For anyone paying attention it would appear that the 45th president of the US is a major danger to both the country and to the world. He appears to have little to no understanding of diplomacy, military action, nuclear war, climate, economics, social issues and at best loose association with reality. It comes as no surprise to see that in polls published over the weekend that democrats, independents and a number of republicans are recoiling in horror. What apparently has surprised the commontariat is that a substantial majority (98 percent in one case) of his supporters are sticking with him.
Considering that the white working class are the people most profoundly impacted by the repeal of the ACA, the war no drugs (especially opiates and meth), will provide the cannon fodder for any wars, will be the losers when farm aid goes away and a host of other challenges many people are puzzled, especially in the media. There will be yet another printed tomorrow (just like today) article where a journalist is sent from their coastal enclave to the hinterland to interview someone in a gun store or feed store (they don’t have them in the big cities so you know it’s for reals) who then declares that they are still 100 percent with Trump.
How can this be possible? Don’t they know they are about to get completely totally and utterly shafted?
In short they do not, they don’t read Dkos, Huffington Post, Raw Story, The Guardian or anything else, even the NY Times is avoided. Rachel may be killing it on MSNBC covering the Russians-Election story but they are not watching. Jake on CNN can be biting and to the point, calling out falsehood and spin, to the Trump supporters he might as well not exist. When your information diet is 100 percent Fox News, perhaps mixed with a little Brietbart or a Facebook group rooted in Macedonian astro-turf then you honestly believe that everything is going swimmingly. The jobs are coming back already, Trump has rolled back regulation and freed up industry (just don’t ask them which ones), the wall is being built, coal is king again, promises are being kept, He Is Risen! (seriously a DT tweet from the most sacrilegious ass on the planet). The new healthcare plan is going to be fantastic and soooo much better than Obama care, whenever we work out exactly what it is.
On Friday evening NPR had an interview with the Mayor of three towns one in Georgia, one in Oklahoma, one in a blue state (don’t recall). But the two red State mayors literally said how much better things were in their towns now that Trump had fixed things, how the Jobs had come back, how many fewer regulations they faced. I screamed at the radio (mad man in the car) but the reporter could not hear me begging her to ask a follow-up:- how many jobs, what kind of jobs, with whom, what regulations, how did they know? Anything. No it was just left there un challenged and unquestioned. That is NPR, Fox does not even pretend they just make stuff up and spin, the others are worse, National Enquirer front page on every supermarket news stand tells of the great things that Donald is accomplishing, it’s good to have friends in low places. That is their news and hence they still ardently support him. They are literally blind to what is happening.
If things actually go south, if things really do fall apart, when their kids have to go fight a war in Korea (next month), or please, please, we actually get to impeachment, there people are going to be so shocked. It will all be George Soros’ fault, the liberal media (to which we never listen), or Obama, or Hillary but it will never be Donald. They simply never hear the critique. It will be horrible shock, assuming of course that Fox news actually tells them the impeachment is happening.
The only solution is to penetrate the bubble, to have an actual fox news person tell them that they are being conned, not one, several. Repeatedly, as often as they have been lied to someone needs to break through the bubble. It is questionable at this point if that is even possible, they are immunized against the truth. I occasionally visit Reddit, there is some interesting stuff and the jokes are funny. There is a little corner of Reddit called r/The_Donald, it is all of his most ardent supporters. Funny thing is that I made one comment a very mild (really mild) question. Within 10 min I had been banned from r/The_Donald, no dissent will be booked (it was a question not even real dissent). One possible point of hope is that they have started banning each other and are fragmenting, the anti-Semites now hate the anti-immigration groups, who hate the isolationists, so with any luck it will all collapse on its self, just as long as they don’t take the rest of us with them.
I do see some hope, if democrats can put behind them the pie fights of 2016 and remain energized, if we can keep winning special elections, the republican house and senate can read the tea leaves of 2018, perhaps they can be a counter weight to 45. In reality until be break out o the siloed information bubble nothing is going to change.