Speaking as someone who has always been good at viewing the qualities of those I disagree with politically (Thatcher, Benn, Reagan and even Farage) the issue with Trump is that he has no identifiable redeeming characteristics whatsoever, which informs my incredulity as to how anyone could view him positively.
For me, it’s not about his politics, but rather his manifest unsuitability to hold public office in numerous ways.
I am genuinely baffled, give all he says and does, how any reasoned, rational person cannot see this.
There are spice heads in Piccadilly Gardens who are more suited to running a country than Donald Trump.
On that basis it is impossibly difficult for me to understand their state of mind or reasoning, as much as I genuinely try to.
It’s akin to having a conversation with someone who says they don’t rate KDB. It simply doesn’t compute and, frankly, isn’t worth the time and emotional energy.
200 million Christians, many of whom think he’s their saviour.
He fiddled the Supreme Court so Roe vs Wade could be challenged and, for many of them, that’s more than enough.
He also appeals to disenfranchised young men, often poorly educated, who long for someone to ‘make it better’, whatever that might mean. They know they’re not getting on and, it is easier to manage if it is someone else’s fault.
The playbook, admittedly not quite so extreme, has been perfected in the UK over the last decade. Find something or someone to scapegoat and use that as the driving force to get people out to vote who, historically at least, tend not to bother. That particularly resonates when people feel like they’ve ’got nothing’ and therefore have got nothing to lose.
Not only that but his behaviour is ‘priced in’ to a certain extent. In 2016 he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and he wouldn’t lose a vote. I think that, in 2024, he’d actually get more votes, which feels both mad but right!
Offering vague promises of much lower taxes, cheaper gas and food, sorting out the migrants whose fault all this is as well as focussing only on America and, finally, couple all that with the conspiracy theories (Trump been fitted up, it’s all MSM lies) and before you know where you are you’ve got Greg Stillson in the White House……