Why Trump Supporters Ignore His Corruption and Moral Bankruptcy

One of the continued puzzles to many is how Trump's supporters continue to close their eyes or look the other way at Trump's utter corruption and general moral bankruptcy.   Having followed the so-called "Christian Right" for decades, this group believes that the end sought justifies any mean to accomplish it whether it be deliberately disseminating known lies and untruths to spewing hatred towards others.  Thus, in exchange for Trump's promises to appoint reactionary judges and supreme court justices and to push an anti-gay agenda, evangelical Christians rallied to Trump. Never mind his three marriages, his self-admitted and boastful sexual assault of women and his fraudulent business practices.  Outside of the "Christian Right" others in the Trump base seem to be similarly focused on what boils down to a racist and/or reactionary agenda that longs for the "good old days" when white men were supreme on the social peeking order and women and minorities knew their place. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon and how Trump supporters seemingly have redefined "corruption" and immorality while ignoring illegal activity and non-stop lies.  The take away?  Trump supporters, whether or not they admit it, are either racists, misogynists, male chauvinists and/or reactionary religious extremists.  Here are highlights: 

On Wednesday morning, the lead story on FoxNews.com was not Michael Cohen’s admission that Donald Trump had instructed him to violate campaign-finance laws by paying hush money to two of Trump’s mistresses. It was the alleged murder of a white Iowa woman, Mollie Tibbetts, by an undocumented Latino immