Over 76.5-million Americans voted for Donald Trump in the presidential election two weeks ago. It has left the rest of us contemplating how so many Americans could vote for a man who has done countless things, any one of which, even MAGAmericans would say should disqualify any other candidate from the office of the President. I have heard many explanations but no one else has expressed the reason that I think Trump was elected.
I have listened closely to MAGAmericans express the reasons why they support Trump and why they opposed Kamala Harris (and before her, Joe Biden). I have also noted their responses to me and others who have expressed why Trump is disqualified for the White House. I have seen a dynamic that has been consistent in all of these observations. When it comes to MAGAmericans’ perceptions of both candidates, they have been untethered from objective reality.
MAGAmericans have created a persona of Trump in their minds that does not reflect the person that he actually is. It’s a caricature of him that has only positive characteristics MAGAmericans want to see.
For example, they think he is a successful business man when the truth is that six of his businesses—including casinos, the hardest business to fail at—have gone bankrupt and his developer business probably has more debt than it has assets. They say that he “tells it like it is” yet Trump publicly told over 30,000 documented lies during just the four years he previously was President, not to mention the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election, which he maintains to this day.
MAGAmericans have also created a persona of Harris that does not reflect the person that she actually is. It’s a caricature of her that has only characteristics they consider negative. For example, they say that she’s Communist when they obviously don’t even know what communism means.
And the only criticism that they can level against her is that she “cackles.” Granted, there are short video clips of Harris laughing in a strange manner but, if MAGAmericans were to watch extended videos of her, they’d see that most of her laughing is very normal. She laughs no more frequently than the typical person with a positive demeanor does, not to mention that it’s irrelevant to her qualifications to be President anyway.
I have also seen that MAGAmericans’ alternative reality is not limited to the candidates’ personae. It extends to the issues surrounding the campaigns. For example, they think that President Biden has made the United States more reliant on foreign sources of petroleum. The truth is that the United states is a net exporter of oil (i.e. it produces more than it consumes), a level of production that is greater than at any time Trump was President and America is now the largest crude oil producer in the world.
They think that crime is increasing when, in fact, violent crime is declining in America. I even know a Trump supporter who regularly blamed President Biden for the conditions in the United States in 2020. When I reminded him that Trump was President then, he simply denied it, insisting that Biden was President in 2020. He had literally convinced himself that President Biden had mismanaged the year of the pandemic because it fit his MAGA narrative.
These are just a handful of the countless examples of MAGAmericans’ alternative reality that I could cite. When they don’t have a grasp on reality and they think these caricatures are representative of the real candidates, it makes sense for Trump’s supporters to make the choice that they did two weeks ago. They don’t have to be racist or fascist or stupid to have a reason to decide to cast their ballot for Donald Trump.
The Progressive Zone 