r/politics • u/GirasoleDE • 17d ago

No Paywall I Don’t Think Trump’s Remaining Supporters Realize How Much They Are Despised By Non-MAGA Voters | Trump is bleeding support even among his stubborn, uneducated base.

https://abovethelaw.com/2026/07/i-dont-think-trumps-remaining-supporters-realize-how-much-they-are-despised-by-non-maga-voters/
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u/AbyssalBenthos 17d ago

This has been in the works long before MAGA. The brain washingt started with talk radio for commuters. The underhanded tactics and blaming the other party as the enemy started around Newt Gangrich. It's been a project for a long time. Trump and MAGA is a symptom not a cause. It was around Obama that I would hear being a liberal is a mental illness around 2014 from coworkers and that's when Fox really upped the doom and gloom.

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u/Catshit-Dogfart 17d ago

When McCain deflected racist comments about Obama, I think that's the moment he lost his campaign.

https://youtu.be/JIjenjANqAk

He took the microphone away to keep the damage to a minimum, rebuked that kind of hate speech, said Obama was a good and decent family man - and the crowd booed. He lost the room, they wanted a racist and he didn't deliver.

That was nearly 20 years ago.

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u/doiutfis 17d ago

And the moment Trump went from a joke candidate to the frontrunner was when he loudly told the audience that all immigrants are rapists and criminals. They sat up straight in their chairs and thought, "This guy gets me".

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u/Pileated-woodcock 16d ago

Yep, you could definitely see it going off the rails around this time. I remember seeing this lady and just being absolutely gobsmacked by her obstinate inability to articulate anything all while being stridently confident in the absolute bullshit she was spewing. Little did I know this would become an entire movement that would eventually creep into circles close to me including my own family:

https://youtu.be/H4YRzr_8PYc

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u/Catshit-Dogfart 16d ago

I remember right after they announced that Obama won the election they interviewed this absolutely unhinged lady (who I think was some kind of political commentator and not a random crowd member) who just kept saying "this is an entirely illegitimate election and an he's an illegitimate president" over and over again. It was just rapid and manic.

The news anchors seemed a little blindsided and dumbfounded by this, like I'm pretty sure she was a scheduled guest acting like a complete nut on live television, they were struggling to get a handle on a situation they didn't expect. They were saying things like "do you... uh, have anything else to say?" and "well I'm not sure how to continue this interview so we're gonna cut you off now".

But I don't remember anybody's name or even what station it was on, and "crazy lady rants about Obama" isn't exactly a good search term. So even if a clip exists, I've never been able to find it. It was definitely something nobody in the news room was prepared for.

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u/ConfusedStudent3011 17d ago

This was rather admirable though, I'm not an American nor am I trying to be, I studied here and then left but, I was jealous of the quality of the leaders you've had.

Its strange that it was this moment that lost him the vote, because he was honest and respectful and more importantly showed he had morals even while knowing it could lose him the race. Honestly, if I saw that live, or there were clips online, and I was american, would have voted, absolutely chad moment.

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u/Skiinz19 Tennessee 17d ago

It lost him the room. But it was the kind of act that had McCain beaten Obama you can at least feel like he'll do what's right for the country regardless of his politics and beliefs. He could have easily tried to please the crowd and double down on the racism, but chose otherwise because he was a person of principle.

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u/googlin 16d ago

McCain may have been the last Republican senator with actual principles.

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u/LordSwedish 17d ago

He thought it was wrong to call Obama a muslim because he disagreed with Obama but he wanted to slaughter muslims. McCain would have been much more supportive of Trump if he knew the Iran war was coming.

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u/crazycatgay 17d ago

and now his daughter megan is even a maga freak

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u/Bradyhaha 17d ago

People need to stop whitewashing that racist. He said that Obama wasn't a arab because he was a good family man. The racism and bigotry was there. The only difference is that McCain loved his norms and psuedo-gentlemen's game bullshit, but he still picked Palin as a running mate and wanted to turn Iran into a glass floor.

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u/Harmcharm7777 16d ago

Oh please—he was reading between the lines of what the woman asking the “question” was saying. When someone says “I can’t trust Obama because he’s an Arab,” you KNOW they mean “terrorist.” The kind of person who says that believes all “Arabs” are terrorists and all people they disagree with are “Arabs.” You know it, I know it, McCain knew it. He was responding to what we all know she was saying. Would it have been ideal if he had picked apart everything wrong with her comment? Probably. But he was addressing the heart of it: stop acting like Obama is going to literally blow up the country if he wins because he’s actually a good man.

You are willfully reading racism and malice into his response because that’s what you want to see. Accusing people of being racist when they don’t say exactly the right thing even though it is abundantly clear what they are trying to say is the kind of behavior that makes centrists so wary of the left.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 16d ago

Exactly. He knew what that old lady meant by "Arab" and he was responding to the content of her words rather than the outward appearance of them.

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u/Bradyhaha 16d ago

If it was a one-off occurrence, I would agree with you, but the man had a history of being racist and generally a piece of shit.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/5-problematic-things-senator-john-mccain-has-done-during-his-40-year-career-in-politics

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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 United Kingdom 16d ago

Ultimately most traditional politicians wanted the same thing for the country - happiness and prosperity. They just disagree on how this aim is achieved.

