“Trump is going to win in a landslide”: Supporting Trump is now openly irrational

Recently, I’ve noticed that, when people post something critical of Trump, Trump supporters don’t even try to argue with the criticism. More and more, I’m seeing Trump supporters say, “Trump is going to win in a landslide.”

In other words, Trump supporters are admitting three things, any one of which makes them look really bad: 1) they don’t care whether their candidate is corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, destructive, as long as he’s winning (that is, if his setting them on fire makes “libruls” too hot, they’re happy); 2) that it’s impossible to defend him through anything within three city blocks of rational argumentation; 3) that they repeat the talking points they’re given without thinking them through at all. As I said a year ago, Trump supporters have given up arguing for him or his policies.

I don’t think the left v. right binary (or continuum) is a useful way to describe our political landscape. It’s used because it’s more profitable for media to present things in simplistic and proto-demagogic ways. And so I think it’s fueling demagoguery to characterize the GOP (let alone Trump supporters) as “conservative.” They aren’t. The GOP hasn’t been conservative since Eisenhower. From the moment of FDR’s success, the GOP has been reactionary—its whole identity has been not-Democratic. There are slogans—small government, low taxes, freedom—but they’re ignored or abandoned at any given moment for an election. Even the two rallying cries (abortion and immigration) are deliberately not actually solved. If the GOP were to solve either of those issues (and they could) those buttons would no longer be hot. So, the GOP has policies that will definitely not solve them.

Granted, every political party will make exceptions on its principles, but as Tim Alberta recently put it, for the GOP, these principles “have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable.” As Alberta says, “If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.” In that same article, Alberta quotes the GOP consultant Brendan Buck as saying that the GOP is now all and only about “owning the libs and pissing off the media.” The response I mentioned above, “He will win in a landslide” is exactly that way of thinking about politics.

In 2016, there were arguments for Trump. He would hire the best people, as a successful businessman he would negotiate effectively, as a Washington outsider he would break the low-level nepotism and corruption of government politics. I’m not saying whether or not those arguments were true—I’m saying that his supporters aren’t even making them any more. That’s interesting. It’s as though even they are acknowledging that supporting him is rationally indefensible. They’re not even trying.

They also aren’t willing to look at anything critical of him, and that’s significant too. They’re like little kids pretending they aren’t afraid of what’s under the bed, and that’s why they take a running jump to get into bed. They aren’t getting near that thing they aren’t afraid of.

This kind of fearful blustery partisanship is hard for a lot of critics of Trump to respond to, since many people who are interested in politics care about policies and arguments—and those are both off the table. Our impulse is to go to the data about him, but there are two problems with that approach. First, their attachment to Trump isn’t vulnerable to data because they won’t look at information that disconfirms their beliefs (they reject it as “biased,” showing they don’t understand what that word means, or how bias works). Second, and related, since they only get information from “trusted” media (that is, sources biased toward Trump), they have a lot of data to support their notion that he’s doing a great job and is not responsible for anything. (The research suggests they’ll only change their mind if they know someone personally who gets sick. )

So, what do you do about someone in your world who says, in response to your post critical of Trump, “He will win in a landslide!”?

I think you don’t argue with them, unless you just want to see exactly how far they’ll go with their nonsense (in other words, if you’re the sort of person who touches paint if there is a “wet paint” sign and pokes fire ant nests, just to see what happens). But I think it can be useful to point out that “He will win in a landslide” isn’t an argument, and that they’re admitting they don’t have an argument. I think it can be helpful to refuse to argue, while making a point that the person isn’t worth arguing with.

Pro-Trump rhetoric has long been all about projection, and it’s worth remembering that his major projection is how “sad” or “pathetic” someone is. I think that’s significant—they’re afraid that they’re sad and pathetic. And whether they are is something I don’t know, but their defenses of him are very sad and very pathetic. And they know it. Sort of.