Anecdotes about why Trump supporters do what they do and believe what they believe aren’t so interesting to me. If you asked a Scientologist why she hooks herself up to an E-meter and gives lots of money to the Church of Scientology, she wouldn’t speak pejoratively about her group as a cult. Nevertheless, that criticism would be warranted.
It’s hard to know ourselves, especially when we’ve done something wrong. We avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance by denying there’s a problem and pretending we’re good. Indeed, we all think we’re the best and the stars of our private show. We’re all heroes in our eyes. The truth lies elsewhere, and that’s so for both Trumpians and Democrats. I criticize both sides harshly in service to the deeper truth.
I’ve spoken to some Trumpians who criticize my articles, and I’ve talked to some anti-vaxxers, including one I used to work with who uncoincidentally bought into various other crazy conspiracy theories, including flat eartherism.
But their propaganda is beside the philosophical point. As the police cars say on their side where I live (which is Canada, not the US, by the way), “Deeds speak.” What’s crucial to me in revealing the true nature of these white evangelicals and Trumpians is their second vote for Trump, the one in 2020 which was implicitly an affirmation of everything Trump did in his four years in office. That election was a referendum on Trump’s obvious monstrousness.
I understand the line of argument that says these Trumpians became the trolls and monsters that liberals all along saw them as, that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that Democrats are at fault for demonizing Republicans. But that’s a convenient excuse because these rural libertarians and evangelical apologists for American imperialism are hardly the self-sacrificial type. Obviously, they’d be the first to mock a reincarnated Jesus as a socialist snowflake.
No, that self-serving propaganda would only rationalize the growing depravity of American culture which expresses itself in different ways in the less educated and overeducated rural and urban regions. Those who became Trumpians were savages for a long time, not because of the bogus stories they tell themselves, but because of their support for the Republican Party and for fake “conservative Christianity.”
Likewise, Democrats have been spineless, unprincipled, sell-out cowards for decades, which is why the thought that Democrats would act like the Chinese government and persecute, imprison, and deprogram Trumpers is laughable. Democrats care about making money, not progressive principles, just as the professional urban liberal class that votes Democratic cares about nothing more high-minded than consumerism, as is apparent from their actions, their urbane intellectualism notwithstanding.
No, this Fox News fear that Democrats are an existential threat to Republicans is clearly the kind of fiction that makes older conservative Christians feel better about their naked betrayal of Jesus-based Christianity. They like to feel persecuted so they can pretend they’re Christ-like even though they worship a host of idols (America, the Constitution, the Military, Trump, and Their Football Team).
The real existential threat is the worldwide breakdown of liberal democratic secularism. It’s runaway capitalism that’s causing the collapse of American society, including the decadence of the intellectual elites and the savagery of the rural victims.
You ask specifically how being anti-vaccine is Trumpian since Trump doesn’t publicly take that stance. Trump’s supporters see him as an agent of chaos. Their goal in voting for him wasn’t to fix their country’s problems, but to punish liberals for winning the culture war, and to tear down the establishment for having supported the cosmopolitan globalization that hollowed out the American heartland. Thus, the followers understand that “Trump will be Trump,” which means they know he changes his lies as the wind shifts. Sometimes he covertly signals his virtue (i.e. his malignance) to avoid taking undo heat from the media. That’s what he did when he gave only lukewarm condemnation of white supremacists (“good people on both sides”).
And Trump’s attitude toward vaccines pales next to his flagrant anti-intellectualism about everything. He said you could protect people from covid by injecting them with bleach and sunlight! (Link below.) Trump demonized Fauci not because Fauci was likely partly responsible for creating covid, but because he was stealing Trump’s spotlight.
What this means is that his followers know Trump doesn’t care about vaccines because he doesn’t care about science or reason or truth. Like everyone else, they know that Trump is psychologically incapable of caring about anything other than himself because he’s a malignant narcissist. That’s why Trump’s presidency was so useful to these trolls.
And those are the facts which are supported by mountains of evidence having to do with Trumpians’ actions, including their votes for Trump, the white supremacist rallies, the Fox News bile, the storming of Capitol Hill, and the refusal to wear masks or to take vaccines in a pandemic that shut down the world.
So the anti-vaxxer stance is Trumpian because it’s chaotic and anti-establishment. Those who are opposed to all vaccines have no good reasons on their side. On the contrary, they’re opposed to critical thinking, which is why they fall for Fox News’ litany of conspiracy theories. Their libertarianism reduces to antisocial absurdity, as I show in a few articles (links below).
Do I think “its possible that somebody could be anti-vaxx or pro-Trump and still be a good person”? Not really. But then again, I also don’t think there are many good Democrats or liberals. My standards for personhood, let alone for morality are high. Perhaps only five percent of adult humans are good. Most of us are bad—not necessarily criminals, but psychologically weak and philosophically unenlightened (deluded).
