I’d like to begin with some numbers.  The most recent polling shows that only 25% of Americans identify themselves as Republicans.  And during the Iowa Caucus, entrance polling revealed that 33% of Republicans would not vote for Donald Trump if he were to be convicted of one of the crimes for which he has been indicted.  This may not be a reliable assumption, but if we can extrapolate that across the Republican electorate generally, that would mean that at this point only 16.5% of Americans are die-hard Trump supporters who will vote for him no matter what.

That’s a pretty low number.  Of course, if that’s all Americans (and not just voting Americans, or those eligible and registered to vote), that’s still a whole hell of a lot of people.  That’s 49.5 million Americans.  That’s a lot, if one considers what that means.  That same percentage of Iowa Republican Caucus-goers said that they did not believe that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 General Election.  So, in other words, 49.5 million people believe the conspiracy theory that the election was rigged or stolen.  And yes, let’s just be clear about this.  It is a conspiracy theory.  This is not to say that it is therefore automatically illegitimate or wrong or false.  There are certainly conspiracy theories that have been revealed to be true.  (Let’s call these actual conspiracies.)  But let’s also put this in perspective.  Polling consistently indicates that about 11% of Americans believe the Apollo missions to the moon to have been a hoax – only 5.5% fewer people than those who think the election was stolen.  For all we know, many of these are the same people.  As one hears so often: some people will believe anything.

From the standpoint of those of us who do not support Trump, however, or who even despise him, the bigger and more seemingly puzzling question is this: how can so many people really believe that Trump is not a narcissistic, faux-populist windbag and con artist?  I’m afraid that my answer will disappoint you, but I believe that the correct answer is: they don’t believe this.  Or at least most of them don’t.  This is, I think, the flashpoint around which people’s attitude toward Trump takes shape.  And don’t get me wrong, there do indeed seem to be True Believers – those who genuinely seem to think that Trump cares deeply about, and really believes in, America and its ideals, and really deeply cares about the downtrodden in this country, and wants to defend them and elevate them against the elites who despise them and want to keep them under their bootheels.  I shall have very little to say about these people.  And this is, I think, a very small minority of Trump voters.  Given the numbers cited above, very many Trump voters must be Independents rather than Republicans, and I do not believe that the majority of them are under any illusions about Trump’s character.  The majority of Trump voters, which encompasses about one-third of Republicans and roughly half of Independents, are to one degree or another self-deceived or merely strategic about their support for Trump, or both.  I’ll explain this shortly.

Before I do that, however, let me also point out that only 25% of Americans identify themselves as Democrats.  So all this stuff we keep hearing about how we’re so “deeply divided” and “half the country” is Republican (somehow the reminder always seems to involve how many Republicans there are, not how many Democrats) is just plain false.  This is a holdover from decades long gone by, but public opinion has not yet even begun to catch up to our current reality.  This is important for three reasons.

Firstly, the real numbers do not at all imply the sort of division that so many people claim exists, so all of the solutions proposed for “healing the rift” or “healing the nation”, by pardoning Trump or dismissing the charges against him, or in some other way placating Republicans, is both deeply misguided and fundamentally point-missing.  We do not decide guilt and innocence by taking a poll.  And anyway, how exactly would appeasing between sixteen and twenty-five percent of Americans heal the “deep division” which doesn’t even really exist?  I suppose that since an equal percentage of Americans identify as Republicans as identify as Democrats one could say that there is an even and deep divide there, between the two camps.  But again, appeasing one side will hardly heal the division between them.[1]

Secondly, we are not even remotely divided on most economic and social policy issues.  Regardless of what Republicans will tell you, a majority of Americans support a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion, and support paid family leave, an increase in the minimum wage, universal health care, and student debt relief.  These positions are popular, with between two-thirds and ninety percent of Americans supporting them.  So, ideologically, the country is far more left of center than it is right of center.  We should of course bear firmly in mind the risks involved in tyranny of the majority, but there simply is no reason why we ought to treat conservative economic and social policy positions as deserving of equal representation.  That’s just not the reality of our situation.

And thirdly, we must get used to the idea that Republican and Democrat priorities and pieties no longer dominate the national discourse.  Independents now comprise 49% of Americans.  As I said above, roughly half of Independents are willing to vote for Trump, and so presumably identify as “conservative”, in one or another sense of that word.  But even many conservatives these days are liberal on policy, as I noted in the previous paragraph, and are not “Trump Supporters” in the same sense that 16.5% of Republicans are.  So regardless of whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent, get it out of your head that Trump Supporters outnumber Biden voters by a vast margin, or even match them.  They don’t.

