Trump’s Appeal: What Psychology Tells Us

[Sixties Fan]

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.

Down with the old establishment, up with the new one.

Then....

Down with the new establishment and up with the newer one.


I would like it to be about issues people actually have and not alleged, invented and perpetuated lies which have nothing to do with people's actual needs.


The evangelical need is power.
The Oath keepers need is power.
The Qanon need is power.
The 4 % need is power.
The KKK need is power.
The Nazis need is power.
so on and so forth.

And it is exactly many of those Trump supporters who are inciting threats and attacks on those who do not think like them.


They have issues, VOTE, as it has always been.

 

[Meathead]

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

I have no intention of reading anything you link. Sorry kid, you're a dime-a-dozen. If it makes you feel better, there's a lot of pathology on this site. You are not alone.

 

[Circe]

Down with the old establishment, up with the new one.

Then....

Down with the new establishment and up with the newer one.


I would like it to be about issues people have.

You may have a point there ---- that is pretty much how it works, I would agree.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Pathology is a branch of medical science that involves the study and diagnosis of disease through the examination of surgically removed organs, tissues (biopsy samples), bodily fluids, and in some cases the whole body (autopsy).

What is Pathology? - McGill University​

What are the three types of pathology?


Types of Pathology. There are three main subtypes of pathology: anatomical pathology, clinical pathology, and molecular pathology.Apr 28, 2017

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ Lindsay Graham, against Trump before 2016, for Trump post election, against Trump post 1/6/22, for Trump afterwards ]

The clip showcased an earnest speech from Graham recorded late the night of Jan. 6, 2021 on the Senate floor.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” the senator said in response to the riots. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president, but today, first thing you’ll see. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

Graham clarified to Bash that his disapproval was surrounding Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, a claim that the Republican senator does not believe and suggested that Trump leave that notion in the past if he wants to run in 2024.

“If he runs for president, talking about 2020 is not what people want to hear. He likes hearing it, but people want to hear about, how can you secure a broken border…?” he said.

Bash grilled Graham on if his message was, “Donald Trump, please stop saying the 2020 election was stolen.”

(full article online)

Dana Bash Confronts Lindsey Graham on Supporting Trump

CNN's Dana Bash confronted Lindsey Graham Sunday about supporting Trump's reelection after the senator said "count me out" on Jan. 6.

www.thewrap.com

 

[ColonelAngus]

[ 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

What?

 

[Meathead]

Pathology is a branch of medical science that involves the study and diagnosis of disease through the examination of surgically removed organs, tissues (biopsy samples), bodily fluids, and in some cases the whole body (autopsy).

What is Pathology? - McGill University​

What are the three types of pathology?
Types of Pathology. There are three main subtypes of pathology: anatomical pathology, clinical pathology, and molecular pathology.Apr 28, 2017

While I admire your looking the word "pathology" up, perhaps just learning what it means without posting about it is sufficient.

 

[Sixties Fan]

While I admire your looking the word "pathology" up, perhaps just learning what it means without posting about it is sufficient.

You meant something else, totally. Shall I post it for you?

Why be embarrassed? It is great to learn always.

The question is, which President has been pathologically lying to his supporters for seven years but his supporters cannot tell at all.

No, you will not read and much less think about what the articles below have to say
-----------

Study suggests Trump's false tweets were mostly intentional lies -- not accidents

Researchers recently used the fact-checked tweets of Donald Trump to develop a linguistic model to detect the former president's lies. Their new findings, which appear in Psychological Science, provide evidence that Trump's use of language differed in predictable ways when his tweets contained...

www.psypost.org

I was right about Trump telling an especially big proportion of self-serving lies. Instead of telling twice as many self-serving lies as kind lies, he told 6.6 times as many. (His overall rate of lying was higher, too, as I discussed in the article.)

