Trump's 'respectable' voters lie about his plans (and crimes) to dodge accountability for supporting those things

There's a New York Times article getting a lot of attention today: "The Trump Voters Who Don't Believe Trump" is the headline, and the meat of the story consists of quotes from Normal Republican Voters who reject the notion that the coup-attempting Donald Trump will do any of the scary things he promises to do in his campaign speeches. He's just fibbing, supposedly. For funsies.

The normie quotes are culled from audience members who turned out to hear Trump give a speech addressing the Detroit Economic Club, a hoity-toity group that hosts presidents on the regular.

There were a few hundred people there. They were not the sorts of people one encounters at a Trump rally. They weren’t construction workers or truck drivers or forklift operators; they carried business cards and had very active LinkedIn pages. They did not wear red hats or T-shirts with images of Mr. Trump’s bloodied face; they wore windowpane suit jackets and loafers and rather conspicuous cuff links.

They did not want to hear about “one really violent day” or about the deep state or the Marxists or the fascists or any of the other radical or antidemocratic visions that Mr. Trump describes in baroque detail at his rallies. They just wanted him to tell them that he would be good for business.

So there's your setup. These are not the frothing maniacs that show up to Trump's rallies to demand he Do A Treason right then and there for their amusement, these are people who consider themselves important in the community and who have a decent amount of cash on hand and want you to know that they are if anything even more gullible than the cranks wearing Trump's face on their clothes or the ones waving Confederate flags around.

According to these captains of industry, nothing Trump says matters and they can vote for him with a clear conscience because he would never do the things he spent four years already doing and has assembled a who's who of extremist fascism-promoting figures who've spent the post-coup years planning out how to remove the obstacles that kept him, and them, from doing much worse.

Asked if he believed Mr. Trump would purge the federal government and fill its ranks with election deniers, Mr. Fachini sipped his iced tea and thought for a moment. “I don’t,” he said. So why was Mr. Trump saying he wanted to do that? “It could just be for publicity,” Mr. Fachini said with a shrug, “just riling up the news.”

Of course Trump isn't merely vowing to fill the government with conspiracy cranks and election deniers; that's who he hangs out with now. It's not a theoretical. Apparently Mr. Fachini here thinks the hundreds of pages of Heritage Foundation documents describing how to accomplish it is all just a put-on. That coup that we keep mentioning? The one that caused multiple deaths and came close to killing lawmakers and Trump's own vice president? Just a little showboating, baby!

Tom Pierce, a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich., did not truly believe that Mr. Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign.

“He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” said Mr. Pierce, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”

Now there's a person who makes sense. Donald Trump and his allies have been traveling the country singling out specific immigrant groups and stoking violence against them. They are promising flat-out to create mass detention camps that would rival those of Nazi Germany, and are vocal in explaining that they don't mean "illegal" immigrants, they mean legal immigrants, their U.S. born children, and whoever else catches their attention.

But don't you understand? The man is only promising a Holocaust as a bargaining chip. He is a businessman. And that means Tom Pierce gets to vote for Trump without feeling a twinge of guilt, because if you're a legitimate businessman of course you're going to understand negotiations like "I am going to commit unspeakable and horrific acts against random powerless people unless you give me what I want." When you go to purchase a new house, you don't simply hand over some money and sign some paperwork—unless you're a chump, of course.

No, first you go to the homeowner and say "I am going to murder you and your entire family unless you give me your house." The homeowner may balk; at that point you offer instead to murder only two of their children, only maiming the rest. And so on, until both sides come to an understanding and you get most of what they want.

If you're not promising to commit crimes and/or atrocities in order to extract maximal gain, the members of the Detroit Economic Club are a bit skeptical of your business acumen. Now Trump, he's got what it takes.

The story goes on a bit, but I think the bit where the decently-well-off and conspicuously white Detroit audience brushes off "largest mass deportation operation in history" and every other bit of Trump's truly hateful and fascist rally rhetoric is probably the most instructive. Do these people sincerely believe Trump will not attempt to do all the things he already attempted to do the first time around? Do they truly believe that vowing concentration camps is just a "negotiation?"

