This is Not the Last We Will See of Pro-Trump Insurrectionists
Illustration by Kai Sase Ebens for the Davis Political Review
Leading up to the 2020 election, many Democrats as well as Republicans were confident in Biden’s ability to secure victory over the increasingly unpopular incumbent. Former President Trump’s first term in office was wrought with controversy and saw a marked decline in the United State’s reputation worldwide, most notably due to the fumbled response to COVID-19 and subsequent economic crises.
Many indicators pointed to a Trump loss and Biden victory beforehand. Yet, as the election results trickled in at a painstakingly slow pace, a baffling 70% of Trump supporters around the nation began claiming the election was being stolen--some even bombarded county registrars as a result.
Meanwhile, the man himself showed no signs of intending to concede and continued to peddle the notion that fraudulent mail-in votes cost him the election.
Trump and his legal team proceeded to exhaust all available avenues in an effort to overturn the election results. They filed lawsuits in several states, federal courts, and even presented their case to the Supreme Court--on each of these occasions, their claims of election fraud were rejected. Despite this, he continued to assert the election was stolen from him.
All of this built up to January 6th, the day the electoral college results were set to be certified. Trump addressed a crowd of his supporters at the steps of the Capitol--he detailed the many mediums used to “rig” the election, told the crowd America “has been under siege,” and said to his supporters, repeatedly, that he “loves” them. He finally encouraged them to walk down to the Capitol and “give [lawmakers] the boldness that they need to take back our country.” Minutes later, they stormed the halls of Congress, sending lawmakers into bunkers and the nation into a frenzy.
In light of this, news sources across the globe have detailed the shocking incident, Trump’s incitement of it, and law enforcement’s failure to prevent it. But a core aspect of the insurrection has been largely overlooked.
Why were they there in the first place?
These supporters of Donald Trump did not ransack the Capitol in the heat of the moment. They arrived from various states on the day the victory of President-Elect Joseph R. Biden was to be verified. Many arrived armed, some wearing shirts which said “Civil War Jan 6.” This was overtly planned on social media platforms. It could have easily been prevented--and yet it wasn’t.
I could write pages upon pages scrutinizing the negligence and utter failure of the Capitol Police and our Intelligence Agencies--but negligence is only one piece of the puzzle.
In fact, there’s evidence Donald Trump may be quite popular among law enforcement officials. The largest police union in the United States endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections--and, alarmingly, police stations across the country are finding some of their officers among those who stormed the Capitol. We can reasonably speculate that a portion of the police officers on scene January 6th were themselves supporters of Donald Trump. Thus, many were likely believers of the various conspiracy theories of election rigging peddled by the President.
Maybe that’s why officers were spotted walking insurrectionists down the stairs of the Capitol.
But it’s not just the police. Over 70 million Americans made the choice to vote for Donald Trump in 2020. Of those 70-plus million, there exists law enforcement officials, veterans, government officials, and certainly many of our own neighbors and family members. Recent polling shows that an estimated 37% of Trump supporters believe in QAnon, an unnamed individual who disseminates conspiracy theories about a deep-state trying to destroy Donald Trump and install a brutal new world order of sorts.
To be clear, that translates into millions of Americans from all walks of life being convinced that the election was fraudulent and that their democracy is now at stake.
This is why the Capitol was stormed.
So, how did perhaps tens of millions of Americans conclude that our election system is rigged against Donald Trump? Just how did the United States get here?
The 2016 Election Was a Microcosm
When Donald Trump emerged as a candidate in the Republican Primary, few took him seriously. He monopolized airtime on media outlets across the country by verbally attacking fellow candidates in a fashion the American people have never witnessed before. Pundits on both Fox News and CNN criticized him constantly. But as he climbed through the ranks in the Republican primary, there was a tone shift.
No longer was Donald Trump’s doomed campaign purely a source of entertainment--he became the person many saw as “the only one who really said what he was thinking.”
Donald Trump began to symbolize transparency to some, largely appealing to previously loyal blue-collar Democrats. Trump portrayed himself as an unhinged outsider fighting against a political establishment which only presented carefully curated candidates. These politicians made vague promises to the people, only to go on to Washington and cede influence to corporate interests and lobbyists at the expense of the American people.
Hillary Clinton, being the most experienced Presidential candidate ever at the time, was perhaps a symbol of the system itself. Many Americans viewed her as corrupt due to her email scandal-- but the 2016 campaign gave voice to many of the existing conspiracy theories surrounding the Clinton family. Most importantly, the valid skepticism of Hillary Clinton became a gateway into the world of conspiracies. Theories alleged sex trafficking, deep-state assasinations, and even that both Bill and Hillary were....reptilians. As skeptical voters engaged with articles and posts criticizing the Clintons, their Facebook feeds were rapidly filled with fake content.