As it turned out, though, that was not the most interesting finding. As I read through Trump’s lies in the process of categorizing them, I realized I could not limit myself just to the categories of self-serving and kind lies. I had to add the category of cruel lies — lies that hurt or disparage or embarrass or belittle other people. In the research my colleagues and I did, we found that only 1 or 2 percent of all lies were cruel. That’s why I wasn’t going to bother with them when coding Trump’s lies.


Trump’s ways of lying also differed from the previous people I had studied in another way. His lies often served several purposes simultaneously (for example, sometimes they were both self-serving and cruel). In my previous research, it was easy to sort each lie into just one category. (I mention that because it is interesting, and also because it means that, for Trump, the percentages in each category will add up to more than 100 percent.)


Now let me tell you what I found when I tallied Trump’s cruel lies. Instead of adding up to 1 or 2 percent, as in my previous research, they accounted for 50 percent. When I first saw that number appear on my screen, I gasped. I knew, of course, that Trump likes to mock and denigrate other people (and countries and agencies), but I didn’t realize just how often he was doing that with his lies.

How President Trump's Lies Are Different From Other People's

Trump is a liar, but so are you. Here’s the more interesting way he stands out.

www.psychologytoday.com

 

[PoliticalChic]

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.

It's what educated folks do.....apply the vast amoung of learning that we have assumed.

....you wouldn't understand.

 

[Meathead]

You meant something else, totally. Shall I post it for you?

Why be embarrassed? It is great to learn always.

The question is, which President has been pathologically lying to his supporters for seven years but his supporters cannot tell at all.

No, you will not read and much less think about what the articles below have to say
-----------

Study suggests Trump's false tweets were mostly intentional lies -- not accidents

Researchers recently used the fact-checked tweets of Donald Trump to develop a linguistic model to detect the former president's lies. Their new findings, which appear in Psychological Science, provide evidence that Trump's use of language differed in predictable ways when his tweets contained...

www.psypost.org

I was right about Trump telling an especially big proportion of self-serving lies. Instead of telling twice as many self-serving lies as kind lies, he told 6.6 times as many. (His overall rate of lying was higher, too, as I discussed in the article.)

As it turned out, though, that was not the most interesting finding. As I read through Trump’s lies in the process of categorizing them, I realized I could not limit myself just to the categories of self-serving and kind lies. I had to add the category of cruel lies — lies that hurt or disparage or embarrass or belittle other people. In the research my colleagues and I did, we found that only 1 or 2 percent of all lies were cruel. That’s why I wasn’t going to bother with them when coding Trump’s lies.


Trump’s ways of lying also differed from the previous people I had studied in another way. His lies often served several purposes simultaneously (for example, sometimes they were both self-serving and cruel). In my previous research, it was easy to sort each lie into just one category. (I mention that because it is interesting, and also because it means that, for Trump, the percentages in each category will add up to more than 100 percent.)


Now let me tell you what I found when I tallied Trump’s cruel lies. Instead of adding up to 1 or 2 percent, as in my previous research, they accounted for 50 percent. When I first saw that number appear on my screen, I gasped. I knew, of course, that Trump likes to mock and denigrate other people (and countries and agencies), but I didn’t realize just how often he was doing that with his lies.

How President Trump's Lies Are Different From Other People's

Trump is a liar, but so are you. Here’s the more interesting way he stands out.

www.psychologytoday.com

Again, pathology, not psychology.

 

[BackAgain]

The sixties fan unduly lengthy posts don’t conceal how poorly thought out they are.

Him no like orange man. Orange man bad. Therefore him no like orange man.

There. I said what sixties fan has said. But I was much more concise.

 

[kaz]

[ 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

We do know that being a Biden supporter means all you care about is belonging to a group no matter how brainwashed you have to be to think cutting police increases safety, it made sense to remove the troops before the people they were protecting, sucking up to the radicals in your party makes you a moderate, disarming victims protects them from shooters, spending trillions of dollars on socialist waste decreases inflation and all the other brainwashed shit you believe. The DNC is a cult

 

[Circe]

It's what educated folks do.....apply the vast amoung of learning that we have assumed.

