So I guess 2016 claimed its biggest victim yet - America

This is one of the issues I have discussing Trump supporters’ reasoning. It all sounds ridiculous to me. Like, seriously. I can’t think of a single thing a Trump voter can tell me that doesn’t just sound stupid or crazy.

I thought Mitt Romney was a terrible candidate and would’ve been a bad President, but there are legitimate excuses a supporter could give me that wouldn’t make me roll my eyes. I may not agree with them, but they’re actual points of discussion that I can engage with. That isn’t true with Trump. Nothing he said in the campaign made any damn sense unless you’re a xenophobe or a 1%er that would directly benefit from his policies, but those are not positions I can logically engage with anyway.

The closest thing to a rational defense of Trump that I have seen is “at least he isn’t Hillary”.

Sure, that’s a defense, but it doesn’t really stand up. It just defines an affirmative choice in terms of what it isn’t, which we are seeing the problems with on the Dem’s side, with the limits of running on an “anyone but Trump” platform. Among the 60 million or so votes for Trump, there’s got to be some principled thought. Maybe it’s nothing more than “time for a change” or “he’ll be better for the economy”, but even that’s better than “not Hillary.”

Well, probably the second thing I have heard the most of is the “drain the swamp” idea. There is a real feeling out there that Washington needs to be somehow “changed” and that an outsider was required to do that.

That doesn’t explain why Trump is the guy who could actually change Washington.

While I agree that ‘at least she isn’t Trump’ wasn’t sexy, I still maintain that it was absolutely goddamn correct given the situation as of November 2016, and should have been persuasive to any voter. (I still consider it an everlasting blot on our electorate, and possibly on democracy itself, that Trump got more than, say, 5% of the vote.) But one of the maddening things about politics is that stating a rational case seems to get you absolutely nowhere. Trump gave 'em the feels, I guess, as the kids say it.

The most charitable reasoning I can fathom is “I just vote R down the line.” Unfortunately, that’s based on ignorance because anyone that paid any attention to what was going on should’ve realized that Trump didn’t actually stand for anything other than Trump.

If you believe abortion is a colossal evil on par with slavery or the Holocaust – and some do – I could see voting for Trump because of the court appointments.

And that’s another thing - it may raise my hackles that Trump is a fake Republican, and point out that obviously Trump is just in it for Trump. But if you’re a party-line Republican do you care? He’s still pushing the Republican agenda and will probably be good for people who support the platform. Assuming he keeps us out of nuclear wars, I guess.

The Congressional Republicans are basically getting everything they want, while Trump flails around with his idiotic executive orders and mounting scandals, so yeah.

I mean what’s worst case for them? President Pence? President Ryan? They’re sitting pretty.

I think it’s a refection of the absolutely enormous FUD industry against Democrats that you just don’t encounter unless you have the “right” social contacts. If it wasn’t Clinton, it’d be Feinstein or Gore or Pelosi or whoever. There’s yet not much on Tom Perez but a scan of Breitbart shows that he’s already labeled a “radical progressive”.

The other thing is the credulity of conservatives in general. For certain reasons i’m not sure about they seem to believe more anecdotal evidence; that “confessional” of some rando guy on youtube that insists he heard first hand someone claim that they overheard Hillary Clinton snicker that she’d “killed that guy” means 1000% more to them than any other claim. It’s really hard to refute this with “evidence”, because what “evidence” do you have Mr. Liberal? Some coastal liberal on the Washington Post? I heard the guy who talked to the guy and saw him first hand, and he seemed like a good guy, the kind of guy that goes to church and was eating those beans and i could drink a beer with.

So it’s a failure of critical thinking skills, therefore a failure of education. A loop which DeVos will help to perpetuate. :)

When you think about how an ignorant electorate is more easily controlled by an oligarchy, well, I don’t like conspiratorial thinking, so I’ll just shut up…

And this is exactly the way Trump makes his arguments. “I’m hearing… people are saying… that birth certificate looks pretty dodgy… I’m just saying!”

That’s the thing. My grandfather said, with no compunction or awareness of the magnitude of the charge he was leveling, that how could I possibly vote for Clinton, she’d killed people. Yet he got mad and claimed that I was being insulting when I said Trump was a liar.

One is a bizzare conspiracy theory, the other objective fact, yet he gets mad that I was bringing down the level of discourse and making personal attacks. JFC, how do you even deal with that?

It’s absolutely that. Why that is when high schools have been tasked to teach critical thinking for dozens of years is the real question.

Honestly, imo, if you want to dig real deep into the mantle-sludge of American education problems, it’s the unwillingness to make large numbers of kids fail. Over and over I have seen in my lifetime an education system that skims the cream from the top but pushes through the rest not from benign indifference but inability to absorb the costs of the alternative.

I think Trump is so utterly careless with everything he says that he doesn’t read to a lot of people as a ‘liar.’ They can put it in the box of ‘oh, he exaggerates; he’s just being colorful.’ Or they can say he’s a ‘bullshitter,’ which is a bit charming, like Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Clinton, on the other hand, is extremely guarded and parses her words very carefully, which makes her seem more like a liar even though it’s objectively verifiable that she utters far fewer untruths.

Also, of course, if I say what I just said, I’m being an elitist, and insulting conservatives. I’m also dodging the issues by being ad hominem. That’s a powerful immune response in this particular memeplex.

But these same people are supporting the GOP healthcare plan, which directly reduces medicaid funding, which is GUARANTEED to directly remove prenatal care of a huge number of women, which is GUARANTEED to result in the deaths of unborn children.

If you care about unborn children, then you should care about guaranteeing prenatal care to every pregnant woman.

There is no amount of evidence to counter this either. I have, repeatedly, offered and provided evidence of exactly this. Yet when I say that Clinton is far more accurate and honest, and Trump is a liar making most of what he says up whole cloth, they refuse to believe it. They accept no evidence of it. They firmly believe Trump is more honest than Clinton was, and refused to consider the inverse.

You might however prioritize the abolition of abortion over all other considerations, on the grounds that it will save untold millions of lives in the future.

Well, that, and it’s the hypocrisy of their own lives. I don’t know a huge number of blue collar Trump voters but those that i do often - not all of them of course - often express the grossest kind of hypocracy w/re to their own situation. In their minds they’re allowed to do and say anything because i’m dependent on me! as i’ve often heard expressed. If they cheat on their spouses, they laugh with a shit eating grin, well, i’m only human! When they cheat on their taxes they laugh with a shit eating grin the damn government is screwing me anyway! When they complain about how hard their lives are because of other people (immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, liberals!) but then turn down well paying jobs it’s because I can’t live that rat race lifestyle! The man will make a slave out of you! Ect. God, have i heard it all.

No doubt they support Trump because in their minds they’d be doing the same damn thing. Hey, hook me up with some of that Russian money lol, they might say with a bit of a shit eating grin. Sure, if it helps my family being President that’s just one of the perks of being President, you know? With ye old grin. Look how much Obama made in speaking tours? Can you blame Trump for getting a piece?