Here's two takes, from commentators I've never heard of, both hostile to Trump.
That Mr. Trump has received nearly 70 million votes is a disgrace. And it says a lot about this country that too many people refuse to face.
This is America. This is not an aberration. This is indeed our country and who the proverbial “we” are. The way this election has played out shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention or if you understand racism and how systemic it really is. Polling can account for a great many factors, but unless they ask about the extent to which racism motivates voters — and find a way to get honest answers on this topic — they will never be able to account for this....
Many will say it was identity politics — which, in their minds means a focus by Democrats on the experiences of marginalized people, which some find distasteful — that kept Mr. Biden from winning by a larger margin. They may be right, but not for the reasons they mean. There is no greater identity politics than that of white people trying to build a firewall around what remains of their empire as this country’s demographics continue to shift.
The United States is not at all united. We live in two countries. In one, people are willing to grapple with racism and bigotry. We acknowledge that women have a right to bodily autonomy, that every American has a right to vote and the right to health care and the right to a fair living wage. We understand that this is a country of abundance and that the only reason economic disparity exists is because of a continued government refusal to tax the wealthy proportionally.
The other United States is committed to defending white supremacy and patriarchy at all costs. Its citizens are the people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories and take Mr. Trump’s misinformation as gospel. They see America as a country of scarcity, where there will never be enough of anything to go around, so it is every man and woman for themselves.
I'll just note that Obama won, twice, and by much larger margins than Trump, and in many states that went for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. America is only two generations removed from apartheid, so they're are lots of racists around, but not enough to explain anything outside the confederacy.
It has been easy, for liberal pundits, to dismiss the entirety of Trump’s backing as a rabble of unreconstructed racists, but that cannot be the entire reality—and shouldn’t be for journalists who seek to understand their enormous country. A vast and significant minority of Americans—nearly 70 million—have voted for Trump. These 70 million people do not all belong to the Proud Boys or the Ku Klux Klan. They are not all silent fascists. Florida and Ohio, which Barack Obama carried in both his elections and are now Trump states, are not merely hotbeds of race-hatred. Trump managed, despite a collapsing economy and an out of control COVID-19 pandemic, to grow his share of the Black and Latino vote.
The numbers cannot be argued with. Black men and women, despite Trump’s bigotry, shifted toward Trump. Latinos did as well. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 79 percent of the vote in Texas’s Starr County, an overwhelmingly Latino area that borders Mexico. In 2020, Trump captured 47 percent of the vote, nearly winning it outright. After barely winning North Carolina’s Robeson County, home to the Lumbee tribe, Trump won 59 percent of the vote in 2020, easily breezing past Biden. (Obama won Robeson by almost the same margin in 2012.)....
Trump endures, I believe, because he does not talk like a politician. There are enough voters, including some Blacks and Latinos, who agree with his rhetoric on immigration. Christians and fiscal conservatives support him because he appoints right-wing judges and opposes abortion. It is important to remember that Republicans, until 2016, had been treated to successive standard bearers they could never wholly embrace. Mitt Romney spoke and acted like the patrician he was. John McCain could not renounce the Iraq War, even when conservatives were clearly souring on its deleterious waste. George W. Bush, the architect of that war, would leave office with an approval rating of under 30 percent. Trump would storm to the presidency mocking and demeaning all of these men—and Republican voters did not care at all....
[A] lot of viewers...see him as an unconventional entertainer, a bullshitter at a dive bar or a construction site, talking smack, getting laughs. It is not an accident that Trump once had a successful career as a lowbrow television personality. He does not speak like a wealthy person. He does not speak like someone who is encultured. He speaks like someone I may have encountered on the handball courts or rock-strewn baseball fields of my childhood, brash and reckless and self-mythologizing. These boys were not vapid and foolish like Trump, but their language was loose and informal, utterly unafraid to offend. Even friends could bond through language we would now regard as divisive, foul, or problematic. Ethnic humor dominated. This was the world I grew up in. It’s one many people of all races know well.
Trump is a child of extreme privilege. Yet he has managed, successfully enough, a faux-populist appeal that is rapidly helping the Republican Party swallow up voters without college degrees....[P]eople who grew up in upper class backgrounds and remain ensconced in such settings still struggle to understand Trump....
To understand Trump’s appeal, as Matt Taibbi has written, is to enter a world like professional wrestling, where humor and violence and outsized narrative all collide. Stand-up comedy is Trump’s venue too. In the late 1980s, when Trump was reaching his first peak of fame, another son of the outer boroughs, Andrew Dice Clay, was rising to prominence, achieving such popularity at one point that he sold out Madison Square Garden for two consecutive nights in 1990. Both Clay and Trump inhabited personas; the difference was that Clay, who would become the macho, savage Diceman, could slip out of it too, leading a commendable enough life away from the stage. Trump, as we’ve learned, is the character—there is no inner life, no intellect buried beneath the orange mask. Watch Clay at his peak, with throngs of fans cheering on his vulgarities, and it is possible to see how a politician could one day command a mass following with such shtick. As Jay Ruttenberg wrote brilliantly this year on both Clay’s career and the enduring appeal of Howard Stern, a longtime Trump interviewer, while Clay could be grotesque, it was understood we were all in on the joke, Clay included. For laughing at him, you were the joke too. Trump, for us, cannot be so funny because he is not a performance artist at Dangerfield’s—he is an American president, invested with the power of absolute destruction.
Trump, for all his absurdity and venality, does not condescend to his followers in a traditional way. They aspire to be him and he believes, fully, he is better than them, and doesn’t hide it. He can shoot people, after all, and keep the cult going. He also treats them like a fan base, tossing merch into the crowd, telling outlandish jokes to keep them occupied. He makes them feel a part of something far larger than themselves. Some of them will believe, falsely, the election was stolen. And some of the 70 million—maybe a large majority—will probably move on. They have lives to live, mouths to feed, jobs to hurry to. Politics cannot consume them. Talk of coups and imminent fascism will recede from them as they tune out from the 2020 spectacle. Politics can only be the sport of choice for so long. Some will choose to engage again and others won’t. Trump will lie, until he dies, that he really won the election, that it was all stolen from him by dirty Democrats. He will say the lie enough to believe it himself. Deranged to much of us, he will inhabit a Lost Cause of his own design. As we move away from this moment, we should study it. Though a fraud and a con man, Trump won tens of millions of votes in two national elections. He found new converts beyond his white working class base. This is America too.
(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer to the second piece.)
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