I apologize in advance for offending anyone here with the next few paragraphs, but a lot is on my mind with this issue, so here goes:
The whole point of this article, and it's an issue with Trump's supporters for a while now, is their utter lack of regard for anything negative that can be said about their guy, ever. Any character flaw, any policy flaw, any inexcusable personal attack, anything that could reflect on their guy in a negative light, they disregard—or worse, explicitly excuse. All the while, any other candidate with that kind of flaw would be kicked to the curb. I've seen it at times on here. I try not to engage too much in these arguments because of the point of this, and others like it:
Trump supporters, on the whole, are not listening to reason.
No forum can effectively function if one side of the argument is constantly doing the equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling. This is idol worship. I cannot stand idol worship.
Now, shutting down that kind of argument here would not fix the overall problem that we have. The Trump supporters I have seen outside of this forum tend to be lower-class/lower-working-class, male, and not the kind that pay close attention to politics otherwise. They support Trump because he's famous, and because, like them, he's obnoxious (you see a lot of dirty jokes on these kind of people's Facebook profiles). They tend not to pay any attention to the typical political discussion channels; they're not reading Politico or Drudge Report, but they may catch a bit of the news on TV at night or listen to the radio once in a while. Most of the people who do follow politics fairly closely consider the Trump campaign to be a disgrace and a laughingstock. (There is one exception: the Sarah Palin vein. But again, there's some overlap with the crude working class, given Sarah's sex appeal.)
As a working class guy myself (albeit one who, admittedly, probably has a much more middle-class sensibility despite my income), I'm not going to bash the working class for supporting Trump. They see the world in a much more simplistic, reactionary way. But it poses a huge problem for those who legitimately fear the guy and what he's capable of doing. It's very difficult when, even here where we have generally well-informed commentators, any discussion turns into just short of an all-out brawl; think of how difficult it is to get anything to stick with the rest of the base! It is as if they have already decided that Trump is their man and nothing they can hear will change their mind.
