The Trump-Trumpist Divide

Members of Donald Trump’s inner circle understandably wish to interpret the election results as a mandate for the most extreme right-wing policies, which include conducting mass deportations and crushing their political enemies.

But how many Trump supporters think that’s what they voted for?

Many seem not to—persisting in their denial of not only Trump’s negative qualities and the extremism of his advisers, but the idea that he would implement policies they disagreed with. There were the day laborers who seemed to think that mass deportations would happen only to people they—as opposed to someone like the Trump adviser Stephen Miller—deemed criminals. There was the restaurant owner and former asylum seeker who told CNN that  deporting law-abiding workers “wouldn’t be fair,” and that Trump would not “throw [them] away; they don’t kick out, they don’t deport people that are family-oriented.” There are the pro-choice Trump voters who don’t believe that he will impose dramatic federal restrictions on abortion; the voters who support the Affordable Care Act but pulled the lever for the party that intends to repeal it.

This denial suggests that voting for Trump was not an endorsement of those things but a rebuke of an incumbent party for what voters saw as a lackluster economy. The consistent theme here is that Trump advisers have a very clear authoritarian and discriminatory agenda, one that many Trump voters don’t believe exists or, to the extent it does, will not harm them. That is remarkable, delusional, and frightening. But it is not a mandate.

[Read: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

During the last weeks of the campaign, when I was traveling in the South speaking with Trump voters, I encountered a tendency to deny easily verifiable negative facts about Trump. For example, one Trump voter I spoke with asked me why Democrats were “calling Trump Hitler.” The reason was that one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, the retired Marine general John Kelly, had relayed the story about Trump wanting “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and saying that “Hitler did some good things.”

“Look back on the history of Donald Trump, whom they’re trying to call racist,” one Georgia voter named Steve, who declined to give his last name, told me. “If you ask somebody, ‘Well, what has he said that’s actually racist?,’ usually they can’t come up with one thing. They’ll say all kinds of things, and it’s like, ‘No, what?’ Just because the media says he’s racist doesn’t mean he’s racist.”

I found this extraordinary because the list of racist things that Trump has said and done this past year alone is long, including slandering Haitian immigrants and framing his former rival Kamala Harris as a DEI hire pretending to be Black. He made comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” and having “bad genes,” an unsubtle proxy for race. Trump’s very rise to the top of the Republican Party began when he became the main champion of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not really born in America.

This is consistent with Trump voters simply ignoring or disregarding facts about Trump that they don’t like. Democratic pollsters told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that “voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign.” Sargent added, “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.” One North Carolina Trump voter named Charlie, who also did not give me his last name, told me that he was frustrated by gas prices—comparing them with how low they’d been when he took a road trip in the final year of Trump’s first term. That year, energy prices were unexpectedly depressed by the pandemic.

Many Trump voters seemed to simply rationalize negative stories about him as manufactured by an untrustworthy press that was out to get him. This points to the effectiveness of right-wing media not only in presenting a positive image of Trump, but in suppressing negative stories that might otherwise change perceptions of him. And because they helped prevent several worst-case scenarios during Trump’s first term, Democrats may also be the victims of their own success. Many people may be inclined to see warnings of what could come to pass as exaggerations rather than real possibilities that could still occur.

[Read: The Trump believability gap]

Watching Trump “go from someone who’s beloved in the limelight to someone who’s absolutely abhorred by anybody … in the media is completely—I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense to me,” another Georgia Trump voter, who declined to provide his name, said to me. “And generally, the things that don’t make sense are solved by the simplest answers.”

This speaks to an understated dynamic in Trump’s victory: Many people who voted for him believe he will do only the things they think are good (such as improve the economy) and none of the things they think are bad (such as act as a dictator)—or, if he does those bad things, the burden will be borne by other people, not them. This is the problem with a political movement rooted in deception and denial; your own supporters may not like it when you end up doing the things you actually want to do.

All of this may be moot if Trump successfully implements an authoritarian regime that is unaccountable to voters—in many illiberal governments, elections continue but remain uncompetitive by design. If his voters are allowed to, some may change their minds once they realize Trump’s true intentions. Still, the election results suggest that if the economy stays strong, for the majority of the electorate, democracy could be a mere afterthought.