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LWT border wall.jpg

John Oliver Sends Us Down The Dark Hole That Is The Mind Of A Trump Supporter

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | March 21, 2016 |

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | March 21, 2016 |


I’m a little bit worried that we might have broken John Oliver. As far as I can tell, he’s still perfectly healthy and kicking ass at his show. But we’ve forced him to open the Pandora’s box that is Trump, and now he can’t seem to close it. Last night, Oliver actually bothered to fact check the border wall, the only piece of policy on which Trump has given any coherent details, and not surprisingly, The Donald’s plan doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny.

So again, the fact that Trump’s huge, fuckable wall is both unnecessary and impractical shouldn’t shock anyone. But what the segment actually made me wonder about is Trump’s supporters. Now to be clear, I believe that a large portion of his supports are in fact stupid, racist assholes. For instance:
Trump Supporter.jpg

I’m not sure what argument that little old lady believed she was winning, but I’m pretty sure this is how you end up the bad guy in video games. But that small, fluffy-haired racist aside, I know that some Trump supporters are not bad people. What I can’t figure out, however, is why Trump supporters seem to be not only accepting of, but embracing of the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t mean what he says.

A prevailing attitude from Trump supporters is that he doesn’t actually believe the things he says. Even the celebrity endorsers don’t think Trump means this shit. He’s either being intentionally inflammatory or it’s a gaffe that the media intentionally overplay. Basically, he doesn’t mean the racist, stupid shit that he says. Those are just the things that come out of his mouth subconsciously.

And in that case, what is Trump’s appeal? If inherent to your ability to vote for a person is the belief that you can’t believe what he’s telling you, what makes you want to vote for that person? This part’s a true personal anecdote: a Trump supporter I know said that she approved of the wall and liked Trump for proposing it because she wanted a president who cared about secure borders. When pointed out to her that the wall is both impractical to the point of being impossible to build and completely ineffective at actually improving national security (to say nothing of the fact that every goddamn person running for office is concerned with “secure borders”), her response was, “At least he’s addressing it.”

Really?! Really?

Is this what the political landscape has really reduced us to? You just want the guy who lies to you the way you want? It’s gotten to the point where some active voters will no longer even pretend that these things aren’t lies. No more chalking it up to a biased media or a privately funded study from an interested party. There are people who openly admit that what their candidate is selling not only isn’t what we actually need, but that it is never going to happen in the first place. They don’t just accept that he’s lying, they’re counting on it.

Which, as has been stated before, is all of our fault.