I keep thinking about the conundrum that is Donald Trump, why he was elected and why he still has support. In an attempt to understand I thought I'd put some of my thoughts down.
First off even his supporters don't seem to make the case that he is a good and decent man. He gets support from single issue voters as he runs an anti abortion line, although I get no sense that this is from principle. In like manner he has a lot of support from Christian Evangelicals even though he is clearly not religious. But what is he? I'll return to the issue of what his appeal is later.
I have been reading his niece Mary Trump's book to get an understanding of the man. The main picture that emerges is that Donald's father Fred Trump went into business with his mother and became very wealthy through Government property development programmes. Fred was very success driven, he was also a failure as a human being, in that he lacked humanity and particularly empathy, humour & love.
Donald's mother Mary became seriously ill just before he turned 3, so that for some years afterwards she wasn't there for him and it seems like there was no strong bond between them from that point. His father while he became the only available parent could not be regarded as a caregiver. As a child Donald became something of a bully, he was sent to a military school to try to curb behavioural problems. It doesn't appear that Donald could ever have been described as a nice person.
Donald's sister Maryanne helped him with his school work and it seems he hired someone to sit his entrance exams to university. His intellectual ability was never that great.
However it was Donald who his father Fred ended up favouring and it seesm to have been for a number of reasons, they shared a belief that winning was the important thing, that admitting mistakes was a sign of weakness and it was always important to appear strong and Donald had something his father didn't have and that is a gift for self aggrandisement a natural aptitude for publicity. what he lacked was Fred's sound business sense and attention to detail. But early on in Donald's career Fred was able to use him as the front man, the face of the deals do the necessary behind the scenes work and the deals would pay off. However Fred pumped large amount of money into Donald and of all his children only really Donald. Donald became used to basically being given money.
This strikes me as why he likes corrupt dictators, they know all they have to do to make Donald happy is give him money.
I have recently been reading some Seth Abramson, partly his tweets but also some excerpts from his "Proof of" series books, I have the first of the series on order, these are quite long books so I don't expect a lot of people to read them. But he calls himself not a journalist but a meta journalist, I think "macro journalist" would be more fitting. What he does is act like a historian but using recent materials to draw on a huge variety of good quality journalism, which is all referenced, to draw a bigger connected picture. Most journalism covers a single topical story and so fails to let us form a complete picture.
It seems to me people think that there should be a single smoking gun instance with Donald Trump and that it hasn't happened. After all Muller didn't find Collusion in the Russian investigation, even though Muller said that he wasn't trying to establish Collusion and that the Muller report confirmed nearly all the instances of contact between Russians and the Trump campaign. The problem seems to be not that there isn't enough evidence but that there is too much.
Now coming back to what Trump's supporters see in Donald Trump, I think there is a certain amount of schadenfreude they love the fact that he annoys Democrats and Liberals so much. He really deals it to them. He appeals to the anti woke crowd, because Trump is certainly not woke, I think they are refusing to look at the fact that in a way he becomes the caricature that is the woke crowds bogeyman. There is also the element of tribalism that has been around for a long time, he has had cheer leading from the Fox network and whatever the connections with Russia are he has used conspiracy theories, hyperbole, lies and bluster to undermine the very idea of verifiable facts and Truth.
Those are my thoughts for the day.
