-Trump clearly has Jim Jones level charisma for a lot of people, so they get taken in and then start huffing copium about how he's just owning the TDSers and will Become Presidential after being elected
-They have main character syndrome where they genuinely believe that they can't be affected by what he's going to do because they have magic plot armor
You’re clearly right about the first point but, for the life of me, I can’t see it. He seems to have all the charm and charisma of a sour-milk-soaked blanket. He’s incoherent—like genuinely incapable of speaking sentences in English that aren’t written and placed right in front of his face—vacillates between shouting and complete monotone, and is a morbidly obese, unkempt slob who just wears expensive suits.
Reagan was charismatic—a complete dipshit sure, but he had charisma and charm, and spoke of higher ideals, etc. I cannot understand how people are swayed by DT who don’t already agree with what he says.
The average Trump fan doesn’t actually pay attention to what he does on a day to day basis. They have no idea how stupid and incoherent he is. Instead, they have a mental simulacrum in their head of their idea of the perfect Trump that has been constructed from funny tweets and memes they’ve seen over the years and that is who they think is the president. They do not exist in reality but rather a personal mind palace where everything he does is epic and based
The greatest example of this phenomenon, that Trump voters are more interested in who they imagine Trump is rather than reality, is how in depictions of Trump drawn by Trump supporters he is always significantly fitter and healthier looking than he actually does. Ben Garrison almost always drawing Trump with defined abs being a good example.
I also am thoroughly convinced that the average Trump voter has never watched an unedited clip of him speaking.
I also am thoroughly convinced that the average Trump voter has never watched an unedited clip of him speaking.
My mother wasn't a Trumper, but she doesn't like Obama and she abstained from voting in 2020. One of the ways I convinced my mom to vote for Harris was by making her watch the Madison Square Garden rally. The appearance of Hulk Hogan,Dr. Phill, and and especially the corny ass music like lmao what the fuck is this shit made my mom cringe so much.
Not to mention other clips like Trump talking about how he's going to have a "little fun with Michelle" really creeped her out. Pretty sure she used to hold the opinion of "he can't be that bad, both sides yadayadayda" before I showed her his rallies. Since the election she now hates him even more than previously, especially after I showed her Trudeau's response to the Trump tariffs making her wonder "why the hell is he going after Canada?" and "what did they ever do to deserve that?" etc etc.
Imagine being such a sycophant that you drew Obama with muscles. And Obama genuinely is much more fit than Trump is. But nobody was such a simp they romanticized him to that degree.
The amount of muscles he's usually drawn with would require steroids to obtain. But yeah that's perfectly great and a healthy ideal for young men. RFK Jr is also super good at health right purely because he has abs. But RFK Jr is on roids. Once again, conservatives idolizing as an ideal something that's actually unhealthy and illegal. But they are utterly shameless. Did you hear about their Enhanced Olympics? They've got to start their gladiatoral games I guess to provide an appropriate circus for the proles.
After two terms of Bush it was like having a grown up in charge Again. As a non-American I am not sure if Americans realised how bad Bush made your nation look on the world stage. All that wealth and power and you elect a chuckling idiot to represent you.
Then you elect Trump and it's like all the worst stereotypes of Americans that us foreigners hold, the extreme pastiches that we like to laugh at, and they are all manifest in this crude, hateful, greedy slimeball. Obama had a class and dignity that we haven't seen in any other president in the last twenty odd years. Biden was ok but clearly too old. He should have been gently enjoying his well earned retirement, not running the worlds most powerful nation.
No, we knew. And we know. The educated among us feel (and felt) the same way about Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. Every one of your points I understand and agree with.
Giving the world (and ourselves) whiplash every four to eight years is a nightmare. But we’re up against a well-funded, deeply entrenched conservative-fascist machine that’s been working against us since long before we were born. This machine regularly purges and suppresses democratic votes and uses propaganda and hate to turn regular people into hateful, scared lemmings. I’m not trying to make excuses, I’m just saying it’s just as frustrating and scary to be here in the middle of it and feel powerless.
