Four years ago, there was an obvious answer to the question, “Why did people vote for Donald Trump?” That answer was Hillary Clinton.

In 2016, voters were fed up with the choice before them. They didn’t care for either nominee, and many voted for third-party candidates. A lot of Trump voters didn’t make up their minds until the last minute.

None of that seems to have been true this time, even though Trump has presided over four years of chaos and accomplished very little, apart from letting a virus through that infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Trump wasn’t running against Hillary Clinton this time, but against a relatively likeable, mild-mannered gentleman named Joe Biden. On top of that, the vast majority of Trump voters said they were voting for him, not against Biden.

Trump got worse, but his supporters somehow became more devoted to him. To the rest of us, this seems absurd, bordering on insane. The question is, why?

One thing’s clear: It’s not about the issues.

Disconnect

Large majorities of voters trust Dr. Anthony Fauci on COVID-19 far more than they trust Trump, who they say has done a poor job dealing with it. They think climate change is real and a significant threat. Coronavirus sent the economy into a nosedive, so it wasn’t as though Trump’s stewardship of the economy was a winning issue.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was in part a repudiation of an economy that went in the tank under George W. Bush, but the same Republican voters who switched to Obama after the Great Recession stuck with Trump more than ever during the pandemic. Remember, these were the same people who voted for him just because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton.

Is it because he’s “building the wall”? Well, he hasn’t built that much of it. Is it because he’s supported pro-life positions? The same could have been said for Mitt Romney, who was far more sincere about it. But Romney lost, so it can’t be that, either.

Romney’s a Republican, so this isn’t about party politics. In fact, a majority of Republicans these days say they’re more loyal to Trump than their party. (We’ll see why below.) But that wasn’t always the case.

Venus flytrap

Trump voters to 2016 had every excuse to abandon him. They’d committed to him at the last minute because they didn’t like Clinton, so obviously weren’t that invested in the first place. They could have said, “Oh well, I took a shot and got it wrong. Time to move on.” The could have clamored for Ted Cruz or Rand Paul to challenge Trump for the nomination, the way Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford in 1976, or Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980.

But they didn’t, because Trump became the political equivalent to a Venus flytrap for them. Once he lured them in, they were stuck. The more false promises he made, the more invested they became in believing them, until they bought into an alternate reality where COVID weren’t killing people, people aren’t getting evicted from their homes, and the coronavirus economy was magically better than it had ever been before.

None of this is true, but Trump repeated it often enough that they started to believe it — because they wanted to believe it. Who wouldn’t?

Trump likes to say he’s not a typical politician, and his supporters say that’s what they like about him.

He’s right on both counts.

Typical politicians make promises, then try to change the subject when they don’t live up to them. Trump does that, too, but more often he does something entirely different: He pretends he’s kept them. He shouts it from the rooftops. Then he keeps repeating it until people start to believe it, despite the evidence.

It helps that, as mentioned, they wanted to believe them in the first place. It also helps that Trump’s core supporters only listen to the echo chamber of Fox News, OANN, and conservative talk radio. And that they’re particularly likely to believe conspiracy theories — which are spread more easily and more widely in said echo chambers and online.

Such theories aren’t based on fact or science. In fact, they’re often diametrically opposed to them. But they’ve been Trump’s stock-in-trade ever since he kept pushing his idiotic “birther” accusations against Obama. Is it any wonder he’s so intent on ignoring scientific evidence on global warming and doctors’ advice on coronavirus? They don’t fit his narrative of promises he’s falsely “kept,” so he seeks to discredit them.

Trump’s divisiveness

Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s spent most of his career selling an image of himself that doesn’t square with the facts. A successful businessman who’s filed bankruptcy repeatedly. A guardian of “traditional values” who brags about grabbing women’s private parts without permission. Someone who pretends to know more about everything than anybody else — even though he doesn’t.  

The key to Trump’s hold on his supporters is wishful thinking. It’s a symbiotic relationship: He gets the adulation he craves as a narcissist, and they get to live in an alternate reality in which everything’s peachy keen.

They’re stuck in this mutual dependence, which has nothing to do with issues or Republican principles or anything else except wishful thinking. Those of us who don’t live in that reality want no part of it, because we see it as what it is: a trap.

That’s the source of the divisions we see now in our country — more so, even, than racial divisions, income inequality, partisan divisions, or the gender gap. It’s simple: Trump has gotten nearly half the country to join him in his delusion, and the other half isn’t buying it. Each side views the other as an existential threat to their reality.

That explains not only why Trump got so many votes, but why he’s tearing the nation apart.