Ask Lemmy

I'd guess a majority of people are dissatisfied with the status quo, and Trump represents chaos, change. It's not a rational decision, but whatever your reason for dissatisfaction, Trump is about as far from a conventional establishment candidate as you could find.

I'm not suggesting, at all, that Trump would fix any of these issues; in fact, he'd exacerbate many of them. But Biden, Hillary, and now Harris are the ones who'd continue many of them. And I'm also not saying that all of these are real issues, but his base thinks they are:

• wealth inequality. The rich have provably, measurably, been getting richer, social movement has all but stopped, and many middle class are losing ground
• the loss of traditional jobs, and thereby, ways of life. Midwest small town life, where everyone knows everyone, has been dying as the jobs that support them fade away through automaton and consolidation under corporations. The faces you see in town are often strangers, and worse, strangers who look different from you, are a different color, and often are speaking a language with their buddies that you don't understand.
• healthcare in this country is abysmal
• all you read about in the news is about people fighting for things you find disgusting: children wanting to be a different gender, people wanting to marry their own gender (which forces you to imagine what the sex is like, and this makes you uncomfortable), even more people who don't look like you or who talk differently coming into the country - overrunning and irreversibly changing your way of life.
• the climate is changing, and is making things worse, and is noticeable within living memory. This isn't gramps remembering everything as the glory days; this is you, remembering that there used to be more snow in the winters, or we didn't used to have to fight with so much drought.
• if you're gen-z or younger, the future looks bleak. You can't afford housing, healthcare, or many of the things your parents enjoyed.
• the past 50 years have been a constant slide into a culture you don't understand. Every few months, you're told you can't use words that you did when you were kids. It used to be "cowboys and Indians;" and then you couldn't call them Indians, it had to be "native Americans;" and then, once you got used to that, you were told you couldn't call them "native Americans" anymore, and it had to be "indigenous people." Gays had to be homosexuals, and then LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA or LGBTQ+ or god knows what it is this week. And it's all you hear about in the news anymore.
• not only are the Blacks still upset about slavery, but now they're talking about making you pay them for it?
• whenever you see cops on TV, they look more and more like police in some banana republic, with military gear... almost as if they're paramilitary, and that makes you uncomfortable
• all that stuff crazy Eddy talks about - tinfoil hat stuff - keeps getting confirmed by the news. Your computer is spying on you, tracking you, watching everything you do and reporting it to some corporation, selling it - and the government only has to ask and they can get all of that. There's no privacy anymore.
• it seems as if there are fewer small businesses and more giant corporations. The local grocer shut down when Walmart put in a store - heck, a lot of mainstreet stores did - leaving mainstreet a hallow shell. I mean, sure, you shop at Walmart, but you aren't really connecting the dots or take responsibility. It's easier just to blame The Corporations.
• but there's also a new generation who does nothing except bitch about how they can't get any good jobs that pay a living wage or provide healthcare, the greedy little bastards
• women are uppity, and don't know their place. They're not making babies, like they should, they're competing with you for jobs.
• vegans want to take your hamburgers away

The country just isn't as good as it used to be, and it's not because of your behaviors - shopping at Walmart, shopping at Amazon, joining Facebook and using GMail and Google search, driving your gas-guzzling hemi pickup (which is actually a work truck because you helped your buddy move his couch once) - it's because of some indistinct them: immigrants, politicians, corporations, gays, blacks, Millenials, The Media. And here's a guy who says he's going to fix all that, and boy did he piss off all those people who represent everything you hate. He turned the Supreme Court around! Things were finally going the way you wanted.

And above all of that are the Christians. They've been indoctrinated to believe in hierarchy: woman above child, man above women, and God above man. Having a king just feels right, an earthly authority who, with a wave of a pen, can turn the tide against progressives. I honestly believe that having a dictator - a sympathetic dictator - is a subconscious desire for most people brought up as Christians. They believe in hierarchy; it feels right.