This was one of my favorite articles in the mid-aughts.

[matt_zimmer]

It's actually a humor piece, and NOT a subtle one, but it never fails to make me laugh, and I often repost it on my journal, or at least link it. Don't know who wrote it but here a good page for it:

https://www.tetongravity.com/forums/showthread.php/55579-bush-losing-core-supporters-(nsr)?p=801714

It's entitled "Bush Losing Core Supporters" and despite it coming out over a decade BEFORE Trump, I think it explains Trump's inexplicably mediocre but steady approval ratings ten years later entirely.

No matter what Trump did, no matter what he said (even on-camera), he almost never had an approval rating lower than around 41-43%. That was his basement, and it almost never changed. It barely ever rose (except for the start of Covid) but he had a far higher approval rating than someone as openly evil, vulgar, and stupid as him should have had. And some foolish people (like me for example) thought Trump being the worst President we ever had would push his approvals even worse than George W. Bush's, who wound up nearly universally despised by the time he left office. Again, people like me always thought too highly of Americans. And that's not a benefit of the doubt we'll ever deserve again after 2016. It shouldn't have taken 2020 and then Jan 6 for me to realize we as a country are both broken and irredeemable. But I was still very much a Pollyanna even back then. Sue me.

And the actual reason those basement approvals never happened to Trump is because a great deal of Bush's disapproval came from horrible people pissed off he wasn't stupid and evil ENOUGH. Those precise people have nothing to complain about when it comes to Trump, so Trump's support may be low, but it's always steady, it's MUCH higher than Bush's by the time he left office, and never once approached those dregs. It's because the Total Fucking Morons got Trump's back. They recognized the Shit King as one of their own the way they refused to for W.

Our country is broken.

Comments

Re: Agreed 100%. Exactly on point. ✊🏾

[jasonderoga86]

Definitely a moral one. Politics has nothing to do with it; never has, never will. I see a similar situation when White American cops cry foul by saying Blacks hate all Whites because of "a few bad cops." My problem with that argument is that the same can be said for ALL people oppressed by the system, which still favors White privilege. When one Latinx is called a "rapist", ALL Latinx are rapists to the GOP and their constituents. When a person of the LGBTQ+ community talks to a kid and is called a "groomer", ALL people of that community are "groomers" to the GOP and their constituents. When a Black person is called "suspiciously criminal" and is beaten up or even shot dead by a White cop, ALL Black people are "suspiciously criminal" to the GOP and the constituents.

Trump supporters who think all White Americans are facing hatred fail to understand that they are (and continue to be) a part of the problem, not the solution, through their actions. Whether it was insensitive or not, Hillary Clinton's comment about "reprogramming MAGA supporters" had the right sentiment. Cults have been condemned for centuries because they are dangerous and antithetical to their own faiths. The cultish mindset forbids questioning the leader, regardless of morals. It's how Jonestown happened, and we all saw the result.