CBS News poll over the summer, 91 percent of “strong Trump supporters” trust him to provide accurate information; 11 percent said the same about the news media.
The absurdity of this statistic captures my imagination. So that 30 or 40 percent of the population who follow Trump, 91 percent of them trust him to provide accurate information. That is pathetic given Trump’s known tendency to lie and misrepresent things, in addition to his poor knowledge of domestic as well as international affairs. It would be hard to be less accurate about “information” than to trust Trump. So why do they do it? They are clearly under the influence of his resentful older white male tendencies. When listening to Trump talking at a gathering of perhaps 10,000 or 20,000 people, there is a distinct tendency for hypnosis to set in. Whether this accounts for the remarkable tendency of his supporters to be severely misinformed about the world or whether it is the effect of watching Fox News, is really unimportant; they are synergistic.
It follows that a large minority of the population of the United States has been infected with the virus of Trumpism, and they are morphing into Trump zombies before our very eyes. The only way to stop them is to outvote them and hope that Trump doesn’t nullify the results of the elections if he loses. A recent Paul Krugman op-ed in the New York Times suggested that Trump may overturn the results of the elections coming up if he doesn’t like they way they come out. We can only pray that Trump doesn’t succeed.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 