The less people know, the more they like Trump

Republican voters find comfort in their intentional ignorance

A lot of Trump supporters are not really voting for Trump. They’re voting for their own fears and prejudices. 

Trump is a channel for their grievances, and when it comes to the specifics of what Trump says and does, even his supporters don’t always buy in.

So what do they do about Trump’s immorality and Nazi-style rhetoric? They ignore it or laugh it off. They don't want the specifics of Trump’s negative behavior to taint their vague but positive feelings about him.

They see no evil and hear no evil.

This exasperates people like me who want every voter to know that Trump promises to be a dictator on “Day 1,” is legitimately facing 88 felony counts, has been found guilty of business fraud, and accuses immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

But many Trump supporters are successfully ignoring his most offensive behavior. A new poll shows that people who don’t follow political news at all favor Trump over Biden, 53% to 27%. The less they know, the more they like Trump. 

It’s a conspiracy of avoidance and denial.

After Trump used fascist rhetoric and called his opponents “vermin,”  Sen. Lindsey Graham said: “I don’t use that kind of language, but it’s a free country.”

Even a Republican candidate running against Trump refused to focus on the remark. “I don’t use the term,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “But what I don’t do is play the media’s game, where I’m asked to referee other people.”

Last weekend after Trump gave a speech in which he called the Biden administration the “Gestapo,” a contender to be Trump’s running mate, Doug Burgum, dismissed the remark as “a short comment deep into the thing that wasn’t really central to what he was talking about.”

Word, words, words. Who cares about words? An Iowa Trump supporter, Holly Rice, 57, certainly doesn’t. 

“I don’t care what he tweets,” she told a reporter. “It’s a little off the wall, but you know? A lot of them do stuff like that. At least we know he’s not a polished politician. He reminds me of my father.” 

When Trump made one of his most outrageous statements, a social media post calling for the “termination” of the Constitution to restore him to power, Republicans had little to say.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) reported that of the 336 Republicans in its “tracker” who are current and former governors and members of Congress,  only 36 had even commented on Trump’s “termination” post in the months after he made it.  

One of those was Sen. Rick Scott. Asked whether Trump’s post was disqualifying for a presidential candidate, Scott said: “I think the voters get to decide those things.” Sen. Josh Hawley chimed in: “I'll leave that to the voters to decide.”

Of course, if the voters don’t know Trump called for terminating the Constitution, they can’t make their decision based on that. And many voters don’t. In the two days after Trump’s post, Fox News devoted a little over a minute to the news. 

Fox has a strong incentive to hide the news from its viewers. This was obvious when Dominion Voting Systems sued the network for falsely accusing it of fraud in the 2020 election. Documents showed that when Fox reported Biden’s victory, it faced a backlash from viewers who wanted the network to spread Trump’s lies. Fox responded by doing just that. Fox ended up paying a $787 million settlement to Dominion, but to Fox, that’s just the cost of doing business. The network is still lying and hiding the truth for Trump.

The sad thing is that Trump supporters want to be lied to. They’ve insulated themselves from the truth. That’s why, after Trump’s “vermin” comment, a poll showed that half of Republicans had heard "not much" or "nothing at all" about it.

In addition to intentional ignorance, support for Trump requires hypocrisy.

During the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, evangelist Franklin Graham demanded Bill Clinton’s resignation, saying that if he’d lie to his wife, “what will prevent him from doing the same to the American people?” But two decades later, Graham declared about Trump’s infidelity: “This thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.”

The same people who dogged Barack Obama because he wore a tan suit and ordered Dijon mustard on his hamburger are telling us that Trump’s words and actions don’t mean anything.

When Trump promises to pardon Jan. 6 attackers who beat up cops, it’s no big deal – even to some cops. The president of the Police Officers Association of Michigan said he wasn’t bothered by Trump’s support for the Capitol attackers because Trump “talks in kind of wide swaths.”

When Trump said Democrats were guilty of treason for not applauding his State of the Union address, a White House spokesman said he was being “tongue-in-cheek.”

Even now, with all we know, Republicans say Trump doesn’t mean what he says. Just last week, former Attorney General Wlliam Barr said he “wouldn’t dispute” reports that Trump talked about executing his enemies. But then Barr added:

“People sometimes took him too literally. He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it.”

Barr is talking about a guy who attempted a coup! Was that just “blowing off steam”?  

You have to wonder whether we’ll start seeing bumper stickers that say: “Ignore what Trump says, but vote for him anyway.” Or “Trump doesn’t mean what he says, so we can trust him.”

There’s something we can do about this: Keep repeating the truth, especially to people we know are fact-starved. Repetition is an important psychological tactic. If people hear things often enough, they tend to believe them. That’s why so many people believe Trump’s Big Lie. And that’s why we’ve got to keep pounding away, telling our own Big Truths.