Trump’s Appeal: What Psychology Tells Us

[whitehall]

Which shows your inability to understand what the topic of this thread is about.

Yeah right, you post amateur psycho junk about a president who hasn't been in office for almost two years and ignore a doddering old man who has his finger on the nuclear trigger and you think I don't understand?

 

[Circe]

Not about you playing games in order to feel good about what you believe in. Believe it all you like.

Well, as long as you allow it ------------- that's what matters, right? You allowing.

As long as we're talking about psychology: one of the most interesting phenomena I've seen is people permitting what they can't stop. They try and try to stop someone doing something, but they realize the person will do it anyway, so they quickly jump in and say, "Okay, I'll allow it this time!"

I love it.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Was that mine? Because I totally agree with that: this is where we are in this country. What the Left hates, we love. What they want to talk us out of, we'll support or die trying.

You seem to disregard the fact that there are many Republicans, especially officials, who do not love what the Republicans have been doing for the past 7 years.

There is a long list of officials who left the Trump administration because of his policies or treatment of people if they disagreed with him, and especially after what happened on January 6th, 2021. Way more than it has happened with any other President.

Do not assume that all Republicans are for Donald Trump, or ever have been.

 

[BackAgain]

"Wall o' words" is good.

I can’t take credit. But I think it’s a good description.

 

[BackAgain]

Who cares

You do.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Yeah right, you post amateur psycho junk about a president who hasn't been in office for almost two years and ignore a doddering old man who has his finger on the nuclear trigger and you think I don't understand?

The "doddering old man" has had 37 years in the Senate and eight years as a Vice President.

Trump had ZERO running of any public office experience.

And they are almost the same age.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Well, as long as you allow it ------------- that's what matters, right? You allowing.

As long as we're talking about psychology: one of the most interesting phenomena I've seen is people permitting what they can't stop. They try and try to stop someone doing something, but they realize the person will do it anyway, so they quickly jump in and say, "Okay, I'll allow it this time!"

I love it.

It is not about me allowing it. It is about understanding what the thread is discussing, any thread, and participating in it, and not endlessly making it about them or us.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Wow, that sure was a long, long, long cut-and-paste. Twenty numbered points?? Hey, at least it had cartoons!

Maybe you could just post the cartoons? Everyone likes those.

So, your comprehension doesn't extend beyond cartoons?


Explains the dearth of substance in your posts.

 

[okfine]

Oh, are you the one who is supposed to tell me what to say and think?? I've been looking and looking for that male authority figure!

Are you hearing voices? I see. Hmmm. You do understand but you don't like what you hear. Whatever it was.

 

[Circe]

He is inciting his supporters with lies about not having lost the election fairly, regardless of all of the proof afterwards, with his law suits, that it had been fair.

What is his psychological motivation here? Why does he continue to lie about something will whip his supporters to make threats to anyone, and even harm others?

I have some thoughts on your question, but I think for those who don't believe what Trump says the answer is obvious, so I won't go there.

But I do think the psychological motivation of the supporters is very interesting, and not much different from what happened with the Obama birth certificate controversy. I LOVED that! It was a symbol, it was close to an allegory, really --- People were saying something important with the birth certificate, because I could see from Obama's parents' regrettable and rather disgusting life stories that he had indeed been born in the U.S., if only on an edge of it.

People were saying, Obama doesn't belong. He's not one of us. He's not eligible. His story is inappropriate (which it certainly was!!). Putting all that on the symbol-idea that he didn't have an American birth certificate: wonderful. Not true factually, but wonderfully expressive. Much the same, I would say, is going on now with the election thingy, with the people at least. Trump's own motivation is another matter, IMO.

People are saying, Democrats lie like carpets! Dems CHEATCHEATCHEAT on elections, and everyone knows it! We want this CHANGED!!! We want HONEST elections! We are SICK of these 3 AM Mystery Dumps of votes from the crookedest Dem cities in America! Fix this, damn it! No more Democrat vote harvesting at old people's homes from people long way too senile to even talk, let alone vote! No more dumping all these illicit ballots into "drop boxes" at 4 AM in the morning! We want Voter ID, not Motor Voter enfranchising every illegal that just swam the Rio Grande!

I love watching symbolic speech.

 

[Votto]

What are you doing about it?

What are you doing about it?

