Understanding Trump’s Voter Appeal
It seems paradoxical that with each new indictment, former President Trump’s support among Republican voters grows stronger. What underlies this strange anomaly? This is a question of great interest to those politicians currently vying with him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. It’s not that any of them have a realistic chance of overtaking him in the primary races. Instead, their interests would appear to be more focused on how they can attract the support of Trump-leaning voters should Trump’s legal problems cause him to withdraw from the race.
When Trump supporters attend focus groups or are questioned by journalists they usually attribute their continuing support of Trump on the basis of his achievements while serving as our nation’s 45th President. It’s difficult to take such answers at face value since, as more fully explained below, Trump’s record in office is hardly something that most politicians would choose to run on. Indeed, it’s probably the last thing that Trump himself would want to do. Throughout his entire life he has tried to get by on his perceived personae rather than his actual accomplishments. Remember, he was the candidate who sued his alma mata (the University of Pennsylvania) to prohibit it from publishing his college transcript. He was also the candidate who had a long series of business failures and drove six of his companies into bankruptcy causing his investors and lenders to lose over $3 billion.
The references made by Trump’s supporters to his record in office also seem disingenuous as his actual achievements don’t appear to justify their continued support. On the contrary, references to Trump’s record of achievements would seem to reveal that his supporter’s only possess a superficial understanding of what he actually did. This suggests that they would prefer not to voice their real reasons for continuing their support for him.
By far the most significant achievement of the Trump administration was Operation Warp Speed which directed extraordinary financing to the rapid creation of vaccines to address the Covid-19 virus. That initiative produced the world’s two most effective vaccines in roughly eight month, a phenomenal achievement when you consider that most vaccines take roughly four years to be engineered, approved and brought to market. Perhaps even more significant was the perfection of the mRNA technology utilized in creating these two vaccines which is now available to enable the rapid introduction of vaccines to address other yet unidentified pathogens that may attack the human body.
Although most Americans would agree with my assessment of the significance of Operation Warp Speed, it’s not at all clear that most Trump supporters would. Shortly after the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines became available in late December 2020, many Republican politicians began to warn against their use, suggesting that the vaccines were unreliable and asserting that the efforts of the Biden administration’s to have all U.S. residents become vaccinated would infringe upon their liberty. As a result, by June of 2021 there was already a great disparity in the vaccination rates of Republican and Democratic voters, with the percentage of Democratic voters who had been vaccinated being twice that of Republican voters. Although Trump, himself was vaccinated and made one or two statements encouraging Americans be become vaccinated, he quickly stopped mentioning the vaccines realizing that his supporters were viewing them adversely.
To Republican members of Congress the crowning achievement of the Trump administration was the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. This is not simply because they played vital roles in enacting that legislation. Rather, it’s because the Act assured them that they would continue to receive large campaign donations from the Act’s principal beneficiaries; namely, corporations and wealthy individuals. This Act, however, has done little to benefit the average MAGA voter. Indeed, it was a total giveaway of the nation’s resources leaving the federal government with insufficient funds to make necessary improvements to the nation’s infrastructure. Moreover, it added an estimated $2 trillion to the nation’s aggregate indebtedness. While Congressional Republicans had promised that they would make permanent the modest individual tax cuts contained in that legislation, that never happened. Indeed, having passed the Act they never mentioned it again perhaps for the simple reason that the tax cuts never produced the economic growth and jobs they were touted to create.
Another achievement of the Trump administration applauded by all Americans, not just Republicans, was the successful negotiation of the Abraham Accords in which Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates , Morocco and Sudan agreed to “normalize” their relationships with Israel. While these accords were not what the Trump administration had set out to achieve, they are nevertheless important milestones along the way to peace in the middle east. This achievement, however, got little publicity from the Trump White House, presumably because MAGA voters seem to have little interest in what happens outside the U.S.
Trump’s loyal supporters also include among his accomplishments his nominations of roughly 230 federal court judges including three U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Each of Trump’s judicial nominees were identified, trained and recommended by the Federalist Society, an organization which embraces “originalism” as the roadmap for making judicial determinations. Trump’s supporters undoubtedly had little understanding of this bogus judicial philosophy and his judicial nominees were promoted as being both “conservative” and committed to overrule the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. As it turns out, this was seemingly all they wished to know. For them, a judiciary prone to “sticking it to the libs” was a dream come true even though a lot of pro-business and anti-worker decisions would come in the same package.
Trump’s ”Great Wall” across our southern border is also viewed by his supporters as one of his significant achievement. That wall, however, was never completed; nor was it paid for by Mexico. More importantly, it has done little, if anything, to stem the flow of asylum seekers from entering our country. Similarly, Trump’s program of separating immigrant families, which can only be described as “cruel and inhumane,” was equally ineffective in achieving that goal. In reality, these initiatives were never designed to be effective; their purpose was simply to dramatize the influx of foreigners, whom Trump characterized as “murderers, rapists and drug dealers.”
