What is it about Trump that has allowed him to acquire so many ardent followers?

[Rev. Rye]

Honestly, I think that most of the recent presidents have had something comparable in terms of a cult of personality. I think Bush Sr. Is the only one in my lifetime that couldn’t be said to have had something at least superficially similar.

That said, Trump is different. While, in the past, (since roughly 1968), Republicans (and Democrats to a lesser extent) have maintained power by referring to the racial and otherwise socially unacceptable fears of the common voter in veiled terms. Trump, however, talks plainly about anything that’s on his mind and he’s not going to resort to the old, more electable saws like “protecting jobs” or “states’ rights.”




Sick of the phony baloney displays of righteousness that the right has come to call virtue signaling? Well, he doesn’t even bother to do that, dismissing the victims of extremist violence and war heroes with a palm of his hand. As to how he gets away with it, well, I suspect that it’s all down to his wealth. If he didn’t have billions to throw around and shamelessly self-promote all over the news media, he’d have petered out like the time David Duke ran for president in ‘88.

Of course, I have to admit: I think Obama paved the way for Trump in this regard, not necessarily because of anything he did, but because, thanks to his being half-Black, suddenly a lot of racists in the Republican Party came out of the woodwork, and thus, because they didn’t have much legitimate in the way of criticism (especially since most of his problems involved being either too conciliatory to the party that twice demonstrated they’d rather America fail than Obama win or perpetuating Dubya’s policies) they started paving the way for some normalization of racism.

And now that we’ve got radicals who have long been alienated from the political process actually having a candidate to root for (and he doesn’t even need a coherent ideology; it just needs to be extreme enough that they can project their own hair-brained ideas onto him), it only makes sense that they start up a cult of personality for him, and due to his slapping his name on anything that would pay him, a lot of the structure for that’s already in place.