Trump recently celebrated the decade anniversary of when he first started running for President, and that means his fans have forgiven him everything over the past decade. The trillion dollar question always seems to be “Why can’t they see him for what he is? How did millions of marks get so took by such an obvious con man?”
The simple truth is that they’ve had a lot of practice being suckers…
1. 45 years of Reaganomics has taught most of these people that up is down and left is right and giving the people who already have everything even more will magically be good for them despite loooooooots of evidence to the contrary. When Trump—a lifelong nepo baby inherited wealth bum who already gave rich people a huge tax cut in 2017 that the majority of America did not benefit from—promises to make everyone rich and bring down price gouging, his horde says “sounds good to me!”
Then they ignore the part where he loudly complains about having to pay overtime to workers, thinks Americans have “too many” non-working holidays, praised Elon Musk for union busting and firing loads of workers, wanted to weaken the dollar in hopes of paying American workers worse wages, and championed tariffs which are known to drive up the price of goods.
2. If you look at a breakdown of the groups that voted for Kamala Harris and Trump, it’s interesting that Harris got an overwhelming majority of black women, black men (despite what you’re seeing in the media about Trump doing “so well” with them by going from 7% to 9%), and Jewish people. Despite the narrative that the Democratic Party is anti-Semitic now, actual Jews know who is more likely to march down the street saying “Jews will not replace us” or create an anti-semitic chatbot that answers “What is 2 plus 2?” with “Bring back Adolf!” These are groups that understand full well what happens when an aspiring tyrant that doesn’t care much for civil right is in charge. These are groups that have had to be savvier due to hard-won skepticism and lack of the protections Trump’s base takes for granted.
But Kamala Harris also got the overwhelming majority of people who identify as “non religious” while Trumpolini cleaned up with Catholics and Evangelicals, especially ones that describe themselves as “very” religious. Religious people are used to being conned, suckered, and never knowing the truth.
3. And to be completely fair, Trump is also a lifelong con artist, who’s had plenty of experience suckering people over the past 50 years. He’s ran a fraudulent university, a fraudulent charity, a multilevel marketing scheme with the Trump Network, casinos that somehow lost investor money, non-fungible tokens, $60 golden Bibles, his own cryptocurrency, etc. You would be hard pressed to find a shady business Trump himself has not tried to get a piece of. So he’s also had lots of practice taking advantage of people; making him a natural fit for the party that has steadily believed in Trickle Down Economics, overturning Roe vs. Wade, previous fads like McCarthyism or The Iraq War, voted for W. Bush twice, thinks climate crisis is a hoax, etc.