While we can't speak for the specific tedious wankers—sorry, Economic Clubbers—being quoted in this piece and others like it, I think in general we're not seeing the phenomenon here that reporters think they're seeing. It's not that Trump's less openly coup-and-sedition-backing supporters are somehow confused as to what Donald Trump stands for and what he intends.

They are lying. And they have to lie, because if they acknowledged Trump's words and actions to be precisely what they are then they must expose themselves as backers of those atrocities themselves.

No, many if not most of them are just lying. And they have to lie, because if they acknowledged Trump's words and actions to be precisely what they are then it's all indefensible, deplorable, and horrific—and they must expose themselves as backers of those things themselves.

What is more likely? That Trump's better-heeled supporters think he is just blowing smoke when he calls, over and over, for retributions and violence against his political opponents, against protesters, and against migrants?

Or is it that they know full well he means all those things, and they like those things, and they want him to do those things—but also know that there would be serious social repercussions for saying that out loud?

The fabulously wealthy people who support Trump know what they're getting; they're not confused over it. From Silicon Valley cryptolords to the stalwart far-right backers of the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks, they want deregulation and they don't want to pay taxes—and they don't give a flying damn what happens to the rest of the country, so long as they get it.

And the not necessarily wealthy but still well-heeled Trump supporters that brush off Trump's promised and actual inflicted violence are not all innocent gullibles either; these were the sort of people who participated in Trump's Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt, standing just behind the militia members who attacked police officers in order to allow the rest of the crowd to walk through the barricades and into the closed Capitol.

The difference between Trump-backing members of the Detroit Economic Club and the sort of people who wave Confederate flags around outside Trump rallies is that members of the Detroit Economic Club have status. It may not be a lot, but it is some, and the first rule of cultivating status is that you need to have at least some marginal, possibly-trivial sense of shame. You generally shouldn't go around being a frothing flag-waving peddler of violence because that isn't the sort of person other people with status want to be around, and if you are a person who owns a business that relies on the general public to survive and you're not in a deep-red area dominated by other Trump backers you may be hesitant to publicly announce that yes, you absolutely think legal migrants should be rounded up and put in concentration camps.

If you say that, then everyone can (correctly) peg you as a monster. So you weave. You evade. You say well now, I don't support concentration camps, and I certainly would never support any politician who proposes concentration camps—but as it turns out, my candidate is merely joking about the concentration camps. He is merely putting on airs, when he boasts of his desire for roving paramilitary thugs to roam through our cities, capturing the hated other. And since he is joking, we all get to ignore all that rhetoric and instead focus on Donald Trump's rich—hang on, let me think for a moment—new tax policies. Yes, that's it. All of the things he says that you don't like are jokes, and what's really important here is tax policy.

C'mon now. That's ... implausible, at best. It makes you sound like the most gullible person alive; it makes you sound like a rube, a clown, and a liar.

But if you're trying to defend your support for Trump in a room full of family members or business acquaintances or God forbid a national reporter who can put your name, age, and quoted statements in print for all the world to see, and you don't want to let on that no, actually, you really like Trump's ideas for fascist takeover and mass violence, then pretending to be a complete fking idiot is by far the better option.

And so, for any Trump voter with enough dignity to not be seen in one of his Hitler Youth-styled rallies, that's what they're going with.

It's a lie. For the most part, and for most of Trump's voters, it's nothing but a lie. It's a preposterous scenario to listen to an entire campaign team promise mass internment camps and think, seriously and truly, that oh-ho, this is a bit of clever gamesmanship on their part. When political parties propose human rights atrocities, most non-sociopathic "normal" people react with disgust. If you're not reacting with disgust, we already know more about you than you probably want us to know; if you're not only not reacting with disgust but are attempting to convince others that such rhetoric is inconsequential, then you have outed yourself as someone who is Just Fine with such speech.