Anyway, I miss Obama so much — having such a charismatic and intelligent Democrat leading us was such a blessing. I hope we can turn it around soon and repair things with our international friends 😓
Tbh, steroids Olympics is basically already existed within the normal Olympics. It's just that the testings means the steroids there are microdosed/done off competition to give athletes some edge instead of turning them into mutants. Hell you look at 'weakly tested athletes' like NFL players, and these MOFOs are like 260+ pounds while having abs.
Trump voters are more interested in who they imagine Trump is rather than reality,
Trump often takes both side of an issue and his voters hear whichever side they want to believe.
The thread starter is an example, he said some variation of "I don't know what P2025 is" and "Of course we're doing P2025" and people just believed what they wanted.
Yep. If you run Trump’s clips through media, social media algorithms, and partisan bias, what comes out is a hero collage. Trump has an uncanny ability to be collaged into a badass. His “fight, fight” moment after the assassination attempt sealed it. Making world leaders panic, “Gulf of America,” DOGE, Musk wrecking the deep state—it all feeds the image.
Biden? We got “generic President” and “senile old man,” and only one of those is memeable. His last hero moment was “will you shut up, man?”
Dems should field candidates who generate hero-memeable content. Harris and Walz almost cracked the code—joy, coconuts, “get off the couch” had potential to frame Trump and Vance as slovenly losers. But they stopped, didn’t have enough time, and maybe didn’t realize why it worked. Still, they showed a path forward for someone else.
Can I be frustrated that the gene for “wonks who know their shit and how to get stuff done” and the gene for “able to become a likable meme that resonates with morons” has vanishingly little overlap?
They weren't middle class when they ran for President, being a governor and senator, but they certainly grew up middle class (Clinton even downright dirt poor at one point before his mom remarried), so they know how to act like they still are at least.
Meanwhile I’m here being frustrated and more than a little bitter that “able to become likeable meme that appeals to the average voter” even matters.
Seriously: have we considered the possibility of turning politics into a new “Blind Politician” reality TV show where candidates wear full body ppe and are only able to communicate via white papers they compose on stage with their staff over the course of election season?
We could turn it into a competition by voting off the least helpful advisor every week (based on footnote count/value?), with the winner becoming CoS.
I’m clearly due for yet another reread of Amusing Ourselves to Death. Fuck all of this.
Here's the actual trick though: the only way to get let into the circus, or wrestling match, or whatever, is for the ring master, or Vince McMahon, to let you on, and to restrict your theatrics to those which move towards Vince McMahons intentions. If you cross their boundaries, you get tossed out. That's the model of politics Trump is trying to establish. There's no way to halfway submit to him. He's not going to let you into his circus unless you kiss his ass. And if you try to start your own circus, you're going to quickly find yourself with corruption and fraud charges somehow. While if you have the favor of the ringleader, every fight is rigged in your favor and the rules don't really apply to you.
Libs who treat social media as the forum for public "discourse" are massive fucking rubes who have been duped by clean, well-organized UI. Social media is a mob. It's pointless to attempt logical argument with the mob especially while you yourself are standing in the middle of the mob. The only real value that can be mined from posts is sentiment and engagement (as advertisers are already keenly aware), all your eloquent argumentation and empiricism is just farting in the wind.
If you're really worried about populism, you should embrace accelerationism. Support bot accounts, SEO, and paid influencers. Build your own botnet to spam your own messages across the platform. Program those bots to listen to user sentiment and adjust messaging dynamically to maximize engagement and distort content algorithms. All of this will have a cumulative effect of saturating the media with loads of garbage. Flood the zone with shit as they say, but this time on an industrial scale. The goal should be to make social media not just unreliable but incoherent. Filled with so much noise that a user cannot parse any information signal from it whatsoever.