....you wouldn't understand.

What, in that elaborate, endlessly long, pre-digested format?

Ha. I think a lot of us probably recognize what is going on here. I'm just wondering who is paying for it.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Again, pathology, not psychology.

Correct the article's writer, not me.

 

[PoliticalChic]

What, in that elaborate, endlessly long, pre-digested format?

Ha. I think a lot of us probably recognize what is going on here. I'm just wondering who is paying for it.

I'm not responsible for your attention deficit disorder.

There is medication that might help....speak to your doctor to see if it's right for you.

 

[Sixties Fan]

We do know that being a Biden supporter means all you care about is belonging to a group no matter how brainwashed you have to be to think cutting police increases safety, it made sense to remove the troops before the people they were protecting, sucking up to the radicals in your party makes you a moderate and all the other brainwashed shit you believe. The DNC is a cult

I support issues. And the Constitution and the Rule of Law, as I have stated many times.

You were for continuing to keep troops in Afghanistan? Trump was not. He started the process to take them out.

Which party voted to decrease police safety?
-----------
From the Speaker's Press Office:

House Republicans voted against the American Rescue Plan’s billions in funding available to keep police officers on the street – and Fox News is asking tough questions about it.

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace called out House Republicans for voting unanimously to defund the police.

Wallace: You voted against that package, against that $350 billion just like every other Republican in the House and Senate. So, can't you make the argument that it's you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?…I'm asking you, there's $350 billion in this package the President says can be used for policing...The President is saying cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies, and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people...You and every other Republican voted against this $350 billion.

Fox News: House Republicans Voted to Defund the Police

From the Speaker's Press Office: House Republicans voted against the American Rescue Plan’s billions in funding available to keep police officers on the street – and Fox News is asking tough questions about it. This morning on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace called out House Republicans for...

www.speaker.gov

 

[kaz]

[ 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 2016 at the literal ballot box, I asked myself if I could vote for Trump, and decided I couldn't. So I voted for Gary Johnson. Specifically because Trump was such a showman I didn't take him seriously. Then I observed what Democrats ignored, he did a good job. Now Biden blows in job performance, and you don't give a shit. The Democrat party is a cult

 

[kaz]

I support issues

Which is why your thread is such a brain fart. So do we. You are a leftist you like leftists. I'm a libertarian so I support either Republicans, Libertarians or other not Democrat parties because you are a direct threat to our liberty. I don't know if you understand capitalization, most Democrats don't, but libertarian = ideology, Libertarian = the party.

Then you write stupid posts that Trump supporters are just emotional, then you react when anyone says Democrats aren't driven by the issues. It's the stupid shit Democrats constantly do.

The other problem with your argument is your party all agree on every issue and Republicans disagree on every issue. Why for example would someone who is a Democrat for say energy agree with Democrats on every other issue? Why would someone who is a Democrat say for woman power agree with Democrats on every other issue? It makes no sense, you're driven by emotion and party, and you prove it when you agree with Democrats on every issue rather than just some of them

 

[Sixties Fan]

In 2016 at the literal ballot box, I asked myself if I could vote for Trump, and decided I couldn't. So I voted for Gary Johnson. Specifically because Trump was such a showman I didn't take him seriously. Then I observed what Democrats ignored, he did a good job. Now Biden blows in job performance, and you don't give a shit. The Democrat party is a cult

Biden is "blowing it"? Maybe on things you are specifically interested in? Or maybe you do not know what he has achieved?

What are your issues which you think Biden is blowing and not getting right?

 

[kaz]

Biden is "blowing it"? Maybe on things you are specifically interested in? Or maybe you do not know what he has achieved?

What are your issues which you think Biden is blowing and not getting right?

Where did I say that? That's funny, I mocked you saying as a leftist you don't understand capitalization while you were proving you don't know how to use quote marks.

FYI, you use quote marks when I used those words verbatim, not when you think you are paraphrasing.

I always have to turn my brain down when I talk to you idiots, and it's still never enough