I am sure I am not the only one who daily checks Project 538's Trump approval tracker to see whether the latest examples of the US president's stupidity, boorishness, racism, support for foreign tyrannies or attempts to subvert his own country's democracy have 'moved the dial' of the American electorate's approval of him. Only to find that they haven't.
And therein lies something of a mystery. Whilst Trump was an insurgent candidate, playing the outsider card, I sort of understood how people could choose to overlook his misogyny, crudeness, ignorance, short attention span... (I could go on) because they wanted somebody to go in there and shake things up a bit. Many Americans' lives no longer come even close to the dream they were promised, and the easiest people to blame are the (undoubtedly self-serving and out-of-touch) politicians who ply their trade within the Beltway.
Trump is no longer an insurgent, however. The big beasts in 'the swamp' are now generally his creatures (even if he spends a great deal of his time deriding and condemning them) and he is making almost no attempt nowadays to present any agenda for change. In 2016 the slogans of 'lock her up'. 'drain the swamp' and 'build the wall' might have been crude, simplistic and fundamentally meaningless, but at least they gave the illusion of an agenda for change, but this time round there isn't even a pretence.
And yet, according to opinion pollsters, at least 40% of Americans (that's 120 million people!) say that they approve of the job Donald Trump is doing and will vote to give him four more years (if not more) to carry on doing it. I could list all of the appalling, incompetent, shameful things that Trump has done or not done, said or not said, but it would make no difference. That 120 million seems to be an absolute floor, of people who (as Trump himself boasted) would carry on supporting him even if he shot somebody dead on Fifth Avenue.
So, why? Some factors are clear of course. Trump's increasingly strident dog whistles towards the overlooked white underclass no doubt have an effect, because they allow the Bob Ewells of 21st Century America to rally behind a leader who can shout their resentment from the rooftops. Another factor is the facebook-enabled siloisation that insulates people from any opinion that challenges their own. Yet another is the appallingly partisan nature of US politics that separates everything into red and blue and blinds many to anything beyond that. There have been many thousands of words written by much more knowledgeable commentators than me on these and other factors.
But still...
One hundred and twenty million people. If they stood in a line, 10 abreast, they would reach from LA to New York. All saying Donald Trump is doing a pretty good job, and we want more, thanks very much.
Of course, one possibility is that all 120 million are racist, misogynist enablers who simply don't care about the suffering of their fellow Americans or the future of the planet, but might there not be a slightly more forgiving narrative to add into the mix? It's not that I think the well-worn traditional arguments, like those I have listed above, are wrong, it's just that they are all problematic in some way as a means of explaining such a high floor to Trump's popularity, particularly now that he is no longer an insurgent outsider. So my additional factor to consider is this: the experience that many Americans seem to share of having been bullied at High School. I don't know this first hand of course, but you can learn a lot about a society by considering its fairy tales, and in more movies than I care to admit to having watched, the villain is the jock who wields unquestioned power to intimidate and harass in the corridors of a High School.
In these fairy tales the jock is always dethroned, whether by the nerd or the cool outsider, but that is clearly wish fulfilment. In reality, jocks in US High Schools seem to benefit from a high degree of official protection, because of their financial value to the school (High School football for instance is very, very big business) and the only sensible response to their bullying, I imagine, is not to challenge them - indeed to try and get on their side.
If this is indeed the case, then it provides a ready-made reason for millions of (otherwise not vile) people to want to be with Trump rather than against him. Bullying is the very essence of his personality and he has shown many times how vindictive and cruel he can be, to the extent even of saying that 'Red' states which elect Democrats had only themselves to blame for coronavirus deaths and deserved no support.
When a bully that powerful and impregnable is standing with his acolytes in front of your locker, are you really going to tell him you don't like him very much?
