The last two days have brought us two absolute must-reads on the idiocy of the typical Trump voter—articles that also clarify why they may be unusually difficult to divert away from their current white knight in shining armor. The first is yesterday’s terrific account by Dave Weigel of the Washington Post of a Frank Luntz focus group gone horribly wrong, in which all the efforts to tear down the candidate that usually prove so effective in this case had the horrifying effect of increasing the group’s adherence to Trump. Among other things you’ll learn that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and took his oath of office on a Koran, while Hillary Clinton has, for sure, “committed crimes.”
Oh yeah, and also, Trump would be a shoo-in if he were the GOP nominee against Hillary.
Today we have Olivia Nuzzi’s essential bit of reportage in The Daily Beast into the Trump voter’s mindset, in which she called up 100 of Trump’s donors to see what was on their mind. Not too surprisingly, as a group they detest Muslims (which is one reason why Trump’s call to ban Muslim immigration into the United States hasn’t hurt him yet), but maybe more surprisingly, there’s a strong strain of 9/11 truther-ism in the mix (logically, if you think that Dick Cheney perpetrated 9/11, you would think that this would make you more tolerant of Muslims, but it doesn’t seem to work that way).
Amusingly, they also wanted to know if Nuzzi herself was a Muslim.
The most unusual of the Trump donors was a fellow from Oregon named John Captain, who claimed to have sent money to the billionaire candidate because he wanted Trump to “look into” the death of his girlfriend, as he suspects she was a Project Monarch mind control sex slave who was assassinated by “her family, part of the Illuminati and the New World Order.”
It’s worth quoting this passage in full:
John Captain, of Portland Tub and Tan, home of “Portland’s premier hot tubbing and tanning specialists with exclusive outdoor hot tubs year round,” was glad that I called because he wanted to talk about his girlfriend, who he believes was a monarch [sic] mind control slave who was murdered by her family, part of the Illuminati and the New World Order.
Captain talks a mile a minute in run-on sentences that jump from one topic to another—an effect of his ADHD, he said. He explained, in record time, that he had been on Trump’s website, trying to contact him to ask for help in his fight against the Illuminati, when he decided to send him $1,000. (He donated in the past to Ross Perot.)
He had recordings to prove that his girlfriend was a robot, he said. He’d been sent tapes of her sessions with a therapist who told her to, “follow the yellow brick road,” but said he would let me ask about Trump before he explained all of that.
Captain liked Trump, he said, “because our government’s out of control in terms of spending and unaccountability and I have no belief in the government that’s currently in power.” Being a small business owner, Captain said, has made him wary of “anybody who gets a check from the government: federal, city, county, state, people who collect leaves. Anything they do is wrong.”
Captain thinks, he said, “on my own,” but he said he agreed with Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. “What I would say is anybody that’s a concurrent threat to our country should be stopped.” Why would we let people in, he said, who are “statistically” more likely “to hate us”?
“If, consistently, we’re having an issue with Muslims that hate Americans…” he trailed off.
“A part of me hoped that Donald Trump would take over and maybe he would help look into my case,” Captain said, his pace slowing down. “I don’t know what to do, you know? I’m at a loss because not only is this over my head, the facts surrounding her murder, but America is ruined as a whole.”
I don’t suppose this is exactly typical of Trump’s voters, but it is suggestive…....
via Death & Taxes