No Harm Spilt

Are Trump supporters stupid? It’s probably not politically correct to ask such a question, but Trump supporters hate political correctness. What they love about Trump, they say, is that he tells it like it is. Since he is obviously a pathological liar who makes things up as he goes along, they can’t possibly mean he’s telling the truth. No, when Trump supporters say he tells it like it is, they mean Trump is giving voice to their own nasty, bigoted inner thoughts. He’s done and said stuff on TV that they’ve been made to feel ashamed of thinking. His openly mocking a funny-looking disabled reporter was just gold. Megan Kelly asked hard questions because she was on the rag. Wow! John McCain, some war hero. He got caught. Only losers get caught. Trump wants to make America great again. His supporters know he really wants to make America white again.

Trump supporters are bitter. They’re net losers in globalization. Well-paying factory Jobs for people who barely made it through high school have disappeared and been replaced by minimum wage jobs in the service industry. The poorly educated used to be able to make a decent living, but not anymore. Trump has tapped into the anger of losers, especially white male losers, who think they’ve been done in by women and minorities. They love it when he denigrates women. When Trump mocks his establishment opponents, who probably did well in school, it makes his high-school dropout supporters feel like winners. The idea of deporting 11 million illegal Mexicans and banning Muslims makes them feel like winners.

And Trump is a businessman, so he can bring all those manufacturing jobs back from China, for example, where he has his own clothing line made. The country should be run like a business, and Trump has been so good at running businesses. He knows just when to file for bankruptcy, and he has done it many times. He has a battery of lawyers to deal with the civil law suits that come up like the one alleging that Trump University was a scam and a fraud. The country really needs a businessman who knows what he’s doing.

Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements are incoherent, which is fine for his supporters who couldn’t follow a coherent discussion of foreign affairs if their lives depended on it. Building walls is good enough for them.

So are Trump supporters stupid? Yes, they are.