Bad Chart Thursday: How Trump Sees Voters
In response to an argument no one was making, a Trump supporter gifted everyone on a Facebook thread with this week’s featured chart. I think it was secretly a cry for help because it (unintentionally?) mocks Trump. Here’s the chart in question:
The top of the chart is not credited, although it resembles a US government agency pie chart, such as from the Census Bureau, without the footnote that would explain why the numbers don’t add up to 100%. The “International” category is a strange group to include in a pie chart about US voters. I suppose it could refer to Americans living overseas, but maybe Trump and the GOP’s welcoming of foreign interference in our elections confused the chart maker, who assumes foreign nationals are a legitimate subsection of US voters.
Regardless, what this chart clearly shows is that Democrats see voters as individuals, and Trump sees voters as a monolith and as objects—a specific object, the flag, to be precise, but this is consistent with Trump’s consistent dehumanizing of Americans. (To be fair, Trump is on camera fairly frequently attempting to hump the American flag, so perhaps the reverse is true, that he sees objects as people [aka men, because he doesn’t see women as people in the first place].)
In this sense, the chart is possibly accurate but ambiguous. What might an unambiguous and accurate version of this chart look like?
Trump has made clear through his words and actions (and inaction) that he sees only white voters as legitimate, and he wishes to make the United States a white country, more like Norway. Yet, he would clearly take votes from non-white voters because it benefits him, so perhaps an even more accurate chart looks like this:
Whether he’s selling out our soldiers to the highest bidder, diverting funds from a kids’ cancer charity or a veterans’ fundraiser to his own bank account, or spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to golf and loaf around at his own resorts instead of working, Trump clearly sees every American as a source of personal profit. Republicans are not immune from this. In fact, Republicans seem to be his biggest marks. He routinely raises rates ridiculously high when GOP and conservative events are held at his properties. This suggests that the grifter-in-chief sees all American voters as suckers.
His supporters are the only ones who fall for his con, though, reflecting how he truly sees voters who back him, along the lines of the possibly apocryphal quotation attributed to him: “I love the poorly educated.”
At the same time, Trump’s narcissism seems to prevent him from seeing anyone else but himself. He routinely projects onto Americans his own beliefs and hopes and prejudices. “Real” Americans are those who agree with him.
Likewise, he projects his own behavior onto those he sees as his enemy, including Democrats, Mitt Romney, John Bolton, people of color, women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, poor people, Gold Star families, POWs, veterans (especially those with disabilities), blue states, the FBI, the US Intelligence community, and basically anyone who doesn’t vocally agree with him or who tries to hold him accountable for his behavior. Keeping in mind that Trump supporters have always been and remain a minority of American voters, and given that Trump will hurt any one of them to benefit himself in even the most trivial of ways, the most accurate version of this chart shows how Trump truly sees all US voters:
