Trump Supporters: The Greatest Curse of the Human Race

This is part 4 in my series explaining the only three logical reasons I can come up with for people to continue supporting our 45th President, Donald J. Trump.

Check out parts 1, 2, and 3 if you haven't already done so.

Is your 401(K) today worth your child’s head tomorrow?

That’s the question I ended the last post with. For some people, the answer to that question is a resounding, thundering yes. Which very conveniently brings us to the last reason people continue to support Donald Trump…

Once you are aware of his bad behaviors, and why they are so deeply threatening to the continued existence of the republic, the only rational reason to continue supporting Donald Trump is selfishness. There is no other way to explain the act of recognizing a threat to the common good and ignoring it for personal reasons. It’s basically the definition of the word itself: putting your own interests ahead of the interests of everyone else. Especially when the cost to the individual is relatively low compared to the cost to society.

Again, this isn’t to say these people are dominated by selfishness. In fact, there are plenty who would give you the shirt off their back in a personal interaction, but when it comes to politics suddenly they have all the altruism of Smeagol when the ring of power is at stake.

For some of these people it really is as simple as financial self-interest. They really do support Donald Trump only because their personal wealth has increased under his administration and they believe it will continue to do so if he remains in power. Will future generations potentially be left with a deeply compromised mess of governance that requires impossibly deft maneuvering to fix? The answer to that question doesn’t matter to them, so long as they get theirs. Of course, this selfishness is also incredibly short-sighted. They’re the ones who have the most to lose if the system breaks, and Donald Trump continues to expose and test the integrity of the system, pushing it closer to that breaking point. So, they are selfishly putting their interests today ahead of moderate concessions that may protect their interest tomorrow. Which is a fascinating strategy that has obviously, never ever backfired once in the history of time .

There is another group of selfish individuals that are equally at fault, but whose selfishness takes a different form. They support Donald Trump because he is a Republican.

That’s it.

That’s the beginning and end of their rationale for supporting him.

For these people, an election could be between a convicted sex offender running against a self-made trillionaire polymath super-genius with a plan to balance the deficit, improve infrastructure and social services at zero cost while curing cancer, and they would still choose the first guy if the R was next to his name on the ballot. Which, sadly isn’t that far from reality. For many of these people, their very concept of self includes their party affiliation, not their political philosophy – they don’t have one outside of the party platform – but their political party. They display tribalism to a concerning degree, valuing wins and losses above all else, regardless of how victory is achieved. These are probably the same people who talk about their favorite sport team in the first person too "we were too soft on defense last night."

The root of this issue is that these people have never taken the time to learn, evaluate, and contemplate their own political theory. They never honestly consumed a variety of opinions to help formulate their own logically consistent beliefs on the role of government or the qualities that make for a good leader. They haven’t learned enough history to understand the mistakes of the past and they lack the creativity to envision a better future. Their worldview is not determined by facts and evidence, facts and evidence are determined by their worldview. These people can be found in any political party, but that fact does not absolve people supporting Trump of their culpability in this current boondoggle.  

They supported Trump in 2016 and are incapable of admitting they made a mistake because their ego just can’t take the hit. Politics are deeply personal for all the wrong reasons. They do not have a vested interest in protecting our tomorrow, only for protecting themselves. They invested themselves into the Republican party and Donald Trump, supporting him and defending him time and time again. Each time making it that much hard to break away. They have spent too much emotional and intellectual capital to cut loose now. They are living a sunken-cost fallacy and they don’t even know it. They’d rather risk everything falling apart than admit they were wrong. To err is less than human and all that.

They are wrong of course; I’ve already explained why Trump’s behavior is bad and how dangerous it is. I’m yet to encounter an actual counterargument to this point. I’ve seen some whataboutisms, which only serves to remind me that most people don’t sincerely believe “two wrongs don’t make a right” they just say it to children when convenient. I’ve also heard that his policies are good, which they aren’t but it also isn’t the issue at hand. If it were just his policies that were a problem, the Lincoln Project wouldn’t be a thing and over 350 prominent Republicans wouldn’t be publicly endorsing Biden because Trump sucks (I’m paraphrasing here) . The Republican ever-Trumpers couldn’t tell you what would make them stop supporting him because there is no honest answer. If they did come up with something, there would be a dozen caveats attached (primarily about the actions of the other side I suspect). They are operating on faith: the party is their religion and Trump their savior.

But there isn’t any salvation for this selfish behavior. People won’t look back on this moment with fondness but disgust and contempt. Future generations will learn that when given the chance to do the right thing, too many people were guided by selfishness instead. The legacy you leave behind won’t be making America great again, it’ll be to act as a cautionary tale. You’ll just be remembered for supporting Trump the same way we remember relatives just for being a member of the Klan. Your story will begin and end with that one anecdote, “he supported Donald Trump, both times.”