In the eyes of many, Donald Trump, an emerging symbol of transparency and anti-establishmentarianism, became the ideal candidate to destroy the Deep State. Incidents like Hillary Clinton calling his supporters “deplorables” and the widespread dismissal of his candidacy enabled this growing sentiment to spread undetected by the mainstream.
A Glimpse Into The Pro-Trump Worldview
When Trump secured a narrow victory in 2016, a new set of conspiracy theories gained traction. Notably, the infamous QAnon emerged. An individual dubbed “Q” claiming to be a former government official sought to expose “the deep state” by posting government and court documents. These pieces of information, coined “breadcrumbs,” generated a narrative that Trump was striving to dismantle elite sex trafficking rings and “drain the swamp” by replacing bureaucrats with political outsiders--and in doing so, he would liberate America from these parasitic elites.
Although not all Trump supporters are ardent followers of QAnon, the general overarching concepts and assumptions about Donald Trump and our government are largely the same. To truly understand the worldview of the Trump Supporting QAnon follower--and why it’s taken such a stronghold on many in this nation--I opted to interview an ardent Trump supporter from my hometown who chose to remain anonymous. The following is a deep dive into his beliefs about America.
He explained to me that the world is run by a ring of elite pedophiles who strive to destroy America and, essentially, enslave everybody. The mainstream media outlets (including Fox News) are run by this very elite group.
The Democrats are “Globalists” who “want to see the United States burn.”
Donald Trump was appointed by military generals who are betting on him as their last hope to prevent this destruction from occurring.
The Coronavirus pandemic was engineered by China (in collaboration with the Democrats) in order to destroy the economic gains made over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Some Trump supporters believe the virus itself is real while others do not--my interviewee was on the fence about it. He and most of his cohorts agree that masks and shutdowns are a means by which the maniacal elites instill obedience and fear in the American people as a primer for the Globalist take over that is to come.
At the core of this worldview is a complete distrust of the government, a feeling that everyday people are being exploited, and a disdain for the system in its entirety.
Mainstream media outlets and career politicians condemned Trump for his overt racism, failures, and authoritarian rhetoric, but this simply served as confirmation for such beliefs. According to my interviewee, the mainstream only reported on the “surface-level issues” like “racism” to stoke polarization and downplay “the many great things” Trump has worked so diligently on throughout his Presidency.
Thus, every failure of Donald Trump appeared to his supporters as an effort by the deep-state to derail his objective of draining the swamp and hindering the Globalist new world order.
The 2020 election, consequently, was a tipping point which posed an existential crisis to Trump supporters: the unseating of Donald Trump equated to a resurgence of the deep state and an undoubted ushering in of a Globalist order. Joe Biden, a typical “swamp creature” and “deep state puppet,” secured victory via several notable upsets: his wins in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. This came as no surprise to Trump supporters who were groomed by the President and conservative pundits the entire year to believe our elections were not secure--a notion which has been proven to be entirely baseless. Unfortunately, many Trump supporters weren’t tuning in to media outlets which falsified these allegations; instead, they trusted their President and sources that reinforced his fabricated claims.
Since the onset of the pandemic, Donald Trump had been tweeting and making speeches about the dangers of mail-in voting, just as Democrats were encouraging it as a safe alternative to in-person voting. QAnon conspiracy groups unhashed fabricated documents allegedly revealing the mass amounts of registration of dead people, undocumented immigrants, and instances where people had voted multiple times.
Yet again, Donald Trump’s evident failure became additional confirmation of the deep state trying to save itself and squash the threat he and his “enlightened” base posed to it. The resilience of this worldview is perhaps a reminder of the human mind’s susceptibility to reality-altering cognitive biases.
What’s Causing Supporters to Sustain these Beliefs?
The truth is, we have an entire subset of our country perceiving an entirely different reality. Although some of their concerns about the nature of our government and the power dynamics within our society are completely rooted in the truth, their governing beliefs require wild assumptions, cognitive dissonance, and an absurd amount of trust in one, savior-like, man.
Theories of psychology and group dynamics can provide some explanations.
Firstly, research has shown that once an individual is exposed to false information it becomes incredibly unlikely that they will be receptive to corrections. This explains the prevalence and persistence of disproven conspiracy theories.
How did Trump supporters reconcile the various scandals of his presidency with their immense trust in him? We need look no further than confirmation bias. Confirmation bias refers to the tendency for individuals to pursue and accept information which aligns with their current beliefs--and subsequently, disregard or ignore any information which conflicts with their current worldview. Imaginably, confirmation bias tends to compound with the echo chambers provided by Facebook and YouTube algorithms. Only until very recently, these sites would show users content that reflected their existing preferences rather than the diverse array of ideas held by the American people.
