The Media Pretends GOP Voters Don't Like Trump, But They Love Him
The Media Pretends GOP Voters Don't Like Trump, But They Love Him
GOP Voters Love Trump's Bigotry And Stupidity
Republican voters love Donald Trump, and they have loved him for years. They love everything about Trump, the racism, the misogyny, the crude way he speaks, the corruption. They love all of it.
This is not an opinion, its a demonstrable fact, and yet the mainstream press is obsessed with pretending that this isn’t true.
Time and time again the press speculates on when the moment of disenchantment with Trump will come. Surely, they ask, there is some sort of “schism” or “split” within the Republican Party, with the “traditional” Republicans (in their view, the McCain/Romney/Bush wing) pushing against the Trump wing.
But what happens every single time is that Republican voters said the clear and unmistakable answer that they still love Trump and back him to the hilt.
I think the roots of the press distortion with this topic comes from a deeply weird place.
The problem for a lot of the media is that they clearly see what Trump is saying and doing on the national stage. He doesn’t have the kind of savvy of a Mitt Romney or a George W. Bush, who kept up the long Republican tradition of saying the right things to rile up the bigots, but almost never say such things out loud in public — in polite company.
As Romney said on the infamous tape of him deriding the poor 47%, such talk is for “quiet rooms.”
But Trump showed that you can win millions of votes by just letting your bigot flag fly. You can joke about sexually assaulting women and mocking the disabled and as long as you appear to be “owning the libs,” Republican voters will be fine with it.
To a lot of national reporters, this means that their (almost exclusively white) relatives who vote Republican are perfectly fine with this. It means their kindly grandmother and jokester uncle are just okay with calling countries with large black populations “shit holes.”
But the journalism class hates to contemplate this reality, so in their reporting they are compensating for this by speculating on a pivot from Trump that never comes.
Republican voters have been all-in on Trump since he came down the escalator and called Mexican immigrants rapists. They’ve been in a love affair with him for over seven years now, through two impeachments and an attack on the Capitol. They’ve seen him lie about winning the popular vote in two elections where he lost it, and they’ve seen him make up lies out of thin air about winning in 2020.
They love it all.
The mainstream press will continue to elevate this false narrative, including promoting possible presidential candidates who have criticized Trump, like Maryland governor Larry Hogan. But Hogan has a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming the party’s standard-bearer because even if Trump isn’t directly on the ballot, the voters in the party will support a candidate like Trump.
Because Republican voters love the pure hatred embodied by Donald Trump, because it is their hate too. That is the reality of the situation and the people who have the job of reporting on reality should suck it up and deal with it.
— Oliver
Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Twitter @owillis
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Kal-El slept through the writing of this post, as he does most of the time when I’m writing. I try not to take it too personally.
"To a lot of national reporters, this means that their (almost exclusively white) relatives who vote Republican are perfectly fine with this. It means their kindly grandmother and jokester uncle are just okay with calling countries with large black populations “shit holes.”
But the journalism class hates to contemplate this reality, so in their reporting they are compensating for this by speculating on a pivot from Trump that never comes."
Ding, ding, ding. I'm white and a former reporter and this is all true. And it's true of white "moderates" who aren't reporters too. None of them want to contemplate how deep white supremacy runs, even in "decent" well-educated people like themselves---because that means they, we, have to deal with our complicity.
Yes. I live in a small PA town that seems to smolder with white hate. It is "endemic." There is no meeting ground with someone whose garage wall features a huge confederate flag or whose truck flies the F*** Biden flag. This is America now. Just like in 2016 - the media doesn't know how to process it anymore than I do.