Every week for the past few months, news has emerged from across the US that Donald Trump supporters are suffering. In February it was farmers in California’s Central Valley, a demographic who voted heavily for Trump, who are now discovering that their workers – 70% of whom may be in the country illegally – are threatened by Trump’s executive orders on immigration.
In March, we discovered that those who stand to lose most in the way of tax credits under Trump’s new tax plan are, by a heavy percentage, his own low-income voters. A few days ago, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof surveyed Trump supporters in Oklahoma and found that threatened cuts to local services – for the unemployed and the elderly – will effect schemes that many of them rely on.
To the non-Trump supporter, these dispatches have brought on some visceral responses. “Serves you right” and “hahaha” are hard rejoinders to justify in adulthood, but the sense of release can be irresistible. “Why is building a wall more important than educating people?” asked one Trump voter, whose government-funded training scheme had been earmarked for elimination, and to which one could only reply: what took you so long?
What’s interesting about this reaction is that, irrespective of the issues at stake, it suggests Trump haters can, in their way, be as guilty of emotional self-indulgence as Trump supporters. One of the lofty observations that gets made by the better-off about the less well-off is that they frequently act against their own basic interests, in favour of more cathartic and irrational returns, a category into which any version of “serves you right” surely falls. By mocking and belittling the idiocy of Trump supporters, they – we – increase the likelihood of Trump being re-elected.
Because here is the depressing thing: Kristof, canvassing people who are almost certainly going to suffer at the hands of the man they elected (and one of whom, it was impossible not to notice, was called Tarzan), discovered that they would not renounce their support of Trump. Most said they would vote for him a second time.
There is a sunken cost bias at work here, like falling for a conman: it is humiliating and the only way to preserve one’s dignity is to double down on the original mistake – but there is also a sense that any commitment by Trump voters to defend their bad choice will only increase with schadenfreude from the left.
Implicitly complicit
Ivanka Trump was interviewed by Gayle King on CBS News this week, and was widely ridiculed for her remark: “I don’t know what it means to be complicit.” She then gave an outline of what she thinks it might mean: “I hope time will prove that I have done a good job and much more importantly, that my father’s administration is the success that I know it will be.”
This added to the definition of “complicit” she gave, some months ago, when first asked about complicity with her father’s regime: “If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit.”
This is, obviously, not what is meant by complicit, which the people at Merriam-Webster helpfully cleared up by tweeting the actual definition: “Helping to commit a crime or do wrong in some way.”
What struck me about Ivanka’s words was that they were less redolent of weasily avoidance than of a genuine blank in her make-up. “Amoral” is an overused term, but with Ivanka, as with her father, one gets a sense of someone who simply can’t conceptualise wrongdoing. There is making money, and there is not making money, and there is nothing in between.
Feline moody
A friend furthers a novel theory: that Trump is suffering from Toxoplasma gondii, the microscopic parasite that breeds in cats but can embed itself in other mammals, including humans, as carriers. The cat parasite, if you have it – and apparently 350,000 people do in Britain alone – can guide behaviour towards paranoid, irrational neuroticism, an enemy agent more powerful than the Russians.