How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent?” David Brooks asks. “He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful.”“What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?” Brooks continues. One answer lies in “a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.”
As much as I respect David Brooks, that’s a bit too highbrow for me.
A simpler explanation is that these 70+ million, largely uneducated people believe that Trump actually is making America great again, and that putting America first has more goodness to it than all his supposed immorality. In particular, he’s eliminating wokeness/DEI, reducing the number of non-whites in the country, and using clever economic policies to bring back jobs from overseas.
Many of his supporters believe that it’s the “radical left-wing” media that unfairly portrays Trump as immoral, and that it’s “activist judges” who charge him with crimes, and use the law in other ways to stop him from achieving his goals for our country.