Why Trump still has supporters

Even though he is scandal-ridden, the US prez’s support base has remained almost steady. Who exactly are these people who back him?
Why Trump still has supporters

An East Coast senator is faced with a peculiar quandary. She’s not sure how to motivate young Americans to join politics, when their president is a man called Donald Trump.
The US has a leader who has bragged about sexual assault, called a woman “horseface”, branded opposition parties evil and press coverage against him “fake news”. He has been accused of financial fraud and is embroiled in probes over Russian influence on US elections. When it comes to guiding youngsters about what it takes to succeed in politics, she says she’s now at a loss for words.

Earlier this month, polling company Rasmussen Reports showed a 50 per cent approval rating for Trump, who said his approval would be at 75 per cent “without the phony Russia Witch Hunt”. The 50 per cent rating may itself be an exaggeration; Rasmussen is believed to have a Republican bias. According to polling data aggregator RealClearPolitics, Trump’s average approval rating was 43 per cent.

Amid jokes about Trump’s high disapproval ratings and adverse comparisons with former US presidents, it may be worth noting how popular Trump remains with his supporters. While a Gallup poll showed a 40 per cent approval rating for Trump between November 26 and December 2, there was a yawning chasm between his approval among Republicans (89 per cent) and Democrats (6 per cent).

Trump’s support base has long been fodder for cartoons, and jokes, and is likely to spawn countless books and PhD theses. So who exactly are these people who support a scandal-ridden president?
In very liberal California, Trump’s base includes a lean, middle-aged fitness enthusiast who doubles up as a taxi driver. He believes Trump has been misunderstood. When it came to Trump’s anti-immigrant stance, he felt Trump was only against illegal immigrants, not against those who entered the US legally. He tried hard to assure the Indians in his car that Trump wasn’t after them. But when it came to Trump’s behaviour towards women, he was visibly uncomfortable.

While liberals have often wondered how conservatives could like a man like Trump, the truth is, many don’t. A woman from Alabama whom I interviewed for a piece on the many shades of conservative thought in the US, found his behaviour cringeworthy and un-presidential, but voted for him as she wanted a conservative judge to fill in a Supreme Court vacancy, for which she knew she’d have to vote for a Republican.

The Guardian columnist Gary Younge, who covered presidential elections from Muncie, Indiana, writes of how he was “struck by how many of those who voted for Trump didn’t particularly like him”. They called him “garbage”, a “bully” and an “arrogant SOB”. When he returned to the city a year after Trump’s inauguration, he found they still didn’t like him. People said he was embarrassing the US and was like “your drunk uncle at a party”. And yet, they all thought Trump was doing a good job; they cited his tax cuts, deregulation and Supreme Court nomination as examples. Younge sums it up, saying, “It was as though they had elected not a president but a CEO, and felt you don’t have to like your boss so long as he keeps the company healthy.”

Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre, points to a mistaken presumption among liberals, that since Trump is unconventional, his support base must be equally so. “But it’s not. The data clearly shows Trump’s coalition is pretty much the traditional Republican coalition,” he writes in The Guardian. He points to the “sheer ordinariness” of Trump’s supporters, what he calls the usual suspects: “tax-cut advocates, religious evangelicals and Catholics … and business types eager for deregulation.” Trump gives them what they want and they support him in the face of the media storm against him.

Olsen believes the numerous daily attacks on Trump from comedians, actors and virtually the entire US press barring Fox News and some conservative outlets, have hardened the attitudes of many Trump supporters. “When the media cries ‘wolf’ at every passing shadow, many Trump backers simply don’t believe them when they say that a wolf might actually be coming,” he writes. 

While Fox News has come under attack for toeing Trump’s line, liberal media outlets have been criticised for the space and time devoted to Trump, giving him free publicity as they analyse his outrageous behaviour. Lisa Hymas, director of the climate and energy program at the non-profit Media Matters for America, complains of how news networks squandered climate-change coverage trying to decipher what Trump thought of climate change instead of reporting on critical issues like his aggressive dismantling of climate protections. “When they (media) chase Trump around and let him set the agenda, the hoax is on all of us,” she writes for The Grist.

While The Boston Globe carried an opinion piece a few months ago on how Trump lies because he can get away with it, a letter from a reader complained that the Globe itself allowed Trump to do so. The reader pointed to an article headlined Trump says Russians will be pushing for Democrats in ’18, legitimising a false tweet, while the article merely mentioned the claim was made without evidence.
In addition to taking advantage of the media’s flaws, Trump routinely dismisses all criticism against him in the media as fake news. A chubby, northern California chicken farmer and ardent Trump supporter once told me that he did not believe “the left-wing press”, a term he used to describe virtually the entire American media. His trusted source of information? The far-right Breitbart News.

Anahita Mukherji

An independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area

Tweets @newspaperwalli

Related Stories

No stories found.
The New Indian Express
www.newindianexpress.com