Stop Dunking on Trump Supporters
No one is beyond reach—unless everyone around them refuses to reach out.
Why have so many American leftists spent the last nine years dunking on Donald Trump’s supporters instead of seeking to understand them? With Trump likely to become the Republican nominee in this year’s US presidential election, it’s a question worth asking.
In many online spaces, Trump supporters are routinely dismissed as cult members and white supremacists consumed with misogyny. In the best case, the idea goes, they want to take America back to the 1950s. In the worst case, they want to demolish our liberal democracy altogether and replace it with either fascism or theocracy.
Of course, there are radicals and bigots in all political movements. But the idea that these intellectual pathologies extend to Trump’s entire voting base is inaccurate and unhelpful. Moreover, these attitudes only seem to further energize Trump’s supporters, who’ve come to believe (not unreasonably) that they’re despised by American “elites.”