But to return to the issue of the beliefs of Trump voters, as I said above I think that the overwhelming majority of them know perfectly well that Trump is all the things we say he is.  As I also said above, this probably seems disappointing, if for no other reason than that I believe we actually want Trump voters to remain forever mysterious to us.  We actually want to other them.  This is mainly because we find it so incomprehensible that anyone could or would vote for Trump, much less support him.  But I think the explanation of this turns out to be both pretty simple, and to involve some basic differences in how we and they approach politics and issues involving what you might call personal integrity.

My sense of things, having argued with very, very many Trump voters of a wide variety of types, is that they know on some level that he is a liar, a fraud, a cheat, a narcissist, a vulgarian, a criminal, and a corrupt and immoral individual.  They just don’t care.  Oh, don’t get me wrong: they’ll defend him against all of these accusations and more; sometimes well beyond the point of rational plausibility.  More often they simply opt out of the conversation, or change the subject just as it reaches this point.  There are a number of ways of reading this silence, but my view (in light of many conversations I’ve had with Independents who are Trump voters but actually acknowledge his many flaws as a person) is that Republican Trump voters who are not True Believers are aware of, but are indifferent to, or willfully ignorant of, Trump’s character defects and criminal activities, but back him anyway because, well, what’s the alternative?  They’re realists.  There is no way in hell that they would ever vote for a Democrat, and Trump’s what they’ve got, and so they will not only vote for him but will defend him as superior to any Democrat no matter how much they may actually like the Democrat’s policy positions or how much they may be willing to admit that Trump is personally repulsive.

This does say something about Republican voters, however, and many Independents I fear, that differentiates them from Democrat voters.  They really do put Party or candidate loyalty above moral principle, and they are more concerned with power and with victory than with compromise or cooperation or mutual understanding and benefit.  Now I certainly don’t want to say that Democrats are somehow above all that.  We can be just as power-driven and unscrupulous, and often are.  But I think that we at least tend to believe that Party loyalty should not be elevated above moral principle, and that power is not an end-in-itself but merely a means of achieving social justice and real reform.  This is what, in the end, makes Trump voters seem so alien to the rest of us, and it does indeed constitute something approaching a deep divide in our approach to politics and morality generally.  We would at least like to believe that we would not defend a buffoon like Trump merely because he turned out to be our Party’s candidate, even if in the end we choose to vote for him.  For the most part we do not unwaveringly support Joe Biden regardless of what accusations are made against him.  We’re honest about his flaws, and fully recognize his limitations as a more or less Standard-Issue Establishment Politician.  But from a strategic and rhetorical standpoint this makes us weak – both in appearance and in practice – relative to Trump voters.  For one thing it makes us seem noncommittal about our own political principles, since we won’t simply unhesitatingly endorse Our Guy regardless of what he says or does.  And as a consequence it makes us seem vulnerable to criticism – which we willingly admit – which puts us in a perpetually defensive posture.  Of course Trump is also wide open to criticism, and lots of it.  But Republicans simply refuse to admit this, and will grant no quarter.

I shall have some things to say about arguing with Trump voters in due course.  But before I do that, let me just first note some of their most common argumentative strategies, both to illustrate the claims I just made in the previous two paragraphs and to indicate why I think that almost all of them argue in bad faith.

I should begin by saying that all of the tactics of argumentation that I am about to discuss are what are called fallacies – which is to say that they involve faulty, spurious, or suspect and illegitimate argumentation or reasoning.  Sometimes unpacking what makes them illegitimate takes some work, and rarely is it of any benefit to try to patiently explain this to Trump voters.  But it’s important to know just exactly what’s wrong with these tactics, if you don’t want to fall prey to them.

Far and away the most common tactic of Trump voters is what is nowadays called Whataboutism.  This tactic is so named because the way it proceeds is that, for whatever criticism you level against Trump, they will level an equally severe or even more severe criticism against one or another Democrat – usually without any regard for whether it is even accurate – using some locution beginning with the phrase “But what about …”.  Part of the point is simply to provoke you into defending said Democrat, and thus you are automatically in the losing position, because you are on the ropes deflecting punches, not throwing them.  This strategy has a very much older Latin name, and it belongs to a family of fallacies called Ad Hominem, or (not surprisingly) attacking the person.  The idea is that rather than actually criticizing their policies or views, you simply impugn their character or their moral integrity, presumably thus unmasking the piety of their policies as a sham.  Strictly speaking, however, the moral depravity of an advocate of universal health care, let’s say, has nothing whatsoever to do with the morality, justice, wisdom, efficacy, or any other feature of the policy itself – unless you could somehow show that the policy requires such moral depravity in its defenders.  (Generally speaking, that sort of claim is difficult to successfully defend.)  Whataboutism operates by supposedly turning the tables on the accuser.  Its full Latin name is Ad Hominem Tu Quoque, literally “you’re another one,” which is another way of saying “well, if you think we’re so bad, look who’s talking.”

