Trump divides us and ignores COVID-19 for the same reason

It’s all there in black and white. I’m not talking about race; I’m talking about a mindset. If you want to understand why Donald Trump has retained his base popularity with about 40 percent of the American public, read on.

It’s no accident that his Republican supporters often decry higher education as something to be avoided. Because it encourages people to think for themselves. Nor is it a coincidence that the largest bloc of Trump’s support comes from people with a high school education or less.

This isn’t a commentary on intelligence, but rather on a way of thinking.

Trump speaks to a base that has never learned to think beyond binary choices. Everything is black or white, good or evil. This is one reason Trump is popular with so many evangelicals, beyond supporting their favored goals (by codifying bigotry under the guise of “law and order” and “religious freedom”). It may even be the biggest reason.

Many evangelicals look at the world as a binary choice: You’re either for them or against them. It even says so in the Bible. Trump speaks their language because he views the world in the same way. You’re either for him or you’re guilty of treason. Off with your head. You’re as expendable as any powerless pauper caught begging on the steps of the emperor’s palace. You can go to hell.

The binary trap

But it’s not just evangelicals who think this way. It’s a common mindset among the less-educated voters who constitute the largest bloc of Trump supporters.

Before you object by saying, “Not all high school dropouts...,” let me assure you, I get that. There are people who haven’t made it through high school who wind up being incredibly successful. But they don’t get that way by thinking in binary terms. Some may become plumbers or electricians, and in doing so learn to navigate complex systems that I don’t have a clue about. Others may become innovators without the benefit of a college education because the don’t need one in order to tackle complex problems.

But many people who enjoy the challenge of such problems do go to college, and college, in turn, encourages the kind of thinking that addresses complex issues.

Don’t bring up complex problems such as Russian espionage or attempts to bribe Taliban soldiers to kill Americans. Don’t bother him with the nuances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only are those problems too complex for Trump to digest, solving them won’t help him politically with his base. They want easy answers to binary choices, so he provides them. It doesn’t matter whether those answers actually work or not (anyone wanna try injecting bleach to stop the virus?). What matters is that they represent “us” in the binary “us vs. them” world of those who think in black and white.

False choices

Trump distracts his base with an array of false choices to imagined or trumped-up problems that could be solved by great minds working together. But he doesn’t care about solving problems; he cares about perpetuating them so he can perpetuate his business of hawking snake oil that keeps you sick and makes him richer. So, in Trump’s world:

You’re either for “law and order” or the “rioters.”

You’re either a Trumpist Republican or a socialist.

You’re either a “patriot” who stands for the national anthem or a “traitor” who kneels

Commentators have noted that Trump uses this strategy to divide the nation, pitting his allies against an imagined evil empire of straw men populated by everyone who’s ever said an unkind word about him. And that’s true. But the deeper truth is that he’s not just dividing us for the sake of dividing us, he’s pandering to the binary thought pattern that’s far more pervasive among his base than it is among America at large.

It’s not just them, it’s all of us

That’s not to say that binary choices don’t appeal to the rest of us, too. They’re easy. We wish complex problems could be solved magically, by snapping our fingers and making them disappear. So when Trump tells us things are getting better, that the coronavirus will just go away on its own, we want to believe him, even though we know better.

That’s why Trump got elected. He appealed to the wishful denial in all of us that problems would just go away if we wished and hoped and prayed (to the right god) hard enough. We got distracted by binary choices and ignored the real problems.

And the real problems got worse in the meantime, which led us to where we are today.

Of course, our entire political system is built on a binary choice between two parties, both of which are adept at making empty promises they know they can’t keep. It’s a system that reinforces kind of thinking Trump thrives on, and he, in turn, has reinforced that system by making the choice so stark there’s no way around it.

Vote for a third party? Not an option this year. Even if you don’t like the Democrats’ focus on cancel culture and identity politics, or are discouraged that opponents of universal health care still run the party, you’ll vote for Joe Biden because the alternative is identity politics as defined by the KKK and health care as dispensed for maximum profit — or not at all. On the other hand, if you’re in Trump’s camp you’ll vote for that white supremacist, draft-dodging, womanizing coward because the alternative is someone who’ll let gays and blacks and illegal immigrants threaten your jobs and your power. At least, that’s what you’re afraid they’ll do. And Trump wants you to be afraid of it, so that’s what he talks about.

No easy answers

It should come as no surprise that Trump remains focused on binary choices: Obamacare or no Obamacare, monuments or no monuments, police or no police, masks or no masks. It works for him because he and his base are on the same page: looking for easy problems that provide easy answers and involve scapegoating when it comes to real problems like race relations and a pandemic run amok, because such things are too scary or overwhelming to face.

Commentators say Trump has tapped into something, but they often seem to miss what it is: a childlike desire for easy answers that don’t exist to complex problems that do. Like a snake-oil salesman, Trump provides placebos to his “children” as he lets them die of coronavirus by refusing to warn them about the very real dangers in the world outside. And they worship him because of it, which is exactly what he wants.

Trump may seem like a generous father figure, but he’s the kind of father who empties his bank account to give his spoiled children everything they want for Christmas, then walks out and leaves them homeless when he can’t pay the mortgage.

That day is coming. The question is whether it will come first for the Republican Party or for the United States of America.

But that’s not a binary choice. It could very well be both.