I just can’t even with this.

About 24 percent of polled Republicans say the charges in the classified documents investigation make them more likely to support Trump, while 21 percent said the same with regard to the 34-count indictment related to falsified business records in a Manhattan court case.

  • Lemmylefty@vlemmy.net
    40·
    1 year ago
    1. I’m a good person.
    2. Being a good person means I hate bad people.
    3. The people who are against me are bad, because I’m a good person.
    4. Trump hates all the people I hate and is a strong male leader, so I follow him.
    5. The only people who would attack him (read: me) are bad people.
    6. People complain and produce false charges when they are afraid of their enemies and need to take them down.

    Conclusion: I identify more strongly with Trump for being attacked for being right by bad people.

    The sad thing is that, short of taking a mental sledgehammer to some really important internal concepts of self-esteem and value, you can’t stop this train of thought, and you’ll upset them for even suggesting it’s what they think. The closest you can get is putting in their heads the sense that Trump won’t win, in which case they’ll glom onto the next narcissistic, reactionary blowhard.

    If you want some more detailed dissection of this thought process, read “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altmeyer: https://archive.org/details/The_Authoritarians_Bob_Altemeyer_2006.pdf/page/n2/mode/1up

    It’s an easy read, but damn if it wasn’t chilling the first time I read it, back in the Obama years.

    • Baron Von J@lemmy.worldOP
      14·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I understand the sequencing. I just can’t understand not seeing Trump as a bad person. Or the people who say “I don’t like Trump, but I like what he’s doing.”

      • Lemmylefty@vlemmy.net
        19·
        1 year ago

        Many of them are just straight up lying, a little bit to you and a little bit to themselves.

        For others, it’s the sense that they’ve lost the golden age of their fathers made BY and FOR their fathers alone, for which someone must pay.

  • CadeJohnson@slrpnk.net
    14·
    1 year ago

    You would think “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” -DJT Jan 2016 would have pretty much filtered the US population into two camps long ago. The “swing” population that is reflected in every poll since then is a gaggle of . . . I don’t know . . . forgetful? inattentive? I am trying not to be invective, no matter what.

  • BartsBigBugBag@lemmy.tf
    42·
    1 year ago

    Fuck Trump, he’s in no way good for anyone. That said, I can also think that the over-classification in this country is absurd and often used to hide information from the public that would be damaging only to the brand of the US. Fuck, Biden literally today just announced he’s delaying the release of the JFK documents. Yes, the JFK assassinated 50 years ago, that JFK. 50 years later and we still can’t know what the government knows. Why don’t we ever tell them the same shit they tell us, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of”?

    The US has this long history of using classification to hide information that is in the public’s interest to know. They declassify decades later if at all (most of the really disgusting stuff is never declassified, but discovered through whistleblowers) to minimize public outrage and lend an air of plausibility to their present actions. “Oh look at this horrible thing we did 50 years ago, but we’re telling you about it now, so you know it’s in the past and we’d never do that again”. Yet, every time documents are leaked, it’s proven definitively that they didn’t stop, they’re still doing horrible, unforgivable things.

    The intelligence community in the United States is the enemy of the people, not their ally…

    We still Wouldn’t know about the NSA spying if it weren’t for whistleblowers. Nor the Pentagon Papers. We wouldn’t know the FBI assassinated Fred Hampton in collaboration with the Chicago PD if it wasn’t for decades of lawsuits by the family finally getting the state to admit there is evidence linking the two. Our own government has to have to commission things like the Kerry Committee Report to find out facts because even our elected officials are apparently not allowed to know what the intelligence agencies know(in that case, that we were financing far right paramilitaries in South America to overthrow democratically elected governments using domestic cocaine sales as the fundraising avenue to do so).

    How much of our dirty history is classified to this day? What horrible unforgivable acts of evil have been perpetuated in the name of our country in recent years that we know nothing of because we readily accept that a government of the people, for the people, by the people, somehow has the right to lie in the faces of those people for decades?

    Fuck classification. I won’t hear warmonger apologia, but if you have non-warmongering counterpoints, I’d love to hear them.

    Seriously, how can anyone believe anything these people say to them anymore?

    • Hot Saucerman
      3·
      1 year ago

      The only thing I will say in response to this is that the kind of information Trump seemed to be peddling was a lot more serious than things that are simply “embarrassing.” Also, such secrets in the hands of a complete fucking buffoon like Trump definitely puts the nations stability at risk, and not in a way that would be beneficial to the most vulnerable US citizens. Right-wing demagoguery is spreading across the planet, not just the US, and there’s definitely some folks out there who harbor ill-will towards the US and it’s citizens who would be happy to exploit such information.

      Otherwise, I generally agree with the thrust of your arguments. James Clapper lied to congress and fuck-nothing happened to him even though, last I checked, lying to congress is a federal crime. The intelligence community, emphatically, are not on our side.