Like many others, I have taken my shot at explaining Donald Trump's appeal to Republican voters. In this matter I have a great advantage over the mainstream media; I do not have to avoid explanations that paint a less than flattering portrait of the voters who, in turn, are the customers of that same mainstream media. How many people would stop patronizing a media outlet that came to the conclusion that Donald Trump's appeal to his party was based on the willful ignorance, bigotry or the irrational fear of many millions of Americans, the very people that a media outlet needs to appeal to in order to stay in business?
Yet the evidence is overwhelming; Trump's initial appeal was to birthers. About 50% of the Republican Party was on board with the idea that Pres. Obama was not born in the U.S. A small minority of Republicans believed that Ted Cruz was not born in the U.S. when, in fact, he was
NOT born in the U.S. Neither fact is a secret, but this is what they believe anyway.
Start adding up the other things that a majority of Republican voters believe that are contrary to the facts as best as we can know them; many believe in Creationism, and Young Earth Creationism at that; most deny that Global Climate change is a result of human activity as if the effects of Greenhouse Gases is debatable. But now you can add an impressive new list of willfully ignorant items or outright lies that Republican voters are willing to accept, overlook or even embrace. What about the total lack of negative push-back by voters when Trump re-tweeted a
fictitious, false, inflammatory and racist chart (see above); or when he implied that Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of JFK; or when he accused Hillary Clinton of abusing women who had affairs with her husband; or when he suggests that former Clinton aide Vince Foster did not commit suicide but may have been murdered with Clinton involvement; or when he said that John McCain was not a war hero; or that he saw thousands of Muslims on rooftops on TV celebrating 9-11 in New Jersey; or when he calls Bernie Sanders a communist... I am sure I've missed dozens of whopping big lies. (Go to
http://www.dailywire.com/news/4834/trumps-101-lies-hank-berrien .)
The one common thread in all this is that what Trump supporters like about Trump is precisely his dislike of fact; facts have become "politically correct" and possess what Colbert has described as a "liberal bias." Of course facts really do not have such a bias but yes indeed many people now oppose "facts" because it is "politically incorrect" to oppose facts and being "politically incorrect" is a good thing!
That is why Trump can lie about other Republicans as well as Democrats, Conservatives as well as Liberals, because
it is the opposition to fact that his supporters adore. Do not get me wrong on this - I am not saying that left leaning ideologues do not do the same thing - they do, such as in those who believed that Bush and Cheney somehow were in on 9-11 and "allowed" it to happen. It's just that those leftist ideologues have not quite taken over the Democrat Party. The ideologues/believers and anti-fact yahoos
have taken over the Republican Party and their main goal is to oppose all kinds of facts that contradict their beliefs.
This is the mess that Republican leaders have created with their years, if not decades of pandering to the willfully ignorant in their ranks. By promoting the "faith-based" initiatives the party has embraced in the past, not surprisingly the party members have evolved into demanding
"lie-based' initiatives. Trump is delivering.
You read that here first.
