There is an assumption, probably particularly among those who cover the news and those who read it, that Donald Trump’s legal travails are common knowledge. We talk about things like the potential effects of a Trump conviction on the 2024 presidential election with the assumption that this would be an event that rose to the nation’s consciousness, triggering a response from both his supporters and detractors.
But this is a sort of vanity: Just because it is interesting to us certainly doesn’t mean it is interesting to others. Polling released by CNN on Thursday shows that only a quarter of voters seek out news about the campaign; a third pay little to no attention at all.
As it turns out, even major developments often fly under the average American’s radar. New polling conducted by YouGov shows that only a bit over half of the country on average is aware of the various legal challenges Trump faces. And among those Republicans on whose political support he depends? Consistently, only a minority say they are aware of his lawsuits and charges.
I don’t think y’all inside liberal spaces like lemmy and reddit are honestly aware of how politically ignorant most Americans are.
“How could they NOT know?! Head all up in Fox News and nothing else?!”
Couple of anecdotes, so take them as you will.
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My wife is Filipina, been here 3-years. She didn’t think Trump was such a bad guy. All she knew was what her ex-husband told her.
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We were at the Mexican restaurant the other day and the server saw a pic of Trump on my phone while I read CNN, wanted to engage me in a conversation about who I was voting for and clearly favored Trump. The man barely speaks English.
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A year after Trump came into office my sister (62-yo at the time) only had a vague notion that he wasn’t a nice guy, not really on the up and up, but maybe the hate was just politics? If my sister got a robocall saying Biden ate a puppy, she would run right out and vote Trump.
Yes, these people are ignorant. But they’re not reading like you and I. We’re interested, engaged, or we wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t.
Not even going to get into how the GOP is flooding the media and internet to make all this sound like white noise, “politics”. But these Trump voters are not all rabid lunatics. And don’t dare come in a space like this and say, “They actually have a point on this particular thing…” or “They’re wrong, but they believe this way because…” You will get shouted down and shut out.
If the Democrats don’t fight fire with fire, we’re fucked. No more “high road” bullshit. The GOP’s propaganda machine is winning, and no amount of gotchas or exposal of hypocrisy matters. We can no longer play fair, aspire to logic and reasoning. We have to fight dirty and WIN.
I think what you are describing is not a specifically American problem. In Germany, for example, the AfD, an extreme right-wing, openly fascist party, is unfortunately on the rise as well. This party uses almost exactly the same strategy as the conservatives in America - simplistic, often anecdotal explanations, false accusations, targeted disinformation, refusal to compromise on anything and so on. Unfortunately, this also works frighteningly well in many other countries. And the same problem seems to exist everywhere: People who are either hopelessly misinformed or not informed at all, or even unquestioningly and often downright sectarianly parroting what their leaders claim (plus those who are actually racists and fascists by conviction). I suspect that this is largely due to the fact that social media is the only source of information for many people today. The main problem with that imo is not only that social media logic favors offensive and particularly controversial content, but also that the owners of the largest platforms almost universally support authoritarian to fascist political currents because it is profitable for them. This is another reason why I think the mass demonstrations against fascism, racism and intolerance in Germany are quite important: they show people that there is still widespread rejection of these terrible ideas - and that seems essential to me, because social media easily gives a false impression of the “public opinion”. It certainly seems worth a try to me. That’s why I’m about to set off again to a demonstration against fascism. I recommend you Americans follow whether the IRL protests in Germany and elsewhere prove to be a suitable remedy to the general stupor in political debate. If so, this approach can easily be adopted in the US as well.
It’s all true but at the same time you’re missing very important thing: a lot of people support extreme right-wing parties because those are the only parties that offer solutions to their problems. One of the main issues conservative guys see today is losing privileges they used to enjoy. For example I heard a guy complaining about the fact, that when he was younger he got naked into some girl’s bed and she only screamed a bit and got angry but today he would go to jail. The big difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals see this change as a good thing. AfD and other parties are the only groups that oppose those changes and a lot of white guys are attracted to that. And it’s hard to say they are wrong. For them it’s all about their status, they see stopping those changes as a net benefit for them. Accusations like the one against Kevin Spacey are not making things better. The farther left you push those things the more people will be worried about their status and will start pushing back. AfD is an example of this push back. It’s not all of it but it’s a very important part of this dynamic.
