HeelYeah2012
Honored Member
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Let me speak to just one part of this. I definitely think that the indictments have only further polarized Trump in both directions - as in, they’ve made people who hate him even more repulsed by him, while at the same time strengthening the loyalty to him from his supporters.So here's the thing. You and I can't imagine that. In related news, we would never consider voting for Trump.
I mean, I say the same thing quite often. "I can't imagine that doing a photo op at McD is going to improve his standing with voters." So I'm not chiding you. It's how we operate as humans. We take our own intuitions and perspectives; if we are open-minded and empathetic, we try to inform those perspectives with the thought processes of other people to understand how they think and feel, and then we make our decisions. But always, we can only really know our own minds. Everything else is an attempt at reconstruction, or perhaps modeling if you'd like to think along those terms.
The last few years of American politics has taught me that I just don't understand Trump voters at all. I cannot understand what goes on in their minds. The things that should make them doubt their fealty -- you know, things like Trump being indicted and convicted and begging the Supreme Court for immunity to his non-stop firehose of lies -- turn out to strengthen their devotion to that cause. Can you imagine wanting to vote for your guy even more because he was indicted under RICO to steal the election?
So while I still sometimes predict whether a Trump stunt will end up helping Trump, the reality is that liberals are bad prognosticators of MAGA sentiment.
As someone who has a lot of Trump supporters in my circle, this makes sense to me. The main appeal of Trump is that he’s a Washington outsider who the folks in the “swamp” cannot stand, and they’ll do anything to make him go away. So Trump being prosecuted for these crimes (crimes he would never be prosecuted for unless he was running for reelection) is only going to make his supporters double down and support him more. The whole thing reinforces their perception that he’s a political outsider and that the political machine has no bottom when it comes to trying to get rid of him.
Basically, Trump’s whole legal mess encourages both his supporters and his haters to strengthen their conviction in how they feel about him.