This is pure hypothesis.
After 40 years of neoliberal attacks on working conditions and lower income Americans, Trump recognised that many people in the US are in despair. They see no future. Things are not as good as they were for them. No one was paying any helpful attention to them. Social Mobility is pretty dead. They were in a mess of apathy, because they were repeatedly told they were useless, or responsible for their own pain, by politicians, media, employers, preachers and self-help people. They had no security and little way of bettering themselves. Many people were and are struggling. The American Dream, was lost.
Many of them saw affirmative action programs for other people, but nothing to help them. People rarely see what they have. They were annoyed about this and it reinforced their sense of rejection. The Left in particular seemed, to them, to worry about other people.
Trump managed to change the apathy to anger. He made their suffering and lack of hope, all the fault of Democrats, liberals and communists, despite the neoliberal domination of politics and economics for the last 40 years. Indeed, he made it so, there was no difference between Liberals and communists and fascists. He would protect the people, by tariffs and trade wars with China, by cultivating national pride.
He was supported in this by one of the biggest pro-neoliberal media organisations in the English speaking world, News Corp. which owns Fox. They helped build the anger. People felt recognised, and so pardoned Trump’s incoherence (he was just an ordinary guy) and his violence, because they were angry and felt like violence, even if they were not openly violent and didn’t want to be. They respected Trump for saying what he thought, no matter how petty. And they empathised with him when other people denounced him for speaking his mind or making stuff up, because that happened to them all the time. And when he accused others of cheating it meshed with their life experiences, because they had been cheated of their dreams, despite their best efforts.
That Trump did not succeed, is either denied, or proves to them that the establishment still cheated them. Naturally the establishment, which won’t accept them or listen to them, got rid of Trump through massive undetectable electoral cheating. This is just normal experience.
What they don’t want to know, is that their only hope is a fraud, with no plans to help them, and with no care for them at all. So that knowledge becomes subliminal: he isn’t perfect but he can still be a tool for God’s purpose to bring America back to faith and greatness. We must have faith. Otherwise there is apparently nothing for them. It is easy to deny what would make it seem we have been deceived.
Even if Joe Biden was great for the working and middle class, then how would they get to know about it? Fox and ONAN won’t let them know – people don’t experience events directly, they experience them through past knowledge, through the comments of those on their side and so on.
So the tools President Trump uses to keep at the centre of attention are pretty basic, he pretends to listen and to sympathise with them, while working up anger against supposed enemies who are his enemies. He keeps harping on how successful he is, and that he can do more or less anything. And he keeps repeating this framework over and over.
Then there is what his followers do for themselves.
People who go to his big rallies get a sense of togetherness, they build bonds with other people who have similar experiences and talk about them. It gives people a sense of being part of a movement. It appears to repair the networks of self-organised support, and helps to make people feel safer, with some hope for the future. Surely if so many people turn up, this hope can be the basis for the future?
People who join Trump conversation sites get their ‘knowledge’ reinforced and an even greater sense of participation and meaning. They also have it reinforced that non-Trumpists are their enemies, because they might obstruct Trump, and these enemies form a great place to dump and purge some of their anger. This is much better than feeling depressed and apathetic. This is living.
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