I'm not like you. I don't believe I have the answer to all life's problems and demand everyone rally round me to embrace my cure for all those ills with higher taxes and less freedom which only seems to make things worse

But what I will do is at least try and point to the problems, other than blaming Orange man for every ill in human history.

 

[Circe]

So, your comprehension doesn't extend beyond cartoons?


Explains the dearth of substance in your posts.

You have acquired from somewhere --- I assume they are paying you --- long cut-and-paste pre-digested tomes of propaganda. It's on my side, but I have limits to what I can approve of, and this kind of paid posting, I don't like.

 

[Meathead]

[ Knowing how to rally people and voters and supporters to one's side is not the same as eventually governing well and fairly. Governing depends on following the Constitution and the Rule of Law. How much did Trump follow the Constitution and the Rule of Law, how much of either did he attempt to change for his own interests and not those of the country? How much do his supporters know about the Constitution and Rule of Law he so often attempted to change? ]


Behind his unforeseen success in the 2016 election was a masterful use of group psychology principles

• Donald Trump's rallies enacted how Trump and his followers would like the country to be. They were, in essence, identity festivals.
• Trump succeeded by providing a categorical grid—a clear definition of groups and intergroup relations—that allowed many Americans to make sense of their lived experiences.
• Within this framework, he established himself as a prototypical American and a voice for people who otherwise felt voiceless.
• His rivals did not deploy the skills of identity leadership to present an inclusive narrative of “us.” In that context, Trump had a relatively free run.

It is easy and common to dismiss those whose political positions we disagree with as fools or knaves—or, more precisely, as fools led by knaves. Indeed, the inability of even the most experienced pundits to grasp the reality of Donald Trump's political ascendency in the 2016 presidential race parallels an unprecedented assault on the candidate and his supporters, which went so far as to question their very grip on reality. So it was that when a Suffolk University/USA Today poll asked 1,000 people in September 2015 to describe Trump in their own terms, the most popular response was “idiot/jerk/stupid/dumb,” followed by “arrogant” and “crazy/nuts,” and then “buffoon/clown/comical/joke.” Similarly, Trump's followers were dismissed in some media accounts as idiots and bigots. Consider this March 2016 headline from a commentary in Salon: “Hideous, Disgusting Racists: Let's Call Donald Trump and His Supporters Exactly What They Are.”

Such charges remind us of Theodore Abel's fascinating 1938 text Why Hitler Came into Power, but first let us be absolutely explicit: We are not comparing Trump, his supporters or their arguments to the Nazis. Instead our goal is to expose some problems in the ways that commentators analyze and explain behaviors of which we disapprove. In 1934 Abel traveled to Germany and ran an essay competition, offering a prize for autobiographies of Nazi Party members. He received around 600 responses, from which he was able to glean why so many Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Certainly many essays expressed a fair degree of anti-Semitism and some a virulent hatred of Jews. In this sense, party members were indeed racists or, at the very least, did not object to the party's well-known anti-Semitic position. But this is very different from saying that they joined and remained in the party primarily or even partially because they were racists. Abel discovered that many other motives were involved, among them a sense of the decline of Germany, a desire to rediscover past greatness, a fear of social disorder and the longing for a strong leader.

We would argue that the same is true of those who supported Trump. Some, undoubtedly, were white supremacists. All were prepared to live with his racist statements about Muslims, Mexicans and others. But are racism, bigotry and bias the main reasons people supported Trump? Certainly not. We argue instead that we need to analyze and understand the way he appealed to people and why he elicited their support.

Moreover, we need to respect those we study if we want to understand their worldview, their preferences and their decisions.

To understand how Trump appealed to voters, we start by looking at what went on inside a Trump event. For this, we are indebted to a particularly insightful analysis by journalist Gwynn Guilford, who, acting as an ethnographer, participated in Trump rallies across the state of Ohio in March 2016. We then analyze why Trump appealed to his audience, drawing on what we have referred to as the new psychology of leadership. Here we suggest that Trump's skills as a collective sense maker—someone who shaped and responded to the perspective of his audience—were very much the secret of his success.


Adapted from Why Irrational Politics Appeals: Understanding the Allure of Trump, edited by Mari Fitzduff, with permission from ABC-CLIO/Praeger, Copyright © 2017.