You’re also missing something very important. A lot of the things these people see as “their problems” have been implanted into their heads by shitheads on talk radio, TV, social media, YouTube, etc for the benefit of the wealthy. If you’re too busy worrying about trans people and illegal immigrants, you’re not going to pay much attention to the rich fucks paying you a pittance and hoovering up the planet’s resources for themselves.
I know a guy that got accused by some family member of rape 20 years ago, lost his job and spend years awaiting trial only to be found not guilty but with broken career and a debt. Now go tell this guy and many other guys thinking that “me too” movement went to far that “their problems” were only implanted into their heads. You and me we understand the power dynamics here and can still support “me too” despite it’s flaws but many guys simply see the privileges they lost because of it. I’m assuming you would agree with me that they shouldn’t have had those privileges in the first place but the fact that they are loosing them is real. That’s why they are worried and are pushing back.
Yes, of course, there are many reasons why people vote for these parties. However, I very much doubt whether these parties actually offer any viable solutions or whether their popularity is due to proposals for actual solutions - imo they just make it seem that way. Just one example: the AfD does not pursue a social economic policy; quite the opposite. Nevertheless, they pretend to be on the side of the little guy by engaging in classic fascist agitation against foreigners who are supposedly taking jobs away from Germans and are therefore also supposedly to blame for the dire economic situation of many Germans. This is of course not only factually wrong, but is even aimed at a counterproductive, namely very restrictive immigration policy. It is nothing more than propaganda designed to attract voters in economically precarious circumstances, although this demographic group would be the one to suffer most from the AfD’s economic policy if this party ever forms a government (basically a 1-to-1 copy of the Trumpists’ strategy). Furthermore, the German economy does actually urgently need foreign workers due to demographics - and by no means only highly qualified ones. I have at least some hope that the protests currently taking place across Germany can help people understand what parties like the AfD actually stand for and thus realize that they are being duped. For those conservatives who are determined to hold on to their traditional values, I hope that the protests will make them realize that they are voting for fascists and perhaps remember what happened in 1933 when the fascists took power in Germany. For the more rational thinking folk, the protests bring a little hope because people can reassure themselves in real life that there are actually many others who neither tolerate fascism nor want this hateful political discourse that just plays into the hands of AfD and others - with all their enemy stereotypes, backwards thinking and simplistic explanations. It at least gives me a little hope when I see, as I did today, that 30,000 people took to the streets in my home town of 250,000 inhabitants to demonstrate against fascism and for an open, tolerant democracy. This might not stop the AfD, but I’d say if I can possibly contribute a bit to weaken the popularity of this fascist party, it’s well worth a few hours of my time.
You’re right about everything but what I’m saying is that there’s something hidden a bit deeper behind all this. A lot of people don’t support AfD, VOX of Konfederacja because they believe in their economic and anti-immigration policies. They are drawn to them because of they anti-progressive stances and once ‘converted’ they accept the other ideas. The main thing is that the further you take progressive policies the more people will start disagreeing with them and pushing back. And there’s really no good solution here. We either give more rights to women and minorities and face pushback from the right or limit those policies and face pushback from the left. It’s a kind of ‘two steps forward one step back’ situation where we took steps forward recently and I think we just have to be prepared for the step back.
Yes, that is certainly true. I just don’t have an answer as to how this attitude can be dealt with reasonably in a democracy. Looking at history, I don’t think there is a better system than democracy (you can of course be lucky and get a “good autocrat” of whatever couleur - but that was possible even in the days of monarchy and obviously never really worked). I realize of course that there will always be the backward-looking people. Brexit is a good example, I think (“we need to be the empire ruling the world again” - was isolationism the way to go? Doesn’t seem so to me). After all, this desire for long-gone greatness has little to do with the reality of a globalized world. This attitude becomes even more problematic when you think about the most pressing problems facing humanity. Climate change. There can be no endless growth with limited resources. I think this is a fact that people just have to deal with. Musk won’t be able to solve this problem with a new habitat on Mars and our promises to cut emissions seem to me nothing more than publicity promises. In short, I’ve come to the conclusion that this unworldly, backward-looking thinking is simply unacceptable. Nevertheless, I try to keep the peace by more or less pretending to understand the concerns of those backward-looking people. There’s not much more I can do, I’m afraid. All the less so when these people try to reverse civilizational achievements such as equal rights for women. I really can’t bring myself to have any sympathy for that. So yea, you are of course absolutely right: there is really no solution to this. But im affraid that there still has to be a solution as soon as possible.
