Trump’s followers
HAVANA – It never ceases to amaze those of us who live in Cuba that Donald Trump enjoys the support of such a broad segment of American society. People wonder who these people are. Are they willing to accept whatever outrageous thing the president says or does and who react irritably to any criticism of his actions? What is the cause for this excessive passion for a man that few took seriously only four years ago?
Some attribute it to Trump’s alleged ability to control the minds of his followers and incite the cult of his personality. It’s possible that some are victims of a kind of divine revelation, but the truth is that few are willing to drink disinfectants because the president says you should. Most know that he lies; the thing is they don’t care because they feel it favors them. In this hypocrisy lies the livelihood of fanaticism towards the New York magnate.
These people were there long before Donald Trump became president. They are the product of a culture whose expressions date back to the 18th century, when a supposed biblical interpretation became popular that believed Anglo-Saxons were the legitimate descendants of the “Lost Tribes of Israel” and the white race chosen by God to survive the Apocalypse and purify humanity.
Throughout American history variants of this fundamentalist interpretation have served to justify the extermination of indigenous peoples, discrimination against immigrants, racism, and xenophobia. It also helped create the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the myth of “American exceptionalism.” There have been many whose politics is based on these beliefs. Remember when Ronald Reagan described the former Soviet Union as a kind of satanic empire? And what of the recent and current movements of the extreme right, such as the Tea Party or Alt Right, who still assume a certain religious interpretation based on white supremacy.
In short, what these people deliriously support is not Donald Trump, but the stark and primitive nature of his speech, the mobilizer of the most intolerant positions, as well as his apparent disposition to make his dogmas prevail at all costs. He is the leader of the crusade, even when they doubt his doctrinal sincerity and his ethics are questionable. It seems that demagoguery has become a virtue and Trump is perceived by these people as a divine instrument to whom all sins are forgiven provided he fulfills his mission on earth.
It is estimated that these people comprise about 40 percent of the voting American adult population. Surely a minority, but no other voting bloc is greater and they vote more consistently than other electors, which accentuates their political strength. In the last fifty years, its proportion with respect to the rest of society has increased steadily, reaching their highest numbers at this point in this century. In 1964, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, then an archetype of the ultra-conservative movement, obtained 38 percent of the vote. In 2000, George W. Bush reached 47.9 percent, and in 2016, Donald Trump obtained a more or less similar margin with 47.3 percent. Not a small percentage when you realize it represented more than 60 million voters.
The group comprises mostly white men with limited education. They are generally found in rural areas and are linked to agriculture or manufacturing, and feel their lives have been affected by globalization, technological development and what they see as competition from cheap labor offered by immigrants.
Due to his violent tendencies, Donald Trump is playing with fire when he incites these people, often armed, to demonstrate against the authorities, especially Democrats, who advocate in favor of confinement to face the pandemic. In an article by Pablo Guimón, correspondent for the newspaper El País in Washington, he writes that these acts have been promoted by Citizens for Self-Governance, who since 2015 has been pushing for a “Convention of States,” and spearheaded by among others the ultra-conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, considered among the president’s main patrons.
[In 2015, Citizens for Self-Governance launched a nationwide effort to call an Article V Convention, through a project called Convention of the States, in a bid to rein in the federal government.]
Some evangelical churches have served as a point of political confluence and ideological inspiration for these people shaping a supremacist and chauvinistic movement that currently keeps Donald Trump’s popularity afloat. According to the PEW Research Center, white evangelicals make up 26.3 percent of the American population and three-quarters of them support the Republican president.
These individuals constitute the social base of what has come to be called the conservative offensive, a movement that has been around since the 1970s in response to the advances of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the time. At the peak of this effort are ultra-conservative billionaires; corporations, especially those related to the production of weapons, the exploitation of non-renewable energy and the pharmaceutical industries; members of the judicial system, some now on the Supreme Court; owners of large media; politicians elected at various levels, and ambitious intellectuals and officials in charge of the theoretical construction and operational work of the projects.
Under their patronage they’ve created private foundations whose aim is to sponsor programs influenced by conservative political ideological thought. These include important think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, who are charged with the intellectual architecture of the movement and whose influence is felt in most prestigious universities in the country. They’ve also formed dozens of lobbying organizations including the National Conservative Action Committee; various media, such as Fox News; as well as powerful Political Action Committees (PACs) whose aim if the financing conservative politicians at all levels of the American governmental structure. The result has been that a small group of big-time right-wing magnates has achieved unusual power in the political life of the United States.
Donald Trump was not the original choice of these groups, but the excesses of the conservatives exacerbated the crisis of the system and created an opportunity for the unexpected Trump victory. Given the evidence of the inevitable, they had no choice but to embrace him, and who then became the Messiah of the conservative popular strata. Despite how difficult it has been to deal with his maddening megalomania, Trump, also in need of the support of big Republican capital, made things easier by completely bowing to the agenda of the extreme right. This explains why the fanaticism towards his person is not only expressed in the mobs of “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton called them, but in the governors, congressmen and any republican politician who aspires to gain the support of the Party and the power groups that sustain it.
CODIV-19 has complicated the extreme-right dream of “making America great again,” as well as the racial purification hopes of its white supremacist followers. Donald Trump’s staunch supporters believe that there is evidence that we are witnessing a satanic conspiracy, in the form of a communist… I’m sure, camouflaged as a liberal Democrat.
