His approval ratings look good. Many Americans see a man of the people in the New York braggart and billionaire Donald Trump. What makes him so popular?
A user on the Internet portal Reddit recently posed a question to the supporters of Donald Trump: Why do they want to make the real estate broker their president? He received nearly 8,000 answers within a few hours, which were in turn “up-voted” by thousands more users. The comment which met with the most approval was this: “I like Trump, because he is exposing the giant fucking joke that politics is and everybody hates him for that.”
With approval ratings of 17 percent to 28 percent, Trump has twice to three times the approval rating of Jeb Bush, the second-most popular of the 17 Republican candidates. Obviously, Reddit does not offer a scientific explanation for that. However, focus group surveys of Trump supporters point in the same direction: Trump’s seemingly limitless belligerence has charmed the Americans even more than his plan to seal off the United States from Latin America with a wall.
Nearly all of Trump’s supporters describe him as “one of us.” At the same time, generally speaking, these people have neither a Boeing 757 private jet in the garage, nor do they engage in feuds with other TV stars on Twitter. They also do not have [relationships] with as many women as the New Yorker, who has been married three times. The journalist John Heilemann believes that he has worked out how the billionaire has achieved this fraternity with the people, after an hour and a half discussion with 12 Republican and Republican-leaning supporters of Trump: “Trump may be a billionaire,” he writes on Bloomberg.com, “but he is ‘one of us’ because he isn’t ‘one of them’” — that is to say, a member of the political class who, in the words of one of his supporters in the focus group, suffers from “Washingtonitis.”
Because of this, the pundits who predicted a rapid fall from grace for Trump just six weeks ago, as he began slinging mud at the big names of the Republican Party, were proven wrong. John McCain? No war hero for Trump — Vietnam here, torture there. Lindsey Graham? A pathetic beggar and total lightweight. Rick Perry? Bought himself thick-rimmed glasses to feign intelligence. George W. Bush? Didn’t have the IQ, which is necessary as president. The Republican Party leadership? Dumb. Jeb Bush? Has so little energy that you fall asleep when he speaks. Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly? A bimbo who has “blood coming out of her wherever.” The list of Trump’s dirty jokes grows longer by the day. Every insult seems to encourage his supporters in their adoration: Someone who brings the whole establishment against him with these kinds of remarks, according to this interpretation, only does it for the sake of the truth.
The topic of immigration is of above-average importance among Trump supporters.
It is possible that Trump has exhausted his potential. In the field of 17 Republican candidates, 20 percent is not enough to indicate a clear front-runner spot. At the same time, in some polls Trump tops the list of candidates who are considered least suited to running the country. Trump may have positioned himself at the right edge of the spectrum with his extreme position in the immigration debate; the topic is of above-average importance to his followers. In contrast, the abortion question, America’s litmus test for conservatism, lays less heavy on the hearts of Trump’s followers than the Republican average. According to the first studies, there are apparently fewer regular churchgoers among Trump’s supporters.
There is really no reliable answer to the question of how many Americans who were previously inclined toward the Democrats now support Trump. On the Internet, some supporters of the self-declared socialist candidate Bernie Sanders have declared that they will vote for Trump if Hillary Clinton gets the Democrats’ nomination. Both politicians are of a mind when it comes to the worry about globalization. And both Sen. Sanders, who has been in Congress for 35 years, and the investor Trump, who has funded the campaigns of hundreds of candidates from both parties, present themselves as independent candidates outside the Washington political clique.
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