I really do love this take, but I have to ask. What does fighting dirty without becoming them look like?
If you could throw out an example that makes this work I’m all for it.
I just cannot stand the idea of obtaining votes through deceit.
You don’t have to lie, you just have to appeal to emotion with your pitch. Bernie was a great example of a populist candidate who knew how to make people feel passionate about things without lying to them. He got a lot of flack for repeating the same lines, but that is all that some Americans can handle—a slogan. He was smart enough to pick ones where most Americans instantly knew what he was about, and it felt good.
Nobody really knows what “build back better” means, and it sort of implies that we’ve been damaged in some way and need repair. MAGA doesn’t really mean shit either, but it implies that we’ve tended to be pretty great, and all we need is to remember those times and recreate them. It is supercharged with Hollywood’s nostalgic eye towards the past, and it doesn’t even require you to know why Medicare is good to want to get on board with it.
So, from that perspective, democrats need marketing. They need meme reacts, iconic looks, and coolness, and they need to stop trying to stifle the candidates they have who exemplify those qualities.
If they can’t figure that shit out, they’re going to keep losing at moments that they sorely need to win.
Bernie, and Trump, and even Obama all had one thing in common: their campaigns were predicated on the notion that the status quo was bullshit and had to change. Obama was a once in a generation political talent, and he got elected on his message, and yeah he ultimately skewed to the center, but he demonstrated that the model could work.
When you get to 2016, your leading contenders are Trump, who is running on a platform of ‘break everything,’ Bernie, a socialist Jew from Vermont who was able to rocket to national significance on the basis of acknowledging populist anger, and Hillary, who squandered eight years of Obama administration goodwill and universal name recognition by basically coming across as a “let’s get back to business as usual” candidate.
Sure, Biden was also “let’s get back to normal” candidate, but that only works in the context of four years of Trumpish turbo insanity.
I’m amazed that Democrats seem to be so afraid to address the anger felt by people who feel abandoned by the rich and powerful in this country. Republicans were never going to deliver, but they have been able to seize power by billing themselves as champions of the common citizen and avatars of middle and lower class justice.
If Democrats can’t wrestle that narrative away from the Republicans and meaningfully address just how powerless and forgotten so many people in this country feel, then they are going to have a very hard time stopping our backwards slide into fascism.
I think part of the problem is that the democrats have been deep in bed with Wallstreet and tech since the 90’s. Populist anger may help them win, but the people they are angry at are the ones who are also paying the bills. It takes extraordinary self sacrifice and discipline to walk the tightrope of politics and keep your hands clean. Obama and Bernie did their best to do that, but both of them had a very difficult road without the traditional money banks.
The Biden administration is quite possibly the worst administration I’ve ever seen when it comes to messaging, and I am in my 50s. Someday in the future someone will write a PhD dissertation on why they are so dysfunctional in this respect, but for now I just don’t get it. They are singularly inept when it comes to publicizing and taking credit for their wins.
Biden can only put on his sunglasses so many times before the meme gets stale.
The problem is that they know people on the left will never be true assholes to them so it allows them to do anything they want.
The current example is the border crisis, Texas acts the way it does because it knows that the federal government will not actually do anything about it. If the situation was reversed though? Democrat State easing the entry of migrants and not letting the federal government manage the border? Republicans wouldn’t care, they would send in the big guns!
I don’t think y’all inside liberal spaces like lemmy and reddit are honestly aware of how politically ignorant most Americans are.
I do. I just don’t excuse it. Some of it is willful. Some is negligent. Some is innocent to some degree. But I won’t excuse it away. The Internet put the world’s info at our fingertips. It’s about time people acted like it.
If you play like them, you either lose, or become them.
I don’t buy into that. There’s a difference in pushing the bully back assertively without necessarily stooping to their level.
Nobody is advocating we attempt to cheat like Republicans, for instance (at least I hope that wasn’t what was meant by fighting dirty). Just stop coddling them and pretending they’re acting in good faith when clearly they are not. I’ve seen more of this assertiveness come out over the years from Democrats and it’s long past due and could be tripled easily.
Republicans lack a soul and democrats lack a spine, that’s my take.