When Trump voters say they don't believe he will do a horrible, monstrous thing, what they mean is that they don't care if he'll do a horrible, monstrous thing. They've heard it. They've absorbed it. And they're either supportive of it or indifferent to it; if it happens, they might claim to be shocked or they might reverse themselves and tell their peers that well of course he was going to do it, but it's still not as important as "tax policy."

Fascism is heavily dependent on this misdirection-of-atrocity, this notion that the future is unknowable, anything you read can't be trusted, and you should believe only what you want to believe while angrily dismissing all of the things you don't.

There's a name for this phenomenon. It's called fascism. Fascism is heavily dependent on this misdirection-of-atrocity, this notion that the future is unknowable, anything you read can't be trusted, and you should believe only what you want to believe while angrily dismissing all of the things you don't. Lying about Trump's motives is, like Trump's own lies, a power move; by dismissing the reality that is plainly in front of your own face, you can then bend your own arguments to claim that your "support" for the party is because the party will do unmentioned good things instead of the loudly promised bad things. The people who are most vocal now in claiming that Trump's collected gaggle of hard-right fascist extremists pose no threat to democracy or the law will be among the first to say, when Trump's party acts on those threats, that such lawlessness or human rights violations are a small price to pay for whatever supposed accomplishments the party promises the lawlessness will allow. It is a game.

As closer, there's one other thing that should be kept in mind here. That much of Trump's most substantive support comes not from the working class, but from the businesscritters one rung up the ladder from "working class" is now an understood phenomenon. And it's key to understanding the professed confusion of these Trump backers as to what he stands for; it is not the powerless that are backing Trump, but the big fishes in each of those little ponds. The people who are doing just fine for themselves, even amid local economic malaise, make up the real core of Trump's base.

This Vox story on the new book Stolen Pride summarizes the phenomenon well:

“Those most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom — the illiterate, the hungry,” [sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild] writes. Rather, Trump’s biggest fans could be found among “the elite of the left-behind,” meaning people “who were doing well within a region that was not.” [...]

In 2020, three political scientists studied how location and income affected white voters’ voting decisions. They found that, on a national level, poorer white people were indeed more likely to vote for Trump than richer ones. 

But when you factored in local conditions — the fact that your dollar can buy more in Biloxi than Boston — the relationship reverses. “Locally rich” white people, those who had higher incomes than others in their zip codes, were much more likely to support Trump than those who were locally poor. These people might make less money than a wealthy person in a big city, but were doing relatively well when compared to their neighbors.

Put those two results together, and you get a picture that aligns precisely with Hochschild’s observations. Trump’s strongest support comes from people who live in poorer parts of the country, like KY-5, but are still able to live a relatively comfortable life there.

The even shorter version:

Trump’s strongest supporters in rural areas tend to be angry that their regions don’t set the social terms of American life: that they don’t control the halls of power and that, as a consequence, both political and cultural life is moving away from what they’re comfortable with.

Detroit can't exactly be called "rural," but the phenomenon appears to be the same. It's a part of the country that's faced extreme economic hardships over the last decades, but when you look for the Trump supporters you're likely to find them to be people who aren't having much hardship at all; they're people who have some small amount of local power, and are peeved that it doesn't translate into the whole damn country doing their bidding.

Those are the people who suddenly are convinced that trans Americans are a "threat within," a group that must be stopped. Those are the people who have been continually looking to capture local school boards and retaliate against educators and librarians who "expose" their children to the wrong sort of knowledge. Those are the people waving the "mass deportation now" signs at the Republican National Convention—and the people who will simultaneously claim, when confronted, that their signs did not mean what was written on them. They are people who are doing just fine for themselves, but are boiling over with cultural rage that their way of life is not everyone else's way of life.

In Trump, they see someone who can enforce their petty grievances on a grandiose scale. Racism; oppression; police violence; a government that pampers them and their companies while putting the screws to the poor, and to religions that are not their own, and to anyone who is not a member of the local Economic Club. They have more power than most, but cannot abide the humiliation of not having more.