looks like the orange man group making a come back..

[Rev. Rye]

My biggest confusion is why all of these people are so faithful to Trump,

---

who really didn't do much of anything for anyone but himself.  I get that there is a huge number of Americans who hate the idea of illegal immigrants coming in from the south and Trump did scream about a wall, but failed to produce much.  What he has built is limited and wasn't installed well.  There was boarder "fencing" installed before Trump took office and many Democrats voted in favor of it, including Obama and Clinton.  And as President, Obama spent a lot of money and developed a lot of other security measures for the boarder.  So the idea of securing the southern boarder was not so partisan before Trump.  And lots of people don't understand that to build boarder walls, the government has to force a lot of people to give up their land because, guess what, the government doesn't own all of the land boarding Mexico.

Obama certainly worked to lure more industries and jobs back to US soil, but the results were not spectacular, but Trump's have been even less impressive.  For some reason I know people who believe that millions of new factory jobs were magically produced by Trump but this is not true.  Factories take years to plan and build.  Any new factories that opened in the last four years certainly originated long before Trump.  And we all know how much Trump touted the Foxconn deal in Wisconsin, which has turned out to be a gigantic flop and a real loss for land ownership of local citizens there.

Economic growth was not spectacular during Obama's years, but it recovered from the recession and it was not much better under Trump and of course has been abysmal since Covid 19 hit.  Unemployment hit an all time low during Trump's first 3 years, but one could see that trending during Obama's entire 8 year run.  Again, you can't flip a switch as president and make unemployment drop in one year; that has to happen over time.  Trump's trade wars appeared to be having a good impact initially, but people were ignoring the negatives of tariffs.  Americans have to pay that tariff!  So everything he taxed became that much more expensive for Americans and everything China and Europe taxed stopped being exported.  The overall effect of the tariffs was negative at best.  What has changed now is that inflation is trending upward, and that is very scary.

So what in the world did Trump actually do that was so great?  Other than offend half the population and half the world, I just don't understand the affection for this con man.  I swear he would rip off any one of the people who support him, so why are they so devoted?  How many of his loyal servants does he have to throw under the bus for people to get it?

---

Trump gave people permission to show the ugliest parts of themselves.  The things they had been keeping somewhat hidden in order to move through society and maintain relationships and jobs.  Trump told them to be loud and proud of their racism and bigotry on all levels.  The only thing he didn't do was give them free beer.

Pretty much. The most consistent theme of Trump’s 2016 campaign was basically: “I’m awful, vote for me.” He kicked off his campaign by claiming immigration is Mexico sending America rapists and thieves (like all immigration is the Mariel Boatlift) and suddenly, blatant racism started to become mainstream. He responds to terrorist attacks by announcing plans on creating a Muslim registry (basically putting an entire religion in the same category as sex offenders) and people start treating this as a good idea. Audio comes out of him openly bragging about sexually assaulting women, they just blow it off. He flip-flops on most issues like crazy, but he always seems to settle on the worst possible option.

That said, I think the process of racism becoming mainstream in the Republican Party started before that, like after Obama was elected. There were a lot of things to criticize Obama for, but the vast majority of the defensible ones relate to his policies not actually being that far removed from the Bush administration in many ways. Since they can’t use those criticisms, many who aren’t latching onto the absurdly unrealistic claims settle on the obvious: his race. Granted, at first, the few who say it out loud get punished, although the bunk claims that he was born in Kenya proved a sign of things to come. And then, one of those people who claimed Obama was born in Kenya ended up running for President in 2016. And after 16 months of talking shit, he won the election.