Ask Lemmy

You are a multimillionaire that has plenty of options on leaving if things get rough, but in the interim you can look forward to tax breaks and more lax controls/protections over whatever industry you may be involved in.

As for the rest of them, he's flying the right colored flag and that's about it.

the american right thrives on propaganda and boy howdy do they have a lot of it.

Immigrants? simultaneously lazy welfare moochers and will steal all jobs forever

women? sluts with no self control that must abstain themselves always, except for you of course

queer people? pedophile groomers that hate you specifically

black people? Racism was solved 100 years ago according to these white guys! now they're claiming that it's systemic?!

Any and all political opponents? Corrupt. Monetarily? Characterally? Spiritually? yes.

A lot of people are very religious and oppose abortion. And that is literally the only issue they care about. Trump stacked the Supreme Court and got abortion made illegal in many states. They love him for that.

Some people think he's stronger on the economy. They just think "look at all this inflation we've had under Biden! It wasn't like this when Trump was in control." Of course they can't think far enough to realize that perhaps a global pandemic caused this inflation and there was little that Biden could have done to stop it.

I think those are the big two reasons. But then there is the propaganda. People are made to believe that crime is running rampant despite the fact that violent crime is actually relatively low compared to in the past. Illegal immigrants are vilified as criminals who are bringing drugs and crime into the country while taking advantage of government benefits. The propaganda says that Democrats are the cause of these problems, and Trump is the solution. Tons of people fall for it. And Democrats are really bad at counter-propaganda.

Having formerly been a rural Republican, there is no good reason to vote Trump. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. People vote for him because they're some mixture of uninformed, misinformed, psychotic, or psychopathic. The broader GOP party is fully culpable, too.

Let's explore some profiles:

17-year-old "lel kek" 4chan/8chan nihilist troll who just wants to act like a dumbass and think Trump is so cooolll.

Grandpa who never left his home town. Never been on an airplane. Watches fox news 24/7.

Your crazy uncle who listens to right wing radio while commuting to work and has a major temper problem, loves his compensatory guns that give him a sense of agency in his sad pathetic life. He loves to blame immigrants for his own problems.

The racist sexist meth head or anyone overly exposed to lead.

The good Christian church goer wrapped around abortion and contrary to the pillar of individual freedom is desperately trying to arbitrate their own sense of morality on others.

The gullible uninformed coworker that doesn't tune into politics all that much but they're a crowd pleaser and all his coworkers talk about is how great Trump is, so must be true. They're not educated all that much and so struggle to use critical-thinking to discern truth from falsehoods.

The grifting pillow salesmen who recognized dumb people are easily grifted so starts feeding the choir and selling them merchandise in one form or another. Bannon fits this.

Deadbeats who love fake it til you make it and see that it worked for Trump. They love that their lifelong habits of bullying are validated by him and so feel empowered.

The people who want to elect DT are either extremists, cult followers, uninformed / misinformed, or corporate or political anarchists. There is no one of sound or informed mind who would ever vote for him. He has proven to be bad for the people, the economy, the nation, and the world.

We live in a time where instant access to ideas dilutes and twists reality. The majority of people don't really know what they're voting for nor do they really care what the ramifications of their decisions mean.

I live in a "blue" east coast city. I read news from generally unbiased sources and I engage with others in forums like this. I can't tell you the number of people I've come across, mostly but not exclusively from outside my city, who have unwavering opinions about something they've proven to know very little about (this is not exclusive to MAGA or republicans). I had a conversation with someone I've known most my life about Dr. Fauci. He thought he should be sent to prison. When I asked why he thought that he didn't really have a coherent response and ended with, "well I guess I don't really pay that close attention to the news".

Today's politics is more similar to a sporting event than it is about the democratic process. It's more about engaging with your team's fans on social media than it is understanding the philosophies and mechanisms of government.

He will maintain the social order of your community.

Women will lose their rights in a variety of ways, making them dependent on their men.

Public Education will become worse, keeping the economic status of families where they are.

Police will be allowed to be as corrupt as they want to be and will be able to oppress disadvantaged groups as they want to.

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.

Most people I know support Trump because they perceive him as a "strong man", which they value in a leader. They see Democrats as "soft". They his wealth, his treatment of women, his treatment of employees, and his reaction to being shot as signs of strength. Another reason is they see him as being more supportive of their one true religion. He comes across as the chosen one and closer to God than most.

Accerlerationists want to burn it all

Mental illness.

You think he's a messianic figure who will save us from the Satanic baby-killing cabal.

I'm not saying it's a good reason, but people in flyover country get resentful when coastal elites don't even try to hide how they see them as degenerate inbred racist morons and want to exert ever-increasing control over their lives and impose their values.

It would be nice for someone else to take the spotlight in the clown show.

Sincerely, the UK.

Foreign powers (church or another country) basically paying to make you think you should do it

You're a rich, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, single, heterosexual, cisgender, male, incel and you have a worthless life and nobody loves you and you think it'd be neat to turn a democratic state into a fascist one.

ulterior motives.

Being a white billionaire.

I agree with the people here that there aren't any.

The closest to a 'good reason' is that some people want certain policy outcomes that Trump has promised, not all of which are in and of themselves morally wrong. What's wrong is that they believe that the ends justify the means, which they quite famously do not.

Crickets, tumbleweeds…. Sounds about right.