In his dealings abroad, Trump was an abject failure. His foreign policy initiatives in Iran, North Korea and China (further described in “The Perils of Perverted Positive Thinking”) made each situation worse and his dealings with foreign leaders undermined our alliances and promoted authoritarian regimes. In many respects, these actions contributed to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, an undertaking that has led to thousands of deaths and the destruction of dozens of Ukrainian cities. Even Trump’s peace negotiations with the Taliban, while enabling the U.S. to terminate its poorly-conceived war in Afghanistan, was badly executed. This was because those negotiations did not include representatives of the Afghan government leading to a total takeover by the Taliban within days after its implementation which Trump cleverly engineered to take place after he had left office. Fortunately for him, his most loyal supporters have always been fixated on domestic issues which have a much greater impact on their lives. The sad fact is that Trump supporters care little about what happens outside our borders with the result they see little beyond the “tough guy” image he strives to project.
Easily ranking high among one of his most significant domestic efforts was his handling (or more accurately, mishandling) of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not just that the U.S. suffered over 1.1 million Covid deaths, but the U.S. Covid death toll was almost three times what our nation had suffered in World War II and exceeded that of every other nation. This deplorable feat was accomplished even though our nation’s Center for Disease Control has consistently been rated as the world’s best public health agency. While it’s tempting to think that controlling a pandemic is beyond the powers of a president, that thought is belied by the fact that the U.S. recorded more Covid deaths than any other nation and on a per capita basis ranked 5th worst among all nations and the second worst among the roughly two dozen developed nations.
Although Trump sought to convince Americans that he was doing a splendid job in combatting Covid pandemic, the report of a House Select Committee reached a distinctly contrary conclusion, finding that the nation’s Covid death toll could have been reduced by 30-40% (or roughly 400,000 lives) had the Trump administration not interfered with the handling of the pandemic by public health officials. To be sure, Trump was slow in addressing the dangers posed by the virus and predicted that it would simply disappear as quickly as it came upon us. Considering what little we knew about the virus at the time, this faux pas might have been excused. The problem is that before the virus even claimed it first casualties, the Trump administration had taken actions which virtually assured that its efforts to contain its spread in the U.S. would be inadequate.
Among his very first actions as president was to discard the guidebook compiled by the Bush and Obama administration to combat the spread of infectious diseases like SARS, MERS and HIV. That was followed shortly thereafter by Trump’s elimination of the Infectious disease unit within the White House National Security Council. In addition, in July 2019 the CDC ‘s epidemiologists stationed in China to act an infectious disease early warning system were recalled and their roles eliminated. To compound the nation’s lack of preparedness, the Trump administration had not ordered the respirator units approved in the last days of the Obama administration and had allowed the nation’s stockpile of face masks and other personal protective gear to become depleted. In short, before the virus was even first detected, Trump had placed the nation in a position in which containing its spread would be an uphill battle.
The litany of mistakes made by the Trump administration after the virus made its way to the U.S. is far too long to recite here, but they all revolved around a single theme. Whereas Trump’s public health advisers felt that the first order of business should be preventing the virus from spreading, Trump’s focus was on the 2020 elections and he was reluctant to take any action that might adversely affect the nation’s economic growth which he saw as the key to his re-election. Trump not only ignored the professional advice being given to him, but prevented his public health experts from expressing any view that might conflict with his own public statements. This not only meant that efforts to retard the spread of the virus were begun too late and relaxed much too soon, but beginning in August 2020 they were essentially set aside as Trump chose to follow the advice of Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist with no public health experience.
Dr. Atlas’ appeal to Trump was that he was advocating that the administration should simply allow the virus to spread unchecked. Underlying this advice was his theory that the virus would quickly reach “herd immunity”, a condition when it would effectively run out of enough new victims to continue its spread. Although this advice was rejected by all knowledgeable public health practitioners, it had great appeal to Trump who viewed it as a rationale for removing restrictions on the economic growth he was counting on to help him secure his re-election. The result was that by the end of 2020 the virus was claiming the lives of more than 3,300 Americans a day. That’s the equivalent to the nation’s suffering daily 9/11-type attacks for a period of several weeks if not months.
Our country’s high Covid death toll is only a part of the story. The pandemic caused the U.S. to expend huge sums of money to sustain its economy and its population. As a result, over $5 trillion was added to the U.S. national debt during the Trump administration. Even though Trump’s loyal supporters tend to be fiscally conservative and to pay careful attention how their tax dollars are spent, this fact seems to have eluded them. That’s probably because of two factors. The first is that Congress passed the CARES Act pouring over $2 trillion into the economy sheltering the vast majority of Americans from the economic effects of the pandemic. The second was the Trump administration’s publication of a statement at the beginning of 2021 touting its successful handling of the economy. That statement was largely contradicted by a summary of the economy during the Trump administration issued a year later by FactCheck and another by CNN Business. These reports reflect that Trump left office with almost 3.0 million fewer jobs than when he took office, making him the only modern U.S. president to leave office with a smaller workforce.
For most Americans Trump’s most deleterious actions have been those that undermine our nation’s system of government. Even before he was elected he was attacking main stream media outlets as purveyors of “fake news.” Our democratic system of government depends on an educated public and news organizations are the medium through which voters obtain their knowledge of current events and the actions of their government. By undermining confidence in media organizations, Trump undermined one of the important pillars on which our democratic form of government rests.