Editor’s note: All but the last section of this article was written before Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, making its insights all the more remarkable. It was updated for Scientific American Mind.

Trump's Appeal: What Psychology Tells Us

Behind his unforeseen success in the 2016 election was a masterful use of group psychology principles

www.scientificamerican.com

In you case it's pathology, not psychology. Wrong ology.

 

[Muhammed]

We would argue that the same is true of those who supported Trump. Some, undoubtedly, were white supremacists. All were prepared to live with his racist statements about Muslims, Mexicans and others.

Of course that that is simply a lie. Notice that the low IQ TDS afflicted moron cannot directly quote Trump uttering a single racist statement let alone multiple racist statements.

Compare that to Biden, who is on the record making blatantly racist statements.

Also compare that to Hillary Clinton. She's on the record bragging about having black slaves as her personal servants serving her hand and foot at the Arkansas Governor's Mansion.

 

[BS Filter]

Trump isn't the president. If you want to go into amateur psychology you might consider TDS and why some people hate him so much. Another area for amateur psychology is why in the world democrats support a doddering old fool who can't put a sentence together.

That's an easy one. He'll do what he's told.

 

[Circe]

You seem to disregard the fact that there are many Republicans, especially officials, who do not love what the Republicans have been doing for the past 7 years.

There is a long list of officials who left the Trump administration because of his policies or treatment of people if they disagreed with him, and especially after what happened on January 6th, 2021. Way more than it has happened with any other President.

Do not assume that all Republicans are for Donald Trump, or ever have been.

So what? People disagree. Actually, I'm thinking that the fact that the GOP is dividing into factions is a good sign: it shows we're taking over. Like when the Democrats owned Congress for decades last century and divided into the Blue Dog Democrats, social democrats (commies), and so on.

Everyone Republican knows we aren't unitary on the subject of Trump. The whole POINT of Trump is that he is radical and is draining the Swamp, i.e., the worthless Establishment Republicans like that awful Romney or my stupid governor, hopeless Hogan. Naturally the Establishment badly wants to rule: Ha, they're done. They're figuring that out FAST, too.

 

[Sixties Fan]

I have some thoughts on your question, but I think for those who don't believe what Trump says the answer is obvious, so I won't go there.

But I do think the psychological motivation of the supporters is very interesting, and not much different from what happened with the Obama birth certificate controversy. I LOVED that! It was a symbol, it was close to an allegory, really --- People were saying something important with the birth certificate, because I could see from Obama's parents' regrettable and rather disgusting life stories that he had indeed been born in the U.S., if only on an edge of it.

People were saying, Obama doesn't belong. He's not one of us. He's not eligible. His story is inappropriate (which it certainly was!!). Putting all that on the symbol-idea that he didn't have an American birth certificate: wonderful. Not true factually, but wonderfully expressive. Much the same, I would say, is going on now with the election thingy, with the people at least. Trump's own motivation is another matter, IMO.

People are saying, Democrats lie like carpets! Dems CHEATCHEATCHEAT on elections, and everyone knows it! We want this CHANGED!!! We want HONEST elections! We are SICK of these 3 AM Mystery Dumps of votes from the crookedest Dem cities in America! Fix this, damn it! No more Democrat vote harvesting at old people's homes from people long way too senile to even talk, let alone vote! No more dumping all these illicit ballots into "drop boxes" at 4 AM in the morning! We want Voter ID, not Motor Voter enfranchising every illegal that just swam the Rio Grande!

I love watching symbolic speech.

Symbolic speech, about Obama's certificate or stolen elections is a very dangerous thing to happen in any country, as it only brings the threats and intended violence that only one party, the one listening and accepting all of those allegations, has been seen going into. And it has been happening with a few countries lately.

Symbolism does not help the population. It helps those who are trying to get power and stay in it as long as they can, by not dealing with the issues, but really creating issues where there are none.

You are aware of the symbolism, and do not accept it as face value. The problem lies with all of those who have believed it and have been incited and instigated to do something more than just vote in the next elections.