What makes Whataboutism so deeply insidious is expressed succinctly and extremely effectively by the British journalist John Oliver.  Here is how he explains it:

This technique of saying “What about …” is dangerous because it implies that all actions, regardless of context, share a moral equivalency, and since nobody is perfect all criticism is hypocritical, and everybody should do whatever they want.   But a defense attorney could not stand up in court and say, “Maybe my client did murder those people, but I ask you this: what about Jeffrey Dahmer?  What about Al Capone?  I rest my case.”  The problem with Whataboutism is that it doesn’t actually solve a problem or win an argument; the point is just to muddy the waters, which can make the other side mad.

To the extent that Whataboutism is meant to serve as a defense of Trump – or anyone – it does so only by suggesting that everyone is equally guilty and therefore that no one can be justly blamed or held accountable for their actions, whatever they are.  But quite obviously that’s completely ridiculous.  If Biden did indeed rape Tara Reade and get away with it, as has been alleged, this hardly means that Trump should not be held accountable for raping E. Jean Carroll if indeed he did.  I’d say that it should be pretty clear that actual justice would involve both rapists getting what they deserve.[2]

This brings me to an even larger issue, or set of issues, however, which I should probably address before moving on with further discussion of the argumentation tactics of Trump voters.  These are the issues of media reliability, media bias, and the reliability of our established fact-finding-and-reporting institutions generally, including scientific ones.  This is the other thing that differentiates many Trump voters, and all Trump supporters, from the rest of us: namely, their deep and nearly total distrust of these organizations and institutions.

It’s difficult, but I think not impossible, to say how it was that so many Americans came to be so deeply distrustful of the bodies that represent factual authority and integrity in our society.  Three things happened.  Firstly, in the 1970s, what is essentially corporate bribery of politicians in the form of large-dollar “donations” was legalized.  That, in combination with later Reaganite conservative distrust of “Big Government” – which was essentially a newly crystallized expression of the midcentury conservative animus against the “nanny state” – led to large numbers of people on both sides of the political spectrum losing faith in the integrity and sincerity of Washington.  Secondly, the national media – what are now collectively referred to as the Mainstream Media, or Corporate Media – have continued even to this day to talk and act as though this legalization of bribery never happened, and that there is still room in American national politics for moral crusades along the lines of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  This led to a deep distrust in both the media themselves and the sources on which they rely.  Thirdly, and most fatefully, the Internet was born, and with it a proliferation of real-time journalistic and pseudo-journalistic sources and streams theretofore unavailable to the average American, followed by a sharp splintering of American media consumers into insular information communities – what are now called “media echo chambers” or “filter bubbles”.

Then along comes this figure, a disruptor of the background noise of the “official culture” of news and political maneuvering, who says exactly what a lot of conservative subgroups had been thinking about the media and about Washington, and not only does it seem extremely refreshing and authentic and just real, but it also seems exhilarating and liberating and downright vindicating to finally have someone at the national level who really represents their interests and values and gives a big middle finger to the Establishment, the Liberal Elites, the smug media and the holier-than-thou Democrats and their insipid politically correct followers and brown-nosers, and who just says whatever the fuck he wants.  Clearly the media and the establishment fear this person, because otherwise they wouldn’t try so hard to destroy him if they didn’t.  Of course that ignores the millions of dollars of free press coverage handed to Trump in 2016, when his performative populism was new and fresh.  One could argue that this was before he gained ground politically and became an actual threat to the establishment.  But something that Trump supporters – and even Trump voters – don’t seem to get is that he’s really not much of a threat to the establishment at all, except to the extent that he refuses to be bound by either social convention or the rule of law.  This is because, despite his pledge to “Drain the Swamp” and fight corruption, he took no steps at all while President to combat the corruption of Washington by corporate donors.

