The audience behind Donald Trump’s podium is of greater anthropological interest than any of the slime that slithers from the Republican candidate’s potty mouth at his election rallies. At Madison Square Garden last weekend, females dominated the background by more than 10 to one; a jarring visual in a campaign cravenly courting angry men. Perhaps the choreographer was attempting to counterbalance the virtual men-only schedule of warm-up speakers – 17 of them, including a wrestler, a shock-jock, an unfunny comedian, a former Fox News host and a businessman who once said he would be “embarrassed” if he earned only $400,000 a year. As these oratorical Chippendales took to the microphone, the women behind the podium raised their Trump placards aloft and cheered. They cheered radio host Sid Rosenberg, who called Hillary Clinton “some sick bastard” and “a son of a bitch”. They cheered Trump’s buddy David Rem, who called Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil”. They cheered Grant Cardone, the one for whom €400,000 is shameful and who claimed on stage that Harris has “pimp handlers”.
When Trump prowled on to the stage two hours late, the cheering shattered the sound barrier for a man who once reposted a picture of Harris and Clinton on his Trump Social with the legend: “Funny how blow jobs impacted both their careers differently.” He has derided his rival for the presidency as “a low IQ individual”, which makes one wonder about his supporters’ IQ. Do they see no contradiction in a man proven to be a sexual offender and against whom more than two dozen women have made allegations of sexual assault or misconduct posing as their great protector against immigrants whom he demonises as “rapists”?
Trump’s supporters are not “garbage”, as the increasingly foolish Joe Biden has charged. Garbage has no brain. Garbage has no conscience. Trump’s supporters are not garbage; they are enablers. By voting for someone who has stoked a deadly insurrection, who is awaiting sentencing for falsifying business records and has, separately, been indicted on charges of conspiracy to disenfranchise millions of Americans, Trump voters are fanning the firelighters of dictatorship. Their role in the US horror show that is unfolding before the eyes of a braced world ought to be addressed. What saves them is the inherent distaste for it in the so-called woke mainstream media that they love to hate. The prevailing credo is that the voter is always right, even when the voter is egregiously misguided.
Trump is an accidental hero. With an intellect so unaccustomed to depth it would drown in a puddle, he operates on a platform of basic instinct. Basically, he despises everyone who doesn’t worship him
In incessant vox pops, Trump voters regurgitate his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him, that Harris was Biden’s “border tsar” (he appointed her to negotiate with bordering countries about improving living conditions in their own homelands) and that she let “more than 13,000 convicted illegal aliens” into the US, a number which the department of homeland security has clarified covers several decades, including the years of Trump’s presidency. This blind acceptance of scurrilous untruths has the potential to propel Trump back into the White House, where the supreme court he appointed has given him carte blanche to indulge his racist, misogynistic and criminal instincts. So intent is the media on not hurting his supporters’ feelings that it keeps trotting out baffling assertions that Harris is a bad public speaker with no policy platform, neither of which withstands scrutiny. Twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists have adjudged Harris’s economic agenda to be “vastly superior” to Trump’s.
Michelle Obama put it best when she said Harris is being held to a different standard. What she did not say and what Harris could never publicly say is that Trump’s supporters are held to no standard at all. When democracy itself is at stake, voters must have some responsibility to inform themselves. Will the failure to expect that be one of the great regrets if and when humankind looks back at a second Trump presidency?
Of course, some people will vote for him with sincere motives. Maybe they truly regard him as the saviour of babies yet to be conceived. Maybe they really believe he is a world peacemaker. Judging by the vox-pops, though, the foremost reason for backing Trump is the cost of groceries. The inherent pact with the devil is that entire cohorts of people may be vilified, abused, jailed and deported in return for more affordable milk and jam. That rationale was illustrated by a 1933 election poster for the Nazi Party which exhorted: “The more power you give Hitler the easier he will win ... You gave these parties 14 years to ruin Germany. Give Hitler four years to rebuild it. You give Hitler power and time by voting Hitler.”
Trump is an accidental hero. With an intellect so unaccustomed to depth it would drown in a puddle, he operates on a platform of basic instinct. Basically, he despises everyone who doesn’t worship him. He casts a wide net by stirring hatred of immigrants, women who are not his type, Muslims, war veterans, Haitians, Mexicans, Democrats, truth-tellers, fact-checkers, transgender men and women, and even America itself, it seemed, when he called it “a garbage can”. The quid pro quo for many of his supporters is the gratification of tuppence ha’penny looking down on tuppence and so they lap up the vitriol and the lies and the man’s shallow obsession with size, be it the numbers at his rallies or the extent of Arnold Palmer’s appendage. He is the locker-room candidate for the age.
His campaign cynically exploits a current appetite for the pornification of women among rage-filled men who view legislative building blocks for gender equality as a threat to their controlling status. It also scares some women who see advantage for themselves in backing a candidate who takes pleasure in objectifying women, classifying them on a scale of 10 to “not my type”. As Clinton told an audience in 2018, most people look at the Statue of Liberty and see a powerful symbol of America’s history as a nation of immigrants but: “Donald looks at the statue and sees a four – maybe a five, if she loses the torch and tablet and changes her hair.”
Respect is a word uncommon to Trump’s meandering diatribes for, were he to allow it to matter, his electability would dissolve. Sneering is his modus operandi. It’s a two-way exchange between him and his audience that requires very little brain engagement and a snoozing conscience. Maybe by Tuesday his supporters might muster some self-respect to use their brains to interrogate the lies they are being told and reject Trump.