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Trump keeps losing his train of thought. Cognitive experts have theories about why
(www.statnews.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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politics
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I mostly agree but I don't think reducing the argument down to, "Trumpites are really dumb" tells the whole story.
The world has gotten increasingly more complex and opaque, it's hard to know for sure what is really going on out there, even for people who are actually paying attention and trying to figure things out.
On top of that leaders are becoming more adept at playing the kind of games the Russians are really good at where everything is obfuscated and few people come across as open and genuine in their opinions.
We know people like Trump routinely lie. Back when things were simpler that wouldn't be tolerated by the electorate. We would've demanded at least some degree of honesty. These days, lying has been normalized to the point where Trump can spit out falsehood after falsehood for 90 minutes on live TV and get away with it.
For Trump supporters, if everything is fake and everyone lies, they figure they might as well get behind their orange god because the alternatives are just as bad.
That sounds nice and all but I’ve routinely noticed that the “lesser of two evils” crowd always manages to pick the meanest, dumbest, and most comically disasterous evil between the two.
When you break something down like that to give grace it still has to fit that aspect worth giving grace to. In this case sure “everyone lies” but why, in this quite honestly misleading hypothetical, do they choose the one whose baseline, out-in-the-open promises are so fucking awful? Why do they choose the one whose lies aren’t even consistent enough to pretend like they’re able to string two thoughts together? And then they pile onto the people who aren’t even fucking lying or whose lies/miscommunications are so much less significant.
Honest to god, and I know it doesn’t feel good, but I think they may just be fucking stupid as hell. It doesn’t mean I would support any kind of fucked up testing, stripping of rights, or any lack of basic respect for their humanity but my god are they dumb.
—
Sidenote: Maybe I’m more intelligent than I feel comfortable saying but it really seems like so many people are stupid. Like, really stupid. It feels wrong to say that I’m special when I see so many examples of people being far more clever than I am yet I still can’t help but wonder if there are simply hordes of people out there who are basically just head-empty and so easily manipulated they may as well- well that’s a path I don’t want to explore much further but you get the point.
I think that's another side to this - many of these people are just plain mean. They want to see pain inflicted on those they dislike and they want to be a part of the in group meting out the punishment.
Several studies have examined brain scans and tried to detect differences between those on the right and left and there does seem to be evidence that people who identify as right wing have an over-developed response to fear stimuli. While not evidence of stupidity, such a response can make these people take decisions which seem bizarre to those who don't react in that way.
This explains the success of the fear-based messaging that is far more common in right wing media and politics. Someone is always coming to take your guns. Caravans of migrants are coming to rape your daughters and murder your sons.
Anyway, I'm just spitballing. I think there's a whole lot more to this than them simply being stupid.
A lot of people are very stupid. Remember the quote by the late, great George Carlin:
If we talk about Trump in particular I think part of it is identification: they see in his persona somebody they recognise from their mirror. Simple minded, loud, rambunctious. They feel alienated by the classic "coastal elites" - lawyers and dyed-in-the-wool career politicians who use big words. Trump's persona speaks to their core identity (note the use of the word persona - he is of course in actuality a multimillionaire, as far abstracted from them as anyone in Washington).
There is also an aspirational aspect I think - and I'm not only talking about money or fame. He doesn't "play by the rules", he says whatever he wants - whenever he wants. He has no respect for anyone. He flies around in a private jet and lives on a golf course. He grabs celebrity women by the pussy. They wish they could also be like that, it speaks to something deep inside them, a hidden, rotten part of American culture that for once has been let out in the open.