Trump supporters and voters make all manner of excuses for this.  One Trump voter told me that Trump was unable to drain the swamp because both Democrats and Republicans benefit from the corruption, so there would be no way to get any sort of anti-corruption legislation through Congress.  Of course, if this analysis is correct, then Trump could never even possibly have made good on this campaign promise.  But then this is to accept defeat before you’ve even started.  What, then, was the point of electing Trump?  As I said above, I think that a large part of the point was simply to throw a wrench into the machinery of the status quo, and that’s it.  And they’ll sooner die than vote for a Democrat.  And only if they have an especially refined conscience would they vote for a third-party candidate on principle and take the risk of siphoning votes from the Republican ticket.  This is fundamentally nihilistic politics.  As another Trump supporter told me, Trump is a way of giving the finger to people like me, and that’s why they voted for him.  That’s not much of a platform.  I’ve also been told repeatedly that the movement existed long before Trump came on the scene, but of course that’s just false.  The ethos was there, but it was not a movement until Trump gave it its shape and its mantra: Make America Great Again.

The point of all of this, however, is that conservatives were well primed for a message like Trump’s; and given their distrust for any other source of information and their implicit trust in him, they take his word above almost all other sources.  They are aided and abetted in this practice by the highly unfortunate response of the corporate media, which consists largely of disparaging Trump as vociferously as possible, which simply further hardens their resolve and seems to confirm the foregone conclusion that the System (or the Machine, or the Establishment, or the Deep State, take your pick) is out to get Trump.  (Of course FOX News is also corporate, but since it mostly tends to be pro-Trump, his supporters and voters tolerate FOX’s membership – or former membership – in the club of media elites.  And anyway, the FOX News division has always been the bastard child of mainstream media, doing everything it can to embarrass its parents and stick its fingers in their eyes.)  The result of this is that even Trump voters, to say nothing of his supporters, fundamentally distrust and disregard most all of what the national corporate media have to say about Trump, and dismiss it as distorted, dishonest, or downright fabricated.

Of course this follows Trump’s own depressing habit of referring to all corporate media as “Fake News,” but for the most part his supporters and voters simply use the phrase “mainstream media,” or the acronym MSM, to identify any outlets they regard as automatically suspect.[3]  This brings me to the second tactic most often used by Trump supporters, which is one or another variety of Equivocation or Ambiguity and Vagueness.  They will most often claim that Trump was misrepresented, or most especially, that his words were “taken out of context.”  I can’t begin to tell you how often I’ve heard this.  What’s sneaky about it is that the relevant context is often neither specified nor explicated, which leaves it open to Trump’s defenders to interpret his words in any way that best suits the purpose of excusing them as wholly innocent.  One Trump voter told me that I had taken Trump “out of context” when I claimed that he had said openly during the 2016 Republican primary debates that he himself buys favors from politicians, which would sure appear to be a case of just the sort of corruption that they (and we) claim to despise.  Here, however, is what Trump actually said:

When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.  You’d better believe it.  If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.

I would admit that this could potentially be viewed as ambiguous.  Is Trump literally saying that he bought favors from Republicans, including the ones on stage with him, or merely that this is how the game is played?  Well, he followed this up with:

I was a businessman.  I give to everybody.  When they call, I give. And you know what?  When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.

Now that sounds just a whole hell of a lot less ambiguous, though I suppose that one could still say that “there for me” doesn’t explicitly mean political favors or legislative favors.  But then Trump is presumably not a complete idiot.  Mafiosi know better than to come right out and say that they buy political favors.  Instead they say things like “I know you’ll do the right thing.”  I don’t honestly think that anyone can seriously deny that Trump talks like this all the time.  And this is reportedly almost verbatim what he said to Mike Pence in his effort to get Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College results on January 6, 2021.

Similarly, of course Trump did not literally directly and explicitly incite the riot that took place that day by telling his supporters, “Here’s what I want you to do: I want you to go down to the Capitol, break into the building and disarm and disable any Capitol Police officers as necessary, and then locate and threaten the members of the Senate until they agree not to certify the Electoral College votes.”  He did, however, say that they should “Fight like hell,” and that if they didn’t, they wouldn’t “have a country anymore.”  Those are some pretty high stakes.  And given that Trump did indeed know that many of them came armed, and that he had himself called for them to be there, there really couldn’t be any mistaking their intent.  Trump supporters and voters always focus on the fact that Trump told the crowd to protest peacefully, but this is Selective Attention.  Moreover, this is the part of Trump’s speech in which he is deliberately constructing plausible deniability.  His supporters and voters simply refuse even to so much as entertain the suggestion that he could have meant anything like what actually transpired.  But then many of them also deny that what took place at the Capitol involved any serious violence, or they claim that if it did, the violence was justified.  This demonstrates two of their other tactics, or dialectical responses: Invincible Ignorance; and Having Your Cake.[4]

