Why conservatives like Trump

I am no fan of Trump. No amount of good policies can make up his manifest psychological flaws. I’d take a zombie Biden over a robust Trump anyday.

But Trump has won the GOP nomination for President, and has a better than even chance of winning in November. This can be quite baffling to people as to how this is possible.

There is an answer on Quora, which helps explain his appeal well. It says:

I want you to try to imagine something:

Imagine that, for your entire life—or at least a significant chunk of it—the people who run for high office in your country have been, essentially, carbon copies of each other.

You’ve quit watching presidential debates, because there’s no point. You already know what everyone will say. The candidates are just talking heads. Zombies. Robots. They don’t give straight answers to moderators’ questions. They dodge, they prevaricate, they bring every conversation back to themselves and their pet issues. Their statements are a meaningless mishmash of buzzwords carefully calculated to appeal to their base and avoid offending anyone. And at the end of the day, they’re all the same: career politicians who just want your vote and the status quo to continue.

You are desperate for a candidate who’s different. Who says what’s on his mind, consequences and image be damned. Who promises to make real change, clearly means it, and isn’t just saying what he thinks you want to hear. Who is, in other words, not a member of the establishment, that shadowy political class currently running the country and driving it deeper and deeper into debt and chaos. In fact, he’s someone who will fight them and stick it to them, horrify and disgust them. (Them and their useful idiots, the woke progressives, who claim to stand for justice but in fact support tyranny and injustice.)

For such a person, you’d be willing to overlook almost any flaw.

And so it was with Donald Trump. People who only consider the man’s personality and character without really understanding what he represented (and still represents) to the American people are missing the key aspect of his appeal. The 2016 American presidential election wasn’t just Trump vs. Clinton. It was self-made man vs. professional thief. Private businessman vs. corrupt corporatist politician. Dark horse vs. reigning champion. Scrappy underdog vs. galactic overlord. Outsider vs. insider. Anti-establishment vs. establishment. The disenfranchised vs. the enfranchised. The real America vs. the privileged coastal political elite.

Get the idea, now?

The American political arena is chock-full of smarmy, slimy, wishy-washy politicos who speak in sound bites and talk a big game but never deliver. It doesn’t need any more. What it needs is more Archie Bunkers—assertive, unvarnished, politically incorrect types who care less about their positions and more about fixing what’s wrong with the country.

When the hero you’ve waited for your entire life finally comes along, you don’t turn your nose up at his hairdo or his spray-tan or his ego-stroking. You load him into the barrel of a gun and fire him at the enemies of the American people.

Now I might not agree with everything said, but I think it is a good explainer of how many feel. Polls have shown most Americans have felt negative about the direction of their country since the 1970s. Doesn’t matter who was run office. So when an outsider comes along, he strikes a chord with the disillusioned.

This is one reason it is important in NZ to have Governments that do actually achieve things. If the population stays disillusioned for long periods of time, then populists do well.