To beat President Trump, you have to learn to think like his supporters

[mahatmakanejeeves]

PostEverything Perspective

To beat President Trump, you have to learn to think like his supporters

Scandals will never defeat a populist.

By Andrés Miguel Rondón December 26 at 6:00 AM Follow @amrondon
Andrés Miguel Rondón is an economist living in Madrid. He is a Venezuelan citizen who was born and raised there.

Almost a year later, Donald Trump is still president. Powerful men in entertainment, media and even politics have seen their public lives implode under scandal almost instantly for months now, but Trump holds on.

If you’re among the majority of Americans who oppose Trump, you can’t understand why. And it’s making you furious. I saw the same thing happen in my native Venezuela with the late Hugo Chávez, who ruled as precisely the sort of faux-populist strongman that Trump now loves to praise. Chávez’s political career (which only ended with his untimely death) seemed not only immune to scandal, but indeed to profit directly from it. Why? Because scandal is no threat to populism. Scandal sustains populism.

{In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. Don’t make the same mistakes we did.}

Pundits have been predicting Trump’s fall since before he won office. It should have been October 2016, when the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape was released. Or January, when former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. testified in a Senate hearing that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in an attempt to get Trump elected. Or in February, when Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser for his undisclosed communications with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. Or in May, when Trump fired FBI director James B. Comey for failing to halt his investigation into the growing Russian scandal. Or in August, when he failed to plainly criticize white supremacists for the Charlottesville protests that led to the death of one counterprotester. Or when we learned early this month that four people with senior roles in the Trump campaign have been indicted in connection with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Search for “Trump impeach” on Google, and you will find that every month of 2017 brought about new, different predictions of his imminent political death from all sides of the public spectrum.
....

Andrés Miguel Rondón is an economist living in Madrid. He is a Venezuelan citizen who was born and raised there. Follow @amrondon

[Sneederbunk]

1. But his supporters don't think.

[JustAnotherGen]

2. My recipe for your response!

Brilliant and accurate!

[C_U_L8R]

3. It's said that the world's dumbest animal is the Turkey

So maybe if we gobble a bit and prance aimlessly around the farmyard,
we can come close to thinking like Trump supporters,

[underpants]

4. I think the author fails to understand how conditioned they are

You could try to express how you are concerned about the same problems but then they want to hear the end of the song they've heard 1,000 times "it's the liberal media/Washington's fault". That's it, they just want to hear the greatest hits. They were conditioned this way well before Trump was actually a candidate. Look at the 2012 primaries - their "debates" could have simply been hands up hands down on each issue - get one wrong and you are done. Ironically, think "THE HOOK" at Amateur Night at the Apollo. When Rick Perry forgot the third Department to get rid of Ron Paul and someone else just looked down and read from their prepared notes.

Bring up the obvious - the corporate media and corporations basically wanting to dismantled the state and you've lost them. It's not that they disagree (they've had very little exposure to even these ideas) they just want to hear the same song or punch line again. The parallel to wrestling catch phrases is hard to miss ---- Trump basically ran a wrestling campaign.

[RandomAccess]

5. I don't really agree with this

I absolutely don't see populism as the enemy, or even the cause. Not at all.

I think this article, which was posted on DU a few days ago, offered the best answer for Trump's never-can-be-swayed supporters. It's an excellent article written by an historian of fascism, and it reads like it was written yesterday until you get near the end where it says " But the destruction of the GOP looks all but imminent should he be the nominee. "

Trump’s not Hitler, he’s Mussolini: How GOP anti-intellectualism created a modern fascist movement in America

To quote Paxton again, this time from his seminal "The Anatomy of Fascism": “Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program.” This explains why Trump supporters are not bothered by his ideological malleability and policy contradictions: He was pro-choice before he was pro-life; donated to politicians while now he rails against that practice; married three times and now embraces evangelical Christianity; is the embodiment of capitalism and yet promises to crack down on free trade. In the words of the Italian writer Umberto Eco, fascism was “a beehive of contradictions.” It bears noting that Mussolini was a socialist unionizer before becoming a fascist union buster, a journalist before cracking down on free press, a republican before becoming a monarchist.

Like Mussolini, Trump is dismissive of democratic institutions. He selfishly guards his image of a self-made outsider who will “dismantle the establishment” in the words of one of his supporters. That this includes cracking down on a free press by toughening libel laws, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 11 million people (“illegals”), stripping away citizenship of those seen as illegitimate members of the nation (children of the “illegals”), and committing war crimes in the protection of the nation (killing the families of suspected terrorists) only enhances his stature among his supporters. The discrepancy between their love of America and these brutal and undemocratic methods does not bother them one iota. To borrow from Paxton again: “Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.” For Trump and his supporters, the struggle against “political correctness” in all its forms is more important than the fine print of the Constitution.

. . .

Benito Mussolini came to the scene in the 1920s at a time when all the known “isms” of the time had lost their mojos. . . .

Enter Fascism. Fascism promised people deliverance from politics. Fascism was not just different type of politics, but anti-politics. On the post-WWI ruins of the Enlightenment beliefs in progress and essential human goodness, Fascism embraced emotion over reason, action over politics. Violence was not just a means to an end, but the end in itself because it brought man closer to his true inner nature. War was an inevitable part of this inner essence of man. Millions of European men had found this sense of purpose and camaraderie in the trenches of the First World War and were not going to sit idly by while politicians took it away from them after the war (famously, after the war Hitler was slow to demobilize and take off his uniform). Fascists’ main enemies were not just Marxist politicians, or liberal politicians, but politicians in general.

It is therefore no coincidence that the most common explanation Trump supporters muster when asked about their vote is that “he is no politician.” Trump did not invent this anti-politics mood, but he tamed it in accordance with his own needs. . . . But since then it has gotten worse: now even the establishment Republicans who had been initially demonized by the Tea Party, such as Mitch McConnell, have openly abrogated their own constitutional powers by refusing to exercise them. This has been most evident in their blanket refusal to even hold a hearing for a Scalia replacement on the Supreme Court. In other words, the Republicans themselves, not Trump, broke politics.

The anti-intellectualism of Trump has also been a long time in the making. . . .

Still, for a fascist to be accepted as legitimate he has to move the crowd and from the very beginning of his candidacy Trump has done this by stoking racial animosity and grievances. . . .

. . .

The Trump Rally: An exercise in community building

If we historicize Trump in such a way, his rallies become much easier to read. For Trump’s supporters, the pushing and shoving, and even the outright violence, against protesters, and the menacingly carnivalesque atmosphere are, to an extent, an end in itself. Just observe how groups at Trump rallies spontaneously come together to roughen up a protester. . . . Violence is electrifying and community building as much as it is devastating for those on the receiving end. Action over politics.


https://www.salon.com/2016/03/11/trumps_not_hitler_hes_mussolini_how_gop_anti_intellectualism_created_a_modern_fascist_movement_in_america/

[flying rabbit]

6. Great post

Thanks.

[Vinca]

7. If we all "thought" like his supporters, we'd all be babbling idiots.