Two reporters, one of whom with a stutter, talked to some Trump fans at a rally, to ask about Trump mocking people with disabilities, including mocking Biden's stutter.
Looked like they looked for people with disabilities. All of them disapproved of Trump belittling people with disabilities but they all will vote for him no matter what. Some of them tried to make excuses or rationalized Trump's behavior.
Near a food truck inside the venue, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Cincinnati named Vanessa Miller. She was wearing a T-shirt that read Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President, and a dog tag inscribed with the serenity prayer. She hadn’t seen, or heard about, the clip of Trump mimicking Biden. “Trump is a good man,” Miller said. “He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country.” She went on, “If Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled.”
A bit later, she told me that “Biden doesn’t stutter; he’s mentally incapable of running this country.” But then she did something surprising: She reached out and grabbed my arm in a maternal fashion. “And I feel what you’re—I feel what you’re saying,” she said, acknowledging my own stutter. “People that are unkind to people with disabilities, it’s shameful. It’s awful. Absolutely disgusting. And I guess I understand that, like, in an election, you know, it gets ugly, and elections get competitive, and people say things, people do things.”
I unlocked my phone and showed her a video of Trump’s stuttering impression. She turned her focus to the mainstream media in general. She said that “for the press to inflame and use disabilities to get people riled up is exactly what they want.” Nothing would stop her from voting for Trump.
This pattern continued in nearly every interaction that day: skepticism, a momentary denouncement, then an eventual conclusion that Trump was still a man worth their vote. A woman named Susie Michael, who runs a Mathnasium tutoring center, told me, “I don’t appreciate the making-fun-of part, but he doesn’t have to be my best friend. He just has to do the best job for the country and for me. So I have to overlook that, because everybody has their good points and their bad points.”
Shana, a special-education teacher from Indiana who did not give her last name, told me, “I would still support him because I feel like people make mistakes. They say things they shouldn’t say. And I feel like God is the judge on that, you know, and that we’re to forgive him.” She noted that if Trump were to mock Biden’s stutter at this rally, she’d be inclined to write him a letter saying that “everybody was born of God and that we shouldn’t be making fun of anybody.”
Read in The Atlantic:
https://apple.news/AuDomSScxT6epbHHzbsjErASo what is this mindset, disapprove of certain behavior, then rationalize it, then say they support Trump no matter what?
Mass psychosis?The high level explanation is that Trump does that to make fun of a lot of people, not just that one reporter.
If voters are still voting for him even if they think Trump made a mistake, it is because they care about other things like legislation more than being polite.
It would be easy to point out similar things about Democratic candidates too. I don't find it cult-like in most cases.