That has been true for so long, sadly.
that line may work in movies
I can’t read all that, gimme a cat gif
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theyNixon and Ailes …
You’re talking about people who believe to their core that a fancy lad born to real estate wealth who revels in his class privilege to a cartoonish degree, to the point of having a reality show where the central conceit was “kiss my ass for half an hour because I’m so rich,” Represents their interests.
They are willfully, belligerently ignorant in order to protect their false beliefs. They have been trained to reject any and all information inconvenient to the positions of their tribe.
Donald Trump could literally rape a typical Republican’s mother in front of them while laughing about it and flipping them off, and their mind would either pretend it isn’t happening, or declare that Biden is doing it. They’ve fully embodied the Orwellian nightmare:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
They are willfully, belligerently ignorant
can’t be repeated enough… ignorant of anything uncomfortable…
It’s odd to think that I want to spend the time listening to their nonsense to stay informed. I’m starting to get concerned about how much “ignorance is bliss” is becoming a mainstream part of life.
That leads to totalitarianism.
So we can confirm they are stupid and uninformed?
43% of Democrats believed he’d been charged with crimes they made up for the poll.
The point of the article is really about the fact that most people are just generally uninformed, especially Republicans about these criminal prosecutions.
The vast majority of Americans completely tune out news and politics, interject at get-togethers with some regurgitated shallow talking-points they overheard coworkers or news headlines say, then suddenly pay half attention like a month before the election.
This
Given all the legal trouble Trump and cohorts has been in, in the past 3+ years… its not a surprise people would think anything they hear is a new or existing charge.
Are they made up? Or are they real crimes that he just hasn’t been charged with?
Shocking
Ask any random GOP what book they last read. There’s Your sign.
For all you Texas GOP’S, Guns and Ammo magazine is not a book.
That means nothing imo, last book I read was years ago and I’m in a field most consider to be for sharper folks. Software dev. The book was the last in the three body problem trilogy.
In a world where the Twilight series exists, I really hate people who use the act of reading books as some intelligence measure
Nah reading books is a great metric
Read a fucking book, dude. And twilight doesn’t count.
Not reading doesn’t mean you’re necessarily stupid, but reading absolutely makes your smarter.
Have you seen the bullshit that Republicans read?
I’d argue reading those toxic masculinity self help books, and all the lives of rich assholes is what makes them act the way that they do.
Nah. My Republican friends are incredibly well read. It’s just Ayn Rand, Ben Shapiro and the Bible. Real books.
Honestly, Republicans are the types who really worship personalities like Elon Musk or other such people. I’m willing to bet that most Republicans read biographies more and try to emulate the lives of the rich and powerful.
It’s not that they’re ignorant. It’s that their culture is backwards. No matter how much they study, it just shoves them deeper into right wing bullshit.
I don’t buy it. He talks about it himself nonstop. I’m pretty sure people just ignore it because they don’t care and they’re voting for him either way
Think of it this way. Plenty of people love Captain America or Superman. They might watch a movie once a year, and never buy the comics, but they have a sincere love of the character and feel excitement when they see a cartoon or meme of their hero.
That’s what it’s like for many Trump supporters. Just knowing he’s out there scaring the Libs is enough for them.
Yes, I know these people personally. They don’t watch the news, and they don’t even know what Trump sounds like. They still believe the lies they bought into decades ago about the Republicans cutting taxes for them and fighting off the trans movement that they think is just brainwashed kids. All they know of Trump is they liked The Apprentice when it was on TV, which rarely featured him in order to make him seem like an important and dominant figure. That’s good enough for them. They have 0 interest in actual events or facts.
I remember my third grade teacher saying that it was every American citizen’s duty to be well informed. Plenty of quotes from the Founding Fathers about the importance of newspapers and public engagement. I guess they missed that day of school.
Reading newspapers is not a great yardstick for information.
Yes it is. I guarantee you that someone who regularly reads a reputable major daily is going to be better-informed than 90 percent of the public. Your attitude is part of the problem too. The vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to news media and don’t have any idea of how to evaluate credibility and accuracy.
I mostly blame the Internet for trashing the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also blame our education system and the profession of journalism itself for not giving people better epistemic toolkits.
“reputable major daily” is a much smaller subset than “newspaper”. Also they have to read more than just the sports page and gossip column.
I’d also bet most educated votes haven’t touched newsprint for years.
The vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to news media and don’t have any idea of how to evaluate credibility and accuracy.
Agreed. I would argue that this extends into the population that reads media.
