The Grievance Machine
Why Trump’s base will never leave him
Every time I turn on my television nowadays, I see talking heads in expensive suits prattling on about Epstein and predicting the downfall of Trump. I like hearing about that, but the constant coverage of the scandal and the endless commentary about the outrage among Trump’s base leaves out an undeniable fact: Trump is just as popular now as he has ever been.
For all the manufactured controversy, Trump’s approval ratings are actually higher than they were during most of his first term. Knowing this, we can only come to one of two conclusions. Either trafficking and raping children is considered normal on the American right, or the people who vote for Trump are motivated by something else.
While Republicans and conservative churchy folk seem to be making the argument that they are pro-child trafficking by getting arrested for it over and over again, it is unlikely that this behavior has become so permissible that anyone in the GOP is going to openly support it. Even amongst the most hardcore Trumpers, this will likely remain the GOP’s worst-kept secret and nothing more. But if this is the case, how do we explain the steady support for Trump even as his disgusting lifelong status as a sexual predator becomes more and more obvious?
The fact that Trump voters are motivated primarily by grievance is not a new argument. In fact, it’s safe to say that Trump voters want to hurt their neighbors more, much more than they want to help themselves. This did not happen by accident, but rather this sentiment has been carefully created and curated by the GOP media machine, which has been feeding us a constant stream of grievance since before Rush Limbaugh hit the airwaves in the 1980s. And the message that has dominated political discourse for decades now is a simple one. It tells us that our problems are not our fault, but rather that the fault belongs to [insert target group here] and they are the reason you don’t have what you think you should have, and why you haven’t achieved what you think you should have achieved.
And you just have to hand it to the GOP message makers. That message works. Over the decades since the GOP started running that playbook, they have won more than their fair share of power, and they have used it to reinforce that message and to justify all manner of attacks on America and everyone in it.
Given the fact that GOP support is mostly a rural thing, the targets for the outrage machine are typically black and brown folks, and the nature of the attacks really hasn’t changed since Birth of a Nation convinced white folks that black people were coming to steal their daughters. They find a difference, drive a wedge into it, and then divide people who are economically identical into separate camps so working people can never organize and get what’s theirs. And once this division is established, you can steal everything from both groups and hurt them as much as you like, as long as you convince one group that the other is being hurt worse.
And that is why Trump’s base, even when they’re certain Trump is what we believe he is, will still never leave him. It’s not because they think he’s innocent. It’s because as long as he’s hurting the people they want him to hurt, they don’t care how many children he traffics, or how many victims he assaults. I don’t know much, but I certainly know that.
So as the coverage of the Epstein scandal continues and Trump keeps breaking laws day after day, don’t expect those poll numbers to drop. As disgusting as it is to say out loud, it appears that a large portion of America likes ICE raids more than they hate pedophilia. That’s a difficult sentence to write, but that doesn’t stop it from being entirely true. Why it’s true is the core of the problem.
In today’s America, grievance rules, and those who control it control all of us.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.