Trump’s attacks on our system of democracy also included his effort to disparage the entire election process. Before the votes were even counted in the 2020 presidential election, Trump began making allegations that the election was tainted by fraud. Not only did he knowingly continue to repeat this lie on a daily basis for the next 32 months, but he encouraged other Republican politicians to do likewise. As a result, more than 70% of Republican voters still continue to believe that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” The problem has grown much worse since many Republicans seeking elective office now also cry “fraud” when they don’t prevail. The result is that a large swath of American voters have lost faith in the integrity of our system of elections.
The resulting loss of confidence in our electoral system then took on a life of its own. Trump’s accusations ostensibly prompted Republican controlled state legislatures around the country to use that loss of confidence over the reliability of our voting system as a pretext to make it more difficult to vote. This, in turn, has made Democratic voters begin to believe the electoral process has been “rigged” against them.
Not only has Trump undermined public confidence in the media and our election processes, but he has also undermined confidence in the integrity of our government. While he was not the originator of the concept of a “deep state” (i.e., a clandestine cabal within the government which causes it to act against the interests of the governed), he certainly popularized the concept claiming that the DOJ, the FBI, the CDC, HSS and the CIA, among others, were out of control and couldn’t be counted on by a sitting president to carry out his (or her) programs. With this thought in mind he embarked upon a campaign to terminate the services of many of his own appointees who did not display sufficient loyalty to him including his Attorney General, his Director of the FBI, his Secretary of State, his Secretary of Defense and three appointees serving as his Chief of Staff. Moreover, to assure that the actions of their more loyal replacements (many of whom were never confirmed by the Senate) were never questioned, he also terminated a dozen Inspector Generals within various federal departments and agencies.
Upon leaving the government, however, he turned this concept around and contended that various elements of the federal government, like the DOJ and the IRS, have been “weaponized” to attack the opponents of President Biden. While this concept also was not originated by him, Trump found it very useful to explain why he was now being “wrongfully accused” by the FBI and the DOJ. Of course, this is exactly what he had done as president. Casting aside the tradition of the DOJ’s acting independently of the executive branch, he regularly communicated with DOJ officials either directly or through his public statements in an effort to attack his political opponents. Not only did he have the DOJ investigate Hillary Clinton for maintaining a personal computer network while serving as Secretary of State, but also some of the FBI’s and DOJ’s former employees who participated in the investigation of his relationship with Russia’s efforts to impact the 2016 election. In addition, he had the IRS conduct extensive audits of the tax returns of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, two former FBI officials who just coincidentally happened to earn Trump’s enmity for actions Trump deemed disloyal to him.
Ironically, Trump’s many efforts to undermine our governmental institutions has not seemed to concern his loyal flag-waiving supporters who have long felt that the federal government is not on their side. This brings us back to the issue as to the essence of Trump’s appeal to his supporters if it is not his achievements while serving as our 45th President. The answer seems to lie in the personae he had meticulously crafted over the years portraying himself on “The Apprentice” (his long-running TV show) as a successful, hard-hitting and tough-minded business executive.
In running for president, he represented that despite a dysfunctional government he would use these skills to gets things done and right the wrongs bedeviling everyday Americans. With Trump, however, it was never about what he would do for his supporters as he did not like to talk about policies which he claimed were “boring.” Rather, it was about what he would do to his supporters’ enemies. He simply proclaimed that he was a “winner” and with him as their president Americans he would win so often that they would “get tired of winning.” This approach, along with a little help from James Comey, Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton, facilitated his victory in the 2016 election. It also enabled him to garner over 74 million votes in the 2020 election.
It’s not irrational that Trump’s supporters were taken in by this siren song. Over the previous 40 years they had seen their incomes stagnate while others had grown wealthy, their jobs vanish as manufacturing had been exported to Mexico, China, Vietnam and Taiwan, and their neighborhoods invaded by black and brown faces. Meanwhile, America’s prestige had faltered as its military might had been foiled in a couple of protracted and winless wars and its economic dominance challenged by China, Japan, Germany and India. They also had witnessed signs of technological decay on our roads and highways as America’s automakers had been losing market share to European and Japanese car manufacturers. All the while their government had been in a state of near paralysis with periodic shutdowns and an inexplicable inability to address the nation’s many vexing problems.
Now Trump is facing new challenges. His image as a “winner” has been tarnished by his loss in the 2020 election and the poor results achieved by the Republican candidates he championed in the 2022 elections. In addition, he now is besieged by a handful of criminal and civil charges. Not unexpectedly, he has been doubling down on the formula that got him elected; namely, viciously attacking all who oppose him and boasting of his accomplishments (some exaggerated, but most imaginary). On top of this façade he has layered a new message; namely, that he is being wrongly persecuted and that he is their last hope to prevent an out-of-control government from attacking them and depriving them of their civil liberties. In short, he is portraying himself as their MESSIAH. As corny as this may seem, this message is resonating with most MAGA Republicans as they have lost confidence in their elected officials, their government and even in democracy itself.