All the Reasons to Support Trump

Note: Earlier I noted that Trump supporters are driven by fear. I wasn't happy with that analysis. I've done some more thinking on the subject.

There are a number of reasons why a person might support Trump. But they all come down to one of two fundamental failures. Either a failure of morals or a failure of intellect. One could support Trump because one believes his policies will increase prosperity. They won’t in the end. But one could nonetheless believe it. One could support Trump out of fear in the belief that his policies will make America safer. Again, they won’t have that effect. But one could believe it. Underlying these beliefs is the acceptation of the hope that some few people whom one values will prosper, and it makes no difference what happens to the others or how many of them there are, or that some small and well defined group of people will be safer and it doesn’t matter who or how many that causes to suffer as long as my people are among the safer.

Underlying all Trump support is a lack of compassion or a lack of sound thinking or both. Whatever short term economic gains might be experienced by the wealthy in America and elsewhere will be more than offset by the increasing costs of climate change, which he ignores and which becomes more and more expensive to fix every year until it reaches the point where it is unfixable. (A point which we cannot be sure we have not passed by the way. That’s how urgent this problem is.) As his policies invest more and more of the wealth of the world in the hands of fewer and fewer people, those people—who were not made rich by their superabundance of compassion—increasingly will treat the others as the means by which they increase their absurd wealth. Money is power. The influence of wealth on the US Congress has never been more widespread or more nefarious. Trump is doing all he can to act in the interest of this small coterie of his billionaire buddies against the interests of everyone else, against the interests of the planet itself.

Trump will not make you safer. Even putting aside the fact that neither Muslims nor foreigners from Latin America or Africa are making you unsafe to begin with (fearmongering for the people who refuse to think and who refuse all evidence), increasing global nuclear tensions does not make you safer. Alienating allies does not make you or the world safer. Increasing the damaging effects of climate change does not make you safer. Loosening gun laws does not make you safer. Ballooning the national debt does not make you safer. Nothing he does makes you safer. He gives you the illusion of safety by scapegoating foreigners and immigrants so he can protect you from them while he increases daily the real and material dangers in which you are living.

All of this aside from the moral vacuity, the incessant lies, the egomania, the lack of impulse control, the, narcissism, and lack of both intellect and curiosity that would make him unfit for office even if he were pursuing policies that tended toward the good of the nation or the world. The sooner he is forced out of any position of power, the safer we’ll all sleep.