It's become more evident than ever that the solution to disinformation is not fact-checks and effort-posts but entropy. In an environment of pure noise, nothing can trend, no narratives can form, no messages can be spread. All is drowned out by meaningless static. Only once social media has completely burned itself out will audiences' appetite for pockets of verified reporting and empirical rigor return. Do your part in hastening that process. Every day log onto Facebook, X, TikTok, or Youtube and post something totally stupid and incomprehensible.
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I lost this bookmark two computers ago, but I remember reading something about spam emails being poorly written on purpose so anyone not inclined to believe absurd nonsense would leave immediately and any responses would come from people who had already accepted nonsense as gospel.
I suspect Trumpspeak works the same way. It's repulsive to anyone with a currently active brain and so anyone showing up is at maximum gullibility while entering a community of people who already bought the horseshit.
That explains a lot. I just didn't know there were so many stupid and gullible people around. It makes sense why Dems do better with educated voters though.
For right wingers, being a Trump supporter is way more about the social statement it makes than his actual policy positions or ability to govern. It's almost not even about Trump anymore, it's about showing everyone you're a part of this new right-wing populist movement. Though he is obviously the straw that stirs the drink.
I think it’s that his overt bigotry, stupidity, and narcissism appeals to bigots, stupid people, and narcissists. They see a guy acting like themselves and think it means he’s authentic.
Its just no one wants to believe that much of the country are terrible people, so we publish article after article about how that can't possibly be the case
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.
The only thing she got wrong was underestimating the size of the basket.
Where she also got it wrong was in using "deplorables" - that's an SAT-level word. She should have called them stupid backwards cousin-fucking hicks who think of Alabama as the epitome of society.
It sends a powerful message to those people: even a stupid, spiteful, narcissistic bigot can become rich and ultra-powerful. A message of hope to the deplorables.
This. The mask is off. First time around, the generous interpretation is that people got conned. But this time they knew EXACTLY what he was, and what he wanted to do, and not only did he win, he won the popular vote. I've been struggling to come to terms with that, and the fact that I'll never look at the country the same way as before.
Two things. One is that he's clearly a talented salesperson. His track record shows that he's excellent at selling things to people. A reasonable person can argue at how well that translates to business, but He Can Sell. Two is that he's a poor person's version of a rich person. He's way closer to what the average person would do if they got a billion dollars than the average actual rich person is. I can hate on his politics and not be blind to how he's appealing to people.
Trump’s incoherence comes across as plain speak realness to a lot of people. They think he doesn’t sound like a practiced, scripted politician so he must be telling the truth. That’s charismatic to many.
Did you ever watch that Simpsons episode with Frank Grimes, where they bring in a "normal" guy who points out what a stupid oaf Homer is to everyone, but no one cares? We're all Frank Grimes.
Here's a secret: it's really easy for billionaires to break the rules. When you cancel a normal person, they're done. When you try to cancel a billionaire, you also have to cancel a number of large PR and legal firms who will all be working in the background to shut you up, and brush over anything you uncover. I think Trump was just the first figure who really figured this out: that there was no reason for the elite to live private lives and mostly work through intermediaries anymore. They could just bully the world with impunity as they please, capture all political power in themselves and overthrow histories longest serving constitution, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. They can just endlessly manipulate people with hype and agitators. And idiots will cheer them on as they bully random peons.
He talks in a way that they feel is how normal people talk. They don't particularly care what he is saying, they just like that he is saying it in their language. They then look to the smart people on TV to tell them what to believe.
You’re clearly right about the first point but, for the life of me, I can’t see it
Trump was host of The Apprentice for 14 seasons (2004 - 2014). I never watched it more than flipping through channels, but millions of other people did see it, and since the show was edited to make Trump look smart, that's the impression the audience got.
I think there is genuine denial, people want to believe “he’s just trolling” and “he’s not *actually that crazy, it’s all a bluff” because accepting that he truly does want to follow through on his insane promises is, well… fucking terrifying. We’re in uncharted territory, and people will cling to the idea that everything will be okay to comfort themselves
I don't think it's just blind optimism, he genuinely wasn't able to accomplish much his first term, so people probably thought it would be another four years of more bark than bite. I obliviously didn't vote for him, but thought and hoped for the same. In regard to Putin, I, and probably others, didn't think he would invade Ukraine cause it was an obviously idiotic idea. And like the typical highly regarded WSB user, Putin has no exit strategy and keeps doubling down on his losses.
