Three statements that answer the question, 'Whither Trump?'

While talking about Trump yesterday, I offered the opinion that no matter what happens from now until he dies, he is pathologically incapable of ever admitting that he lost the 2020 election. My wife wondered what happens in people’s brains to make them believe everything he says, to the exclusion of all facts, truth and evidence to the contrary.

Now I don’t know the clinical explanation for such behavior, but in layman’s terms, my answer to that question is this: From the moment he descended the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy on June 16, 2015, Donald J. Trump took on the persona of the Grievance President. He looked out at the country – at millions people he wouldn’t invite to dinner, sit next to on a train or allow to visit his home – and saw a smoldering volcano of grievances just waiting to erupt.

And he also saw votes.

Across the country in mostly southern and Midwestern states, Trump saw an angry mob of voters who believed that black people are inferior to whites, that brown people are streaming across the border to steal their jobs and that homosexuality is an abomination that should be banished by their god. They believed that all Muslims carried explosive devices on their backs and that women who have abortions – and the doctors who perform them – are guilty of murder. Trump saw people who distrusted the government in all of its forms (even though many depended on it for their very existence), and he saw a white Christian fundamentalist religion that believes that they are the ones who face discrimination in America.

I can almost hear him telling his aides, “I think I can work with this.”  

Just look at what Trump said that day when he announced his candidacy. He started out by lying about the size of the crowd: “That is some group of people,” he said. “Thousands. This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this.”

Then he launched into his speech:

“Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us.

 

“When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn’t exist, folks. They beat us all the time.

 

“When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.

 

“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

And grievance politics was born.

These were the first few paragraphs of the Donald Trump campaign. He could have started out by saying something like, “America is the greatest country in the world, by far, but I think we can be even better…and I have a plan to get us there.” Instead, he spent 46 minutes and 6,245 words telling us everything that was wrong with our country and nothing about what was right. Here are a few other excerpts: 

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

 

“We spent $2 trillion in Iraq, $2 trillion. We lost thousands of lives, thousands in Iraq. We have wounded soldiers, who I love, I love — they’re great — all over the place, thousands and thousands of wounded soldiers. And we have nothing. We can’t even go there.”

 

“Obamacare kicks in in 2016. Really big league. It is going to be amazingly destructive. Doctors are quitting. I have a friend who’s a doctor, and he said to me the other day, “Donald, I never saw anything like it. I have more accountants than I have nurses. It’s a disaster. My patients are beside themselves. They had a plan that was good. They have no plan now.”

 

And on and on it went, with Trump ranting about trade with China, stupid negotiators, tariffs, Ford building cars in Mexico, the national debt, his massive wealth and the incompetence of the other Republicans in the race. And that was just Season 1, Episode 1. His campaign was all downhill from there.

All of a sudden, around the country, the smoldering volcano burst forth. People who had shared their grievances with only their friends and family and maybe a local politician or two realized they had a champion who understood their complaints and could soon be president of the United States. Their grievances were HIS grievances and he told them he could make all of their problems go away. He was saying it all out loud, and it didn’t take long for millions of them to fall in line behind him. It was all Trump, all of the time, and nothing else mattered.

Looking back on the campaign nearly seven years later, you’ll no doubt remember that Trump talked endlessly at rallies and debates and Fox News interviews, spitting out millions of words that sometimes made no sense but managing to repeat his list of grievances at every opportunity. He’s still doing it today, but has added the new grievance that the election was stolen from him and he is the true U.S. president in exile, just waiting for his chance to return.

Through it all, filtering out the lies, the disinformation and the frequent word salads, I believe that Trump uttered three statements that go as far as anything to answer to the question that opened this essay – what makes people believe what he says. Those three statements are:   

(1) “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening. Just stick with us.”

(2) “The news media is corrupt and the news is fake; they are the enemy of the people.”

(3) We have a multitude of problems and “I alone can fix it.”

If those were the only three ideas that got through to you during the campaign and subsequent presidency, then you, too, may be a Trump supporter. Just this week, Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius” for invading Ukraine and took Russia’s side over President Biden, but even that doesn’t seem to matter to Trumpaloons. As my wife said yesterday, nothing will ever happen to change their minds, so unfortunately, they can’t be fixed. 

I just hope they can be overcome.