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zsomething wrote:
Trump's life-support system is, essentially, racism and religion (and those two things overlap far too often nowdays), plus a lot of dumbass team-sports "own the libtards" spite out of people who don't understand policy, anyway. There are still people who are willing to overlook Trump robbing 'em and making their lives worse because they're just happy he's keeping out the Mexicans and the Muslims and making-black-lives-not-matter-as-much.
They'll keep supporting him because he's the Great White Hope for bigots.
That's Big Dirty Secret About Trump Supporters #1. The not-so-big-dirty-secret is that the base is also full of a bunch of crazy Dominionists who think Trump is helping to fulfill Biblical prophecy, and they're willing to turn a blind eye to everything else, including his own morality. As long as he stacks the courts with people who might get Roe V. Wade overturned, or get religion taught in schools instead of science, and shove the gays back in the closet, they'll let him loot the economy.
And then you get the chuckleheads who don't really understand any of it, but they just know that liberals seem like whiney do-gooders, and that anything that's not utterly selfish is "socialism" (which they equate with full-blown Communism -- Republicans have trained them to brand everything that's not hard-right-conservative as "socialism," and that anything that even leans toward socialism is the same as full-blown Commnism... I've never seen such alarmist ignorance. In a way I'm glad Democratic voters aren't that stupid and easily-herded, but damn if it wouldn't make things a lot easier of they were. Being the party that appeals to the low-end of the learning curve is really all that's kept Republicans in business for the past several decades. Well, that and a cowardly streak... they can be counted on to accommodate you if you tell them to fear anything. Ms-13's under their bed! Anyway, all a lot of Trump's supporters really want is to "trigger" the people they hate. So, they enjoy Trump being a hate-monging asshole who sets American against American, because that's good for LULZ. They don't care if Trump rapes the economy or destroys America's alliances or makes us all look like a country of idiotic troglodytes, that's great because liberals hate that and it's all about "pwning the libs, LOL!" And if people die, hey, that's funny, they can show off to their buddies on the various chans by making memes of it to show off how crass they can be. Basically, they're the "I love him because YOU hate him" voters, and there's not a lot you can do with them. They don't care what happens to the country because they don't really live there -- their lives are on the internet, they don't fully understand the real world.
Bad thing is, a lot of that will work for Trump, because there are enough Americans who are that stupid and that nasty inside. You can't wise them up and you can't help them, because it's cult-mentality now... they'd rather stay wrong and ride the flames right down into the dirt than admit anyone else was right. I don't think there are going to be enough of those idiots to keep him in office, but there'll always be enough to keep whoever replaces him having to fight an uphill battle to do anything good. Obama saved us from a recession and they fucking hated him for it. They accused him of everything that Trump's actually doing... and now they cheer for all those things because, team sports.
You make an excellent case for Trump's base being mostly hateful lowlifes, but I think you're forgetting one large segment of his supporters: The voracious mega-corporations that benefited so massively from the tax cut.
There's 500 or maybe even 1000 giant public companies and then another two or three hundred more mostly unregulated private corporations that reaped uncountable benefit from that bill. Together, just the repatriation loophole alone has probably saved them a trillion dollars in taxes. When you add in the reduction in tax rates, all of a sudden you're talking about real money, multiple-trillions.
He could get caught with BOTH a dead girl AND a live boy in the Lincoln Bedroom with Edwin Edwards drivin' that train, high on cocaine and they STILL wouldn't turn away.