Overall, these pro-Trump conspiracies offer Americans a well-constructed frame by which they can easily make sense of the world and this country--and they view it as a struggle of good versus evil.
Why Millions of Americans Were Susceptible
Trumpism and the rapid spread of conspiracies are simply symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the American psyche. Deplatforming QAnon, Donald Trump, and putting the insurrectionists of January 6th in jail is a short-term solution--a meager band-aid thrown atop a deep, festering wound.
The truth is, working class Americans do not feel their government is working in their best interest. In the past 20 years, they’ve seen a rapid decline in living standards, increased healthcare costs, and inequality of astronomical proportions. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington are plagued by gridlock, partisanship, and many cede their power to corporate interests. We have failed to make accessible the tools necessary for everyday Americans to garner an understanding as to why their government was neglecting them--they only know that their government is neglecting them.
The fact that Trump’s primary base is white men with no college degree is telling--research shows that citizens often gain civic knowledge through higher education and, as a result, are less susceptible to misleading or falsified political information. When civic knowledge is inaccessible, countless voters are defenseless to manipulation through media and rhetoric. The rise of social media has amplified this knowledge gap by forcing the American electorate to sift through disinformation to reach the facts--all Americans are not equally equipped to do this.
Lack of civic knowledge and increased access to conspiracies only compounded with a recent resurgence of racial attitudes among white voters of all income brackets. Between 2008 and 2016, underlying racial animosity increased among white Americans. It is unclear just what caused this, however, it is worth noting that Republican pundits and white supremacist groups on social media dissseminated racist rhetoric and conspiracies to much broader audiences during the Obama presidency--and perhaps, because of the Obama presidency. White American voters, more than ever, were exposed to baseless claims asserting that undocumented immigrants and refugees steal jobs and resources from the government, white applicants are discriminated against by universities and employers, and notably, the high profile birther scandal which suggested Barack Obama is not an American citizen. Importantly, the voting decisions of individuals harboring racial animosity are highly influenced by racial identity appeals.
Donald Trump exploited these vulnerabilities in our electorate to rise to power. He offered dejected Americans easy answers as to why their government was neglecting them. He scapegoated undocumented immigrants and Muslims to harness existing racial attitudes. He pledged he would “drain the swamp” to channel underlying distrust in American institutions and win over conspiracy theorist voters.
The ladder to the presidency was there, Donald Trump simply climbed it.
But since his power was contingent on the existence of unequal wealth and access to education, Donald Trump could not retain legitimacy with his base by improving their living conditions. Rather, he simply continued sowing the seeds of racism, anger, and distrust in our institutions. In doing so, he (and other lawmakers who have utilized the same approach) cemented these ideas into the worldviews of millions of Americans.
Where do we go from here?
Freshly inaugurated President Joe Biden emphasizes our country is in need of unity and healing--and he’s completely correct. Unfortunately, for those who perhaps need to hear that message most, it is falling on deaf ears.
There is no way for Joe Biden to win over Trump supporters who have completely lost faith in the establishment that’s long neglected them (and countless other Americans). There is no way for experts or media outlets to convince them their worldviews are rooted in carefully curated lies disseminated by an amalgam of entities seeking to further their own respective self-interests. Trump supporters are going to continue to support Trump through any means available. They are going to continue to mobilize in pursuit of their goal of “draining the swamp.” They will continue to be susceptible to masquerading fascists and despots, eager to utilize their fervor as a ladder to power.
Unless something changes.
My interviewee spent the four years leading up to the 2016 election working seven days a week at a manufacturing plant. After decades of working in the industry, he developed severe knee, shoulder, and back problems caused by workplace injuries--some which have nearly ended his life. But time off combined with medical expenses would put his already bankrupt household over the fiscal edge and into homelessness.
His combined household income was above the median in the United States.
He voted for Obama in the hope he would “deliver change.”
He voted for Trump because he’s “tired of Americans being sold out.”
He even mentioned he would’ve voted for someone like Bernie Sanders, another outsider who was “angry for everyday Americans” and provided answers to their plights.
We must offer everyday Americans tangible change. Universal health care and actual living wages would have alleviated the circumstances which drove my interviewee to cast a vote for Donald Trump. Accessible higher education and increased regulation of social media platforms would have stifled the spread of the disinformation and racist conspiracies which hijacked my interviewees perception of reality.
The key to saving our democracy is investing in the American people.
If we do not, our democracy will see another Donald J. Trump. Perhaps he’ll be more polished or arise from humble beginnings. Perhaps he’ll understand the various tools the Executive branch is equipped with-- and how to use them as a means to an end. Likely, he will be far more dangerous.
We can’t afford to let that happen.