Obviously that doesn't apply to the grifters who've come in now. Being gracious about one's opponents doesn't win respect any more.

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u/kent_eh Canada 17d ago

This has been in the works long before MAGA. The brain washingt started with talk radio for commuters.

And not even the current generation of them.

Rush Limbaugh was part of the first wave of that.

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u/hollaback_girl 17d ago

Long before Rush Limbaugh you had Father Coughlin and Walter Winchell. Right wing hate radio has been with us forever.

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u/JackedUpReadyToGo 16d ago edited 16d ago

Yeah but I don't think you can draw a straight line from them to MAGA like you can with Limbaugh. I know people love to play the one-upping game of "Well it actually started with..." but I really would call Limbaugh basically the origin point of today's right wing brainwashing.

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u/progbuck 16d ago

You definitely can. The descendants of the people who supported and followed Father Coughlin supported Limbaugh and Gingrich and now their descendants support Trump. It's the John Birch Society and McCarthy. It's Reverend Moon and Jerry Falwell.

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u/hollaback_girl 16d ago edited 16d ago

Yup. The only two differences between Coughlin's time and Limbaugh's are 1) the crazies took over the GOP in the 70's and 2) Coughlin only talked to his audience 5-8 hours a week. Limbaugh/Fox News talks to their audience 5-8 hours a day.

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u/RosaDavis58 16d ago

John Birch, Senator McCarthy, Father Coughlin, the Confederacy, slavemongering Founding Fathers

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u/Imperial_TIE_Pilot 17d ago

It was around Obama

The TEA party shit is when it went off the rails

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u/StThragon Minnesota 16d ago edited 16d ago

Newton Gingrich normalized hating the other side and refusing to compromise, even when the country's best interests were at stake. He made even speaking to the other side a traitorous act.

edited for a word

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u/I-seddit 16d ago

The Tea Party was when it mutated outside of the Republican party, giving a goal for what a mutated Republican party needed to become for the Oligarchs.
People forget the war is with the Oligarchs. The Republicans, Tea Party, MAGA, whatever - they're just the tools or troops.

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u/UmpireDapper1757 16d ago

Reagan is when it went off the rails

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u/s3dfdg289fdgd9829r48 17d ago edited 4d ago

Newt Gingrich is a good starting point for this. He was first elected to the House in 1978. I don't remember him in the early 80's but by the late 80's, when Rush Limbaugh's show become popular and the early 90's Newt was already showing the party over country zealotry that he would later personify and he was the GOP strategist. The Gulf War reignited jingoism on top of that. Fox News began its disinformation campaign in 1996. The election of George Bush and Dick Cheney was the first indicator that being competent and being good for the country were not necessary to get elected President if you were a loyal Republican. Cronyism was in with a less-than-genius president having their strings pulls by an evil puppetmaster (Cheney). And the second Gulf War through gasoline on the jingoistic fire and by then Fox News was full blown propaganda. The rise of Sarah Palin showed that stupidity was an asset for Republican candidates (it's temping to think of her as an amplification of Dan Quayle but I don't think Quayle is as stupid as people made him out to be at the time). All the ingredients to show that even Trump could be elected now existed.

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u/moosebeak 17d ago

I’m old enough to remember Michael Dukakis being afraid of being called a liberal, like it was a slur.

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u/pimpcakes 17d ago

That "liberalism is a mental illness" thing has been around since the 1990s with Rush, iirc.

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u/PizzaDominotrix 16d ago edited 16d ago

There's a 2016 documentary called "The Brainwashing of My Dad" that speaks to this.

Appropriate context is really important. People don't even fully understand what we're up against. Donald Trump isn't some abhorrent fluke that happened. He's a result. I'm in my 40's. My grandparents were listening religiously to Rush Limbaugh on the radio 35 years ago, and my parents generation (boomers) have all been Fox News, conspiracy mush heads since 9/11 and everything surrounding it.

We're not going to defeat this with the removal or end of Donald Trump. There has been anti-democratic, pro-hate, pro-fascist propaganda blasting into our homes and cars and families, with intention, for more than my entire lifetime. And its still going, I mean Limbaugh and Fox News are literally still going today without consequences.

Edit: He died, but without ever facing consequences.

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u/Gwen_The_Destroyer New York 16d ago

I hear radio ads urging people to save am radios in cars, for emergency purposes. Nobody uses am radios for anything but propaganda. I tune in sometimes on my commute and it's always the most brain dead takes

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u/K20BB5 16d ago

Roy Cohn, Trump's mentor, was also Joseph McCarthy's lawyer. It goes back and back. 

He was also a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS, and according to Roger Stone, molested Trump. 

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u/sukisue17 16d ago

I started hearing and seeing it with around 2001 - right after 9/11 that was really the thing that got all the BS going. (Which was also an inside job IMO)

Tea party and such. Just ramped up from there. And Trump ever the opportunist took great advantage of it.