experiment and observe, and, finally, theorized. I define emotions as quantic energies entering continuously the mind so filled up with specific senses they carry. They are then transmuted by the brain into hormones or electric impulses running along nerves to provide either sensation of fulfillment or unease of variant degree depending on their kind. The mechanism is triggered by a dynamic flow of emotions exciting the brain to process thoughts and feelings, themselves forwarded into beliefs, choices, spontaneous moves, desires. Expressing words or/and acts almost always conclude the chain of events. In other words, emotions do activate behavior as well as the capacity to consider clearly and consciously what is going on around us, or not.
Fears are rooted in memory
Ongoing fears have the particularity to be rooted in memory when deep wounds have been inflicted to self-respect and faith in the capability to go your own way. People implemented with these energies have lost the natural sense they can handle their destiny and achieve the best version of self as an original being.
Often, children and tennagers have witnessed grown-ups stuck in despair and endured bursts of violence it creates, quite far away from what we call the American dream. When your relatives, friends, and neighbors struggle for survival, in terms of food supplies and basic needs like shelter or education, there is no more joy felt but shame and distress. These senses are passed through generations from elders to youngsters, and so on. As years pass by, one’s faith in the goodness of life decrease, and then comes the certainty that the whole deck is stacked.
People who have lost the possibility to assure life support for themselves and their families nourish strong feelings of distrust to the well-off decision-makers who relocated their jobs abroad and took their once long-experienced workers for granted. The resentment mounts too against politicians who promised to prevent that -the democrats – but did not. These experiences shape the picture of an unjust world driven at the expense of honest workers for the well-being and power of a wrong-doing establishment either economic, political, or scientific.
Fears distort reality
The second remarkable property of fear is to distort the meaning of whatever event according to its own long-ago integrated senses. The reason why Trump’s partisans believe fake news is that they reverberate senses that are already admitted as real.
What they see is not what others see. The real world is seemingly veiled in the shadows of their monstrous inner fears where survival and dignity are threatened. As a consequence, they have become unable to take other people’s needs into account, due to the properties of this specific emotion. When you feel crushed in fears, the sense transmitted to your mind is one immediate, huge, and blind inner scream urging you to flee away or to fight back. Fear, as love, bears a sense that controls thinking and acting as well as the perception of reality. Besides, there is no way to bar the emotional energy to enter the mind.
Example: Most of Trump’s supporters are white, blue collars, who heavily hurt from the trade globalization which relocated industries abroad and asked for more educated workers. They have felt abandoned by an elite of politicians identified as mean, selfish, liars only pursuing their own interests. From there, it does not take much to admit the idea that the democrat establishment organizes purposely their exploitation, are involved in pedophilia activities, and in satanic rites, as QAnon states in its conspiracy theories.
Here are the senses that make people supporting Trump
The integrated senses of Trump’s partisans – acknowledged for real – are easily observable. Polls’ statistics on professional and social issues, revendication handed up in mass demonstrations and interviews, the Trump’s mantra that galvanizes them, give a good picture of it. It shows a quite homogenous entity. They are mostly poor workers, blue-collars, unemployed, whites and religious, living in the deep south and middle west, in areas poorly gifted for the challenges of this time, and are given little interactions with non-white American people.
Here are some of the expressed senses gathered from diverse origins:
- “Republican voters take a radical conspiracy theory mainstream”, wrote the New York Times, the 20th of October 2020.
The conspiracy theories – Qanon, Pizzagate, and others – depict the existence of a deep state handled by democrat elites who are involved in pedophilia activities and satanic rites.
- “White people once again largely backed a president who champions a brand of nationalism that is steeped in racism and xenophobia“, wrote Vox online media, on the 7th of November 2020. Vox also specifies 58 % of white males and 55% of white females voted for Trump.
- According to the New York Times, Trump picked up votes in Appalachia, the Southern portion of the Piedmont region, rural Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and more agrarian sections of the Midwest. “The president made significant inroads with critical nonwhite swaths of the electorate while also growing his share of rural white voters,” Ken Spain, a Republican strategist, told the Times on the 18th of November 2020.
This happened after Trump mishandled completely a national pandemic, spewed daily nonsense on Twitter, and literally caged children.
- An interesting analysis from Ron Stagg, professor of history at Ryerson University distinguishes “hardcore supporters who are largely the forgotten, the ignored, the disrespected” and “those who vote for him as Republicans or because they believe he would cut their taxes“. He points out a historical resentment fueled by the economic downturn of the past 10 years that deprived blue-collar of their jobs. “The West was underpopulated and felt ignored, he says. The South was angry over the loss of the Civil War.” Then there are the evangelical Christians: “not all are anti-abortion or anti-gay but many have a sense that America is sliding backward morally.” “Another segment of hard-core supporters feel strongly that America is under attack by foreigners, including Central Americans crossing the southern border. They also falsely believe the Chinese sent COVID-19 to kill Americans.”
In a Sky News footage following election day, Trump’s voters of diverse social and racial origins explained why they did so.
- The report says that “76% of evangelistic Christians voted for Trump“. They usually live in the Midwest, are pro-life, whites, and like to carry guns.
- Someone says “I want to get rid of the corrupt liars in Washington“
- Another, a Cuban-origin woman says she is against socialism and that Biden gives fake promises.
- A black woman says Trump would do better than Biden for jobs.
- 76% (again) of people thinking that the economy is more important than coronavirus voted for Trump, says the journalist. She recalls that the former President has painted himself as a President of money, a businessman who could revitalize the US economy while Biden has promised to prioritize coronavirus.
- A white man says that Trump would bring back business from offshore. He doesn’t believe the scientific evidence to show the mask would stop anybody to get anything.
- A woman sees the mask as a personal responsibility rather than a public one and puts her life-safety into Jesus’s hand she designates as her lord.
Trump’s ego-needs positions him falsely as better
Trump’s voters have been manipulated by Trump’s ego-need to present himself as a super male, the ultimate unbeatable warrior, capable to defeat enemies – who are, in fact, not evil, but those who disagree with him – he actively curses, threatens, and falsely denounces. His absence of morality and his vulgarity happened to position him as different from other politicians and, whether it is not at all a mark of integrity – merely the opposite – the forgotten, as depicted previously, picked him up as their savior.
Trump’s partisans are crushed in enormous fears from which they hope someone could save them. The conspiracy theories are theirs since they believe in the wrongdoing of the establishment which has proven incapable to retain the excess of the high finance and the economical predation over low-wage workers and natural resources.
They are even more likely to believe these inventions because their religious faith goes along with the belief of an existing battle between god and evil, between good and bad people. As everyone else, they tend to position themselves on the good side of the road, placing all the others, different, on the bad side. We may enumerate black people, Chinese, Muslims, foreigners in general, all scapegoats so easy to target. This explains why Trump’s supporters position themselves as racist and nationalist.
Those of Cuban origin hate the communist system they have fled away and surely do not want to experience it again in their adopted country. Truly, democrats and communism do not compare in any way but remember that fear does not allow considering any problem calmly and thoughtfully. Fear prevents people to think while urging them to act blindly and furiously against whatever is identified as threatening.
They are right to cry out for justice
The poor, the forgotten, need jobs desperately to reconquer their dignity and self-satisfaction of earning their living.
They are right to identify injustice in a system made at the expense of the human beings for profits as the supreme value. Here is something that should be changed, fast. Otherwise, the revolution of the forgotten, possibly led by a man potentially as dangerous and cruel as Hitler had been, will really occur in the short run.