His changed opinions seem to be due to two nonsensical beliefs:
- Trump was helping the economy
- Trump was a businessman
Where do people get these ideas?
Willful ignorance is my guess. (hope that wasn’t rhetorical)
It was rhetorical, but I would be interested in hearing theories.
Is this all because of “the Apprentice?” Did people really believe that show? Why didn’t “Making the Band,” for example, have the same effect?
For the same reason they liked to watch animals and people fight to the death in ancient Rome?
There has been a concerted effort by the Republican party for decades to de-fund and de-legitimize education. End result: most people don’t actually know what skills are necessary to do a good job in almost any field. Then they are told that someone whose skill set isn’t being a politician is a better choice to be a politician than, you know, someone who actually has the necessary skill set to be a politician. And they don’t even understand that the businessman in question is actually really really bad at being a businessman, as well.
Where I live in rural Indiana, the most run-down homes are the ones flying the Trump (and Confederate, and Gadsen, and Blue Lives Matter) flags RATHER THAN the U.S. flag. (It’s pretty much required that you have to fly at least one flag in Indiana. I fly the U.S. flag, period.) They believe the lies they are told about how the economy is better, even though they literally are doing categorically worse under him. They don’t know how to think about things. They don’t know how to research. In many cases they can barely read past a grade school level.
I happen to know someone who was put on the Governor’s task force to try to figure out how to attract young adults who had been educated in other states to come to Indiana to work, because in the highest halls of government there they realized that there are a lot of good jobs available in the state, but they’re going unfilled because – according to the businesses themselves – they cannot find enough Hoosiers who:
- can read the employee manual well enough to understand it;
- can show up on time to work; and
- can pass a drug test.
I suggested that maybe starving their educational system might be the area to look at, instead of trying to convince people from other states to move to Indiana. After all, the ones smart enough to be able to do the above are also going to be smart enough to realize that if they start a family, their kids are going to be stuck with a seriously deficient education.
These are not my people. But this is how they think.
My ex and his friends were all big Trump supporters and they were not stupid people. They all hold Masters. The best man at our wedding is an asst attorney general in CT. They are smart, educated people.
I think what they all shared was an incredibly toxic form of masculinity. It was very sad to me to watch my husband gripped by this idea of manhood that made him so unhappy. When we first got together he talked about how he has this feminine side that he wanted to express and no one else understood about him. But he couldn’t express it even when he had someone to express it to.
Trump told people that they could win without changing. They could dominate instead of evolving. And lots of people love easy answers, even when they are smart.
Historians have described it as the only coup in US history. Its ringleaders took power the same day as the insurrection and swiftly brought in laws to strip voting and civil rights from the state’s black population. They faced no consequences.
This time, there’d better be consequences. Ostracism, for one, total and complete.
If only he’d learned to write science-fiction…I mean the proper kind, not the stuff he’s done in the past.