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If you check r/conservative these won’t even appear in the TL, so I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them aren’t exposed to these news.
You have to understand that conservative media right now barely features anything that Trump actually has said or done. It’s all made up bullshit and mythology about him and how great his is. My own mother consumes this media all the time and has told me that Trump looks healthier and stronger than ever. That’s what these people are being fed.
Maybe she’s seen some of ben garrison’s cartoons, where he draws the orange lardass as an adonis bc he really really wants some of that floppy micropeen all up inside him.
If you’ve ever talked to a republican actually in person, you’d realize they have zero idea what’s going on in the party or even what the party ideals are
I was at the gym the other day talking with a friend I see regularly. She says “I might not vote, I don’t like either of them”, I kept my mouth shut but I couldn’t stop thinking like holy shit lady one is wayyy worse than the other. I’ve seen it before where people aren’t aware the depth of Trump legal issues and general personality problems however i assumed it was because they only watched fox or something, but hearing it from her really threw me in for a loop. I cant believe I’m living in this reality
My sister lives in US ans is like that. She’s not really conservative but the narrative that ‘democrats only worry about trans people’ got to her. You don’t have to watch Fox for this. It’s enough to for example work with conservative people and not have strong personal opinions about those things.
Trump may be way worse, but not liking either of them can be a perfectly rational, informed opinion.
Sure I get it, but by not voting still benefits Trump.
Or does it send a message to the DNC to propose better candidates.
You can say the same about the RNC especially since they are not the ones with an incumbent and are voting for someone that already lost and has a really bad history. But that’s all beside the point, the US democratic system is broken and that’s an entirely different discussion
Yes. Any Republicans who don’t like Trump as a candidate should also abstain from voting.
Would they? My gut says no.
And now we are back at the start. Voting Trump vs Biden, Trump is worse. At this point we are going in circles.
My point is that not voting Biden is not necessarily equal to voting for Trump.
That is a lazy, bullying argument.
It helps Trump.
Maybe sending the DNC a message is more important, particularly in non swing states.
It really isn’t. We’re on a sinking ship. We need to fix the ship or sink. You’re talking about solving a murder mystery that happened onboard. It’s not that murder shouldn’t be investigated, it’s that the if we don’t stop the ship from sinking rifht this instant, we’ll be eaten by sharks.
Isn’t the sinking ship US democracy and Trump the murderer?
Trump is not a good candidate, but he is too stupid to be really dangerous (i submit his previous term as evidence).
The fact that no other option apart from Trump (or Biden) is feasible is the real problem.
True, but it still amounts to a vote for Trump, due to the electoral college.
No. A vote for Trump is a voting for Trump.
Abstaining or ballot spoiling in blue states is a perfectly viable way to say you dislike both candidates.
“Most Republicans aren’t aware…”
My grandparents are pretty fucking dumb, I love em but they are you’re typical Trumpers, they only see the “good” like owning casinos and hotels alongside having many wives and children.
Trump is them, if you gave them hundreds of millions of dollars and said “have at er” while making sure fox news or Newsmax was always in the background.
but are they sentient ?
Like a Roomba.
Republicans are ill informed
there, fixed that for you
I don’t think it’s that they’re completely unaware, Trump talks about them all the time.
It’s that they buy the line that they’re politically motivated.
Well, Republicans are pathologically fucking stupid.
Hey now, some of them are simply amoral.
The Republican view of the world, probably
I hope Biden is all outta bubblegum
The Saudis and Israelis seem to be giving him some, unfortunately
They won’t believe it if you told them. If you pointed out Trump being a criminal, they’ll just plug their ears and scream their misinformation, claiming Biden is too.
There is no educating the unwilling.
Aren’t aware, willfully ignorant: Same difference, right?
Different difference. There was an almost depressingly apt comment upthread that’s worth a read.
Fair point, however there are definitely a good number of supporters who just don’t care that he’s shitty because, in their minds, he’s their guy and he’s got their backs (even though the reality is, he doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but himself).
My guess is that they think anything negative about Trump is a conspiracy. He seems to blame the world and is always sharing his opinion.
My guess is that they think
Nope.
I wonder if that three year Robert Mueller investigation that came to nothing has anything to do with that.
came to nothing
Case in point. You’re exactly who the article is referring to
You partisan morons can’t even handle a simple statement of fact without accusing me of this.
