At the Intersection #3: All About Trump Supporters

Should we listen to the people who might vote for Trump?

Hello everyone!

With the New Hampshire Primary in the rearview mirror and with Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee, I wanted to share some stories on about Trump supporters. Why? Keep reading until the end of the article.

Why Trump? When historians look back at this time in history 50 years from now, they will look at how those opposed to Donald Trump were too focused on the man himself and not on the issues that made him possible. I've long said that NeverTrump conservatives and Democrats had to pay attention not just to his increasingly authoritarian rants, but to why people might support Trump other than thinking they are cultists or love strongmen. Thankfully some Trump opponents aren't thinking this way. One of them is Bret Stephens who wrote a great column a few weeks back about why people still want Trump. He cites three reasons people make the case for the Orange one: unchecked immigration, a general sense the country is headed in the wrong direction, and the failure of institutions especially during COVID. An even deeper reason is that his supporters and many other Americans see our society as increasingly broken. "As writers like Tablet’s Alana Newhouse have noted, brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government," he writes. "At best, they have become shells of their former selves. And there’s a palpable sense that the autopilot that America’s institutions and their leaders are on — brain-dead and smug — can’t continue." 

The article was a breath of fresh air to me after reading the umpteenth article on Trump as a dictator. But will those opposed to Trump listen? My guess is no. Just witness what's happening to Chase CEO Jamie Dimon who said Democrats should be more respectful to Trump voters.

They Have Chosen: Most of us have a mental picture of what an evangelical voter looks like. There is always that kind of picture of Trumpists at a rally wearing every kind of red, white, and blue and waving a huge Trump flag. We think they are driven by racism and authoritarianism which is why they support Trump. In an article for Christianity Today, Bonnie Kristan writes the debate over Donald Trump among evangelicals is dead. Why is it dead? Because most evangelicals have already chosen Trump, which isn’t surprising. The interesting part is why they have chosen Trump and it isn’t for the reasons people think. “The raging politico who can’t seem to log off, touch grass, and love his neighbor has become a stock character in American politics,” she writes. “But there’s another character better represented in our democracy: the party-line voter (and sometimes nonvoter) who really does intend to do her civic duty but just has so much else to do first. There’s dinner to cook, laundry to sort, that email to answer, the dog to wash… People have limited time and energy, and they can’t spare much for distant political dramas, so they vote the party line.”

On the one hand, this can be discouraging, because it means that white evangelicals have already chosen someone that many of us think is unfit to be President again, let alone is incredibly immoral. On the other hand, Kristan’s notes remind us that the people who might choose Trump aren’t necessarily bigots and “deplorables.” They are people that we might want to try to converse with to understand where they are coming from.

Give Me Your Tired: I think the church needs a better way to talk about issues surrounding immigration. I think immigration can be a good thing and I am not one that wants to shut it all down. I also think the United States had a wonderful refugee program that allowed people to flee persecution to start a new life in America. I think of someone I know whose family fled Cambodia in the 70s as the Khmer Rouge took power. She and her family started a new life in Minnesota with the help of Lutheran churches.

Churches have an honored history of welcoming the stranger. But the issue of immigration is a complex one and it is here that the church can stumble by offering simplistic talk about how Jesus was a refugee (which is true) as proof positive that we can’t ever limit immigration. A recent article in the Atlantic doesn’t talk about religion and immigration, but it does talk about the unintended consequences of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which sought to rectify a 1920s immigration law that limited immigration in the US to mostly European nations. In “The Hard Truth About Immigration” by New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, we face the good and bad of increased immigration. “The celebration of immigration has become core to the political beliefs of many Americans, on both the left and the right. Immigrants are underdogs, heroes, and—for most of us—ancestors,” he writes adding that most opponents are really xenophobes. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t downsides to the amount of immigration coming to America and how that can affect working-class populations.

The point here is that people of faith should be able to have a complex conversation about this topic without immediately thinking people who might have reservations about immigration are bigots. But can we do that without succumbing to what I like to call “progressive proof-texting?” I don’t know. If South Park can look at immigration from a nuanced view the church can and should as well.

He’s a Divider Not A Uniter: Politico did a great profile of New Hampshire Republican who initially supported Nikki Haley, but then supported Trump. “I think his policies are going to be good,” Ted Johnson said in the interview, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”

Johnson is an interesting voter who supported Obama twice and then voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. You can’t put him in a box. But he is also someone who feels that American leaders are not being held accountable, something that he thinks Trump will do.

What led him to support Trump? He gives some reasons, but I think it’s important to look at this paragraph:

He lives in a classic three-bedroom house he bought almost four years ago for $485,000 that’s now worth roughly a quarter-million dollars more. He’s originally from Centralia, Illinois, a town like too many towns in the more rural interior of the country that isn’t what it was. He was born in a hospital that no longer delivers babies. His father’s gallbladder several years back broke during a snowstorm and so he couldn’t be airlifted to the closest suitable medical facility in St. Louis. “So we just watched him die,” he said.

On the one hand, Johnson is doing pretty well for himself, but he comes from a place that has seen hard times and also lost his father in a way that seems rather unfair. Is that an excuse to turn to Trump? Probably not, but some of the hardship that some of Trump’s voters face might be the fuel that is pushing them to the Former Guy.

This leads me to what connects all these articles: I think we tend to not understand conservatives, especially Trump supporters and we need to try to connect and listen to these people. I wrote about this in the fall and I wish we would spend more time connecting with Trump voters even if we don’t agree with them. I don’t think we will try to reach out, but I still think we should.

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