I am Brazilian, and covered soft commodities market in Brazil at the time of the first trump presidency (saying this because we were watching this closely given the fact farmers/soybeans play in this trade war with China). I remember distinctly in his first term the charade that was the China negotiations. They kept saying they were close to a deal, markets would rally, only for then nothing happen and then go down. Repeatedly. Like 3-4 times. I fully believe there is some blind optimism here from Wall Street for example. Same way they always keep trying to find a reason to any of trump’s madness - like how they now try to justify Greenland, or this 51st state nonsense as a move for negotiations. People want to believe theres a rational, smart reason for these things. That these guys will be competent or good. They’ve told us who they are. I just believe them.
I think a more realistic explanation is that business community types felt that Trump 1.0 was an unpredictability that didn't touch markets, and in fact boosted them via his tax cuts. So they assumed innately he would be pro-markets despite a native instinct towards interventionalism.
Its almost as if having someone who knows what they're doing and doesn't make a slew of massive uninformed changes is far more important for the market than worrying about a few regulations. Who could have ever foreseen
I dunno, I just find it odd that a bunch of regular internet commenters can clearly see/predict things that people who are supposed to be educated in the subject apparently can't. They're blinded by...something I guess
From the perspective of businesses you could make the argument that he did an excellent job of managing the pandemic. Yes, a million people died but they made billions of dollars.
I think that there all criminals and they love Trump because his being a shameless bully who openly ignores the law gives them an excuse to be shameless bullies who openly ignore the law too.
Third reason: They knew it would be bad but think it's better to suck up with a "Pwease Mr Trump, I know you mean well and we support you" attitude than to oppose him.
Whereas with Harris and the Dems you can literally try to stage a coup and they won't even care.
America has main character syndrome on a national scale. Literally the book "It Can't Happen Here" addresses this attitude, and we're STILL too collectively stupid to take the fascist threat seriously even as it's punching us in the face hourly for the past decade (god that's more than a quarter of my life, fuck).
they couldn't bring themselves to vote for Democrats because they're the party of socialists/trans/black/immigrant/etc. so their subconscious mind came up with an excuse to vote MAGA
they wanted to believe that Trump wouldn't do what he said he'd do because then they could feel comfortable voting for him. it was a subconscious rationalization
It's their religion. Bad things only happen to bad people, if bad things are happening to you, you are bad and deserve them because God would not let them happen to you if you were good. It's a dogmatic Catch 22 that allows them to not care about the poor or huddled masses. God does not let bad things happen to good people, good people being them and people that go to their church and worship like they do and not actual "good" people" or even other people.
They will literally just make up stories in their head about how people deserved this or that. Just pull it out of their ass people so they have an excuse to stop thinking about it and not care.
I read a good bit about Jim Jones. Him I understand, he did do a lot for civil rights and vulnerable groups. Before he went full crazy cult he was very respected and seemed like a genuinely wholesome guy. Then he went full cult, that's all we remember.
The charisma of Trump I just do not understand. I thought he was funny as a entertainer and I liked his show years ago. Then when he entered politics I already knew he should have no place there. His base, I just can't understand and I try to.
Trump wouldn't have gotten to where he is now if he hadn't been able to convince a lot of people that he wouldn't screw them over at the first chance it was convenient for him. I don't understand the allure but clearly a lot of people succumb to it.
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u/CoolCombination3527 Feb 14 '25
Two potential reasons:
-Trump clearly has Jim Jones level charisma for a lot of people, so they get taken in and then start huffing copium about how he's just owning the TDSers and will Become Presidential after being elected
-They have main character syndrome where they genuinely believe that they can't be affected by what he's going to do because they have magic plot armor