I realized in a reddit argument a while back that one huge difference between Trump supporters and the rest of us is: Trump supporters expect less from Trump. Hold him to a lower standard than they hold themselves or non-supporters to.
In the argument, I had a supporter tell me that “raking the leaves” was advocating wildfire management – including controlled burns. And the person followed it up with remarks along the lines of, “you should have been smart enough to know that’s what he was saying.”
Which was crazy to me because:
- they were measuring my intelligence by my ability to come up with numerous unique rephrasings and potential meanings to Trump’s words
- they were scoring higher than Trump by their own intelligence metric
- Trump could only come up with “raking the leaves” and the commenter came up with “as a country, we should be putting more resources into wildfire management”, a much more coherent and intelligent phrasing
- in expecting me to be able to read multiple meanings into “raking the leaves”, this person was ALSO expecting me to score higher on this measure of intelligence than Trump. And calling me stupid for not outscoring Trump.
Basically told me that if I wasn’t smarter than Trump, I was stupid.
I pointed this out to them and never got a response.
Anyways, different standards. According to Trump supporters:
- if you’re no smarter than Trump, you are an idiot;
- if you’re no kinder than Trump, you are sadistic and malicious;
- if you are no more effective than Trump, you are useless,
- But Trump is the smartest, kindest, most valuable person there is.
There’s been this idea circulating among Christians that Trump is actually chosen by God to help protect his people. This is because there are instances in the Bible of “outsiders” being chosen by God to protect the Jews in the Old Testament. They just see it as another one of those instances. Now, we’re dealing with faith. They can overlook his gaffes, his very un-Christian behaviors, bad perspective on reality, all of the issues. Because they know he’s not one of them. They don’t care. They have faith that he will protect them and deliver the United States to Christian rule despite his seemingly sinful ways.
I know of a Christian who believed Trump is the anti-christ, as foretold by Revelations and made direct comparisons. But he still voted for Trump anyway, because he could never support a Democrat. I live in an area where majority of Christians believe that Jesus actually would in fact forgive them for their actions that are antithetical to the Bible and cherry-picked Bible quotes. He was very homophobic too, so I deliberately dressed more queer to be irritating.
It’s a common tactic on the right. Trump says some nonsense. Then the left makes fun of it for being nonsense. Then the right pretends there is a reasonable explanation besides Trump’s mind deteriorating. They use this made up explanation to attack the left’s intelligence for not getting the made up explanation. When in fact they are in engaging in bad-faith gas lighting to cover for Trump’s incoherence and incompetence.
It would be useful to ask them why they feel the need to make stuff up to cover for Trump’s failings. Since the justification they made up isn’t real, Trump just rambles incoherently, there is nothing to get. It’s summarized by the saying the emperor has no clothes. edit: typo