 

[themirrorthief]

[ Knowing how to rally people and voters and supporters to one's side is not the same as eventually governing well and fairly. Governing depends on following the Constitution and the Rule of Law. How much did Trump follow the Constitution and the Rule of Law, how much of either did he attempt to change for his own interests and not those of the country? How much do his supporters know about the Constitution and Rule of Law he so often attempted to change? ]


Behind his unforeseen success in the 2016 election was a masterful use of group psychology principles

• Donald Trump's rallies enacted how Trump and his followers would like the country to be. They were, in essence, identity festivals.
• Trump succeeded by providing a categorical grid—a clear definition of groups and intergroup relations—that allowed many Americans to make sense of their lived experiences.
• Within this framework, he established himself as a prototypical American and a voice for people who otherwise felt voiceless.
• His rivals did not deploy the skills of identity leadership to present an inclusive narrative of “us.” In that context, Trump had a relatively free run.

It is easy and common to dismiss those whose political positions we disagree with as fools or knaves—or, more precisely, as fools led by knaves. Indeed, the inability of even the most experienced pundits to grasp the reality of Donald Trump's political ascendency in the 2016 presidential race parallels an unprecedented assault on the candidate and his supporters, which went so far as to question their very grip on reality. So it was that when a Suffolk University/USA Today poll asked 1,000 people in September 2015 to describe Trump in their own terms, the most popular response was “idiot/jerk/stupid/dumb,” followed by “arrogant” and “crazy/nuts,” and then “buffoon/clown/comical/joke.” Similarly, Trump's followers were dismissed in some media accounts as idiots and bigots. Consider this March 2016 headline from a commentary in Salon: “Hideous, Disgusting Racists: Let's Call Donald Trump and His Supporters Exactly What They Are.”

Such charges remind us of Theodore Abel's fascinating 1938 text Why Hitler Came into Power, but first let us be absolutely explicit: We are not comparing Trump, his supporters or their arguments to the Nazis. Instead our goal is to expose some problems in the ways that commentators analyze and explain behaviors of which we disapprove. In 1934 Abel traveled to Germany and ran an essay competition, offering a prize for autobiographies of Nazi Party members. He received around 600 responses, from which he was able to glean why so many Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Certainly many essays expressed a fair degree of anti-Semitism and some a virulent hatred of Jews. In this sense, party members were indeed racists or, at the very least, did not object to the party's well-known anti-Semitic position. But this is very different from saying that they joined and remained in the party primarily or even partially because they were racists. Abel discovered that many other motives were involved, among them a sense of the decline of Germany, a desire to rediscover past greatness, a fear of social disorder and the longing for a strong leader.

We would argue that the same is true of those who supported Trump. Some, undoubtedly, were white supremacists. All were prepared to live with his racist statements about Muslims, Mexicans and others. But are racism, bigotry and bias the main reasons people supported Trump? Certainly not. We argue instead that we need to analyze and understand the way he appealed to people and why he elicited their support.

Moreover, we need to respect those we study if we want to understand their worldview, their preferences and their decisions.

To understand how Trump appealed to voters, we start by looking at what went on inside a Trump event. For this, we are indebted to a particularly insightful analysis by journalist Gwynn Guilford, who, acting as an ethnographer, participated in Trump rallies across the state of Ohio in March 2016. We then analyze why Trump appealed to his audience, drawing on what we have referred to as the new psychology of leadership. Here we suggest that Trump's skills as a collective sense maker—someone who shaped and responded to the perspective of his audience—were very much the secret of his success.


Adapted from Why Irrational Politics Appeals: Understanding the Allure of Trump, edited by Mari Fitzduff, with permission from ABC-CLIO/Praeger, Copyright © 2017.

Editor’s note: All but the last section of this article was written before Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, making its insights all the more remarkable. It was updated for Scientific American Mind.

Trump's Appeal: What Psychology Tells Us

Behind his unforeseen success in the 2016 election was a masterful use of group psychology principles

www.scientificamerican.com

all Iknow is that since trump left office i cant afford to eat at mcdonalds anymore it costs twice as much

 

[Sixties Fan]

all Iknow is that since trump left office i cant afford to eat at mcdonalds anymore it costs twice as much

True. But it was caused by massive container issues, truck driver issues, Russia invading Ukraine.

The whole world is suffering an inflation caused by all of the above issues, and Biden is responsible for all of it since he took office, right?

 

[Sixties Fan]

In you case it's pathology, not psychology. Wrong ology.

The writer of the article calls it for what it is. You did not read it and have no intention of reading it, correct?