One Trump supporter insisted to me, as I have heard endlessly and fervently from Trump supporters especially, that all of the court cases Trump’s legal team lost, in his attempt to challenge the 2020 General Election results, were lost merely for lack of standing, and not at all for lack of evidence.  This is simply patently and demonstrably false, and does not depend in any way on media distortion or misrepresentation.  One can consult the court documents directly.  And the fact is that the vast majority of those cases were indeed and in truth lost for a complete and total lack of any discernable evidence.  When I provided this Trump supporter with a summary of the judicial decisions handed down in each case, he simply denied it.  This is Invincible Ignorance.

And this brings me to my remarks concerning arguing with Trump supporters and voters.  If I were to offer one piece of advice about how to go about doing this, it would be this: just don’t do it.[5]  It’s not worth it, unless you simply enjoy the sport.  There is nothing to be gained from the effort, and much to be lost, since every “argument” with a Trump supporter or voter – which I all but guarantee will end in frustration and failure, if your hope is to convince them of something or to get them thinking – takes time that you could instead spend on trying to get through to an undecided Independent.  I argued with Trump supporters so that you don’t have to.  Instead I recommend that you keep your eye out for that one voice of uncertainty, that one fence-sitter who doesn’t particularly want to vote for Trump but thinks they might, but just needs a push in the opposite direction.  This is someone you can reach, and this sort of effort is necessary and highly worthwhile.  These folks usually are not familiar with all the facts, but unlike Trump supporters and voters, they are open to considering statements that don’t come directly from Trump himself, or from his minions.  If we’re going to defeat Trump this November, we need to win as many hearts and minds as possible, because his supporters are immovable and his voters are self-deceived or strategically committed to their position, and unlikely to be dislodged from it.  What separates us involves political and personal commitments which rarely rise to the surface level of an argument, and so cannot be challenged or altered by any facts about Trump or his actions, however obviously heinous and anti-democratic they seem to us to be.  They will defend Trump come what may.  So ignore these people.  As Cenk Uygur always says, Trump supporters are the most politically irrelevant voting bloc in America, because nothing can move them from the ground they now occupy.  Don’t waste your time trying.

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[1] If anything, I suspect that Republicans will regard a pardon as an insult, though minimally fair, since they think Trump is innocent, and Democrats will regard it as a miscarriage of justice.

[2] There is, I suppose, a limit to this sort of reasoning.  If literally “everybody does it” – or almost everybody – as the saying goes, then depending upon the crime it might make more sense to look the other way than to be draconian about enforcement; as, say, in the case of violating the speed limit.  I would say, however, that the same thing would not apply to rape, regardless of its frequency.  There are some things we should not tolerate.

[3] Another thing that I am quite frequently told by Trump supporters and voters is that I “obviously” just believe everything I hear from the MSM.  This is both infuriating and hilarious.  It’s hilarious because apparently none of them realize that the average age of viewers of Mainstream Media is north of 65, meaning that most of the folks they would be likely to argue with on social media are not consumers of MSM at all.  It’s infuriating because it serves as a neat rhetorical device for simply dismissing what you’ve said out of hand.  They’ll call you a sheep, and tell you that unlike you they think for themselves.  My guess is that the fact that we Democrats and liberal Independents tend to make the same arguments leads them to believe that we must all get our information from the same unreliable sources.  It seemingly never occurs to them that we tend to make the same arguments because we’re working with verifiable facts, available to anyone who is not shielded from them by FOX News, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart News, and the rest.  Here are three of Trump’s supporters’ and voters’ other tactics: the Genetic Fallacy; Straw Man; and Ridicule.

[4] Of course Trump supporters and voters use a number of other argumentation tactics that I have not covered here, but the ones I’ve discussed are the ones I’ve found to be the most prevalent.  I will cover some of their other common tactics in a subsequent discussion of their deeply misinformed claims concerning widespread and rampant election fraud.

[5] If the Trump supporter or voter in question is a friend or relative, then arguing with them, or at least talking with them, might be worth the effort.  Since you presumably share experiences you may stand a chance of appealing to those among their moral convictions that could be brought into the service of revising or re-weighting their other commitments.  But if the Trump supporter or voter in question is a stranger, don’t bother.