How to explain the inexplicable? Trump continues to dominate the polls and benefit from colossal support despite his numerous legal setbacks and a criminal conviction on 34 counts (a first for a former American president). If his empire took a famous decline the day after his conviction (400 million dollars lost on the stock market), at the same time, his supporters gathered around 50 million dollars in a few hours to support his campaign.
Is the American voter blind and deaf? No way. What differentiates Trump from the rest of the politicians around the world, and therefore from his rival Joe Biden, is that where everyone else has supporters, he has fans. In the first sense of the term: fanatics.
Donald Trump is above all a reality TV character. People will continue to worship him no matter what he does or says, even if it is false, vulgar, excessive, dishonest, etc. Trump the showman has succeeded in uniting all these people who, faced with successive crises and an unsatisfactory response from politics, have lost confidence in the ability of leaders to be able to save them.
In “Engineers of Chaos”, a remarkable essay on the rise of populism, Giuliano Da Empoli analyzes: “Through the brutality of his language and his provocations, through his improvised speeches (…) Trump expresses an authenticity which distinguishes from traditional policies, on which everything seems to slide with the same unalterable indifference.
Trump unites because he entertains. He understood before anyone else that politics is a circus, and that to get the public in his pocket, you just have to be the best clown.
