In 2008 I was working at a very busy clinic outside Chicago. We rarely talked about anything except our patients. One of the young Doctors there really liked Barack Obama. This was unusual because most of the other MDs were Republicans. I remember the day after Obama was elected the first time. He was coming to Chicago with his family to give an acceptance speech. My friend said that he was going there no matter what. After work he left and drove into Chicago. It was incredibly busy because of the speech. He had to park miles away from Grant Park where the speech would be held. He told me he didn’t care. He got out of his car and ran at least 2.5 miles to get there. To really understand this you have to know Chicago and some of the dangerous neighborhoods there-especially at night. I remember seeing the speech on TV. There were thousands of people there. Cameras kept sweeping the area and showing people weeping and hugging each other. They all just wanted to be part of the experience and close to the man they voted for.
The reason I thought of this is because the same type of images were being shown at the Trump headquarters after he was declared the winner. I began to think of why people attach themselves emotionally to certain candidates and ignore anything negative about them. Certainly Donald Trump has a lot of negatives with his history and divisive speeches. It didn’t seem to matter.
On Tuesday November 5 I saw a red pickup truck with a huge Trump banner. On one side it said Trump. On the other it said “Take Our Country Back”. I then remembered that I had seen many trucks and cars with huge Trump banners paired with American flags. They didn’t care who saw them. They just wanted to be seen. I have never seen a Harris flag or even a Biden one on any vehicle. There would be stickers on the back of cars or signs in their yards, but never something so in your face as that flag.
It just seems that sometimes people open themselves to people who don’t deserve it. There are libraries written about narcissistic relationships and the difficulty understanding how they occur and how long they last. For whatever reason Donald Trump was able to key into a certain population and they accepted and believed in what he presented. Their loyalty has stood no matter what evidence the media presented against him.
Kamala Harris seemed to be a good person. She had difficulty because of her ties to President Biden and her past liberal history. However some of her ideas were good and she was able to excite a large part of the Democratic Party. However that did not last. She was not able to ignite the kind of passion that Trump did. She lost much of the male vote and even the African American population was not as committed to her as she would have liked. Her issues on abortion attracted a large part of the white female population, but not as many males.
Perhaps one way to think about this is to look at as a process of relationship .The beginning of any intimate relationship has a period of “limerance” where there is almost a golden glow to every moment. That usually ends with the first disagreement. How that is managed predicts the future of the relationship. Kamala Harris had a very short “limerance” and it seemed to fade with much of the population she was trying to reach. Donald Trump’s has lasted now for almost 10 years . He is the hero of the underclass and the working population who will “fix” our country. Everything he does is viewed thru the distortion of his attraction. Harris never had that type of relationship with the American people. There was an initial attraction because she was new and wasn’t Biden. She never was able to go beyond that with the groups she needed.
So for the next four years we will see how long the Trump relationship lasts. In 2028 we will have to go thru this again. Perhaps there will be a new “wonderful one’’ or perhaps we will have to decide what kind of real future we all want and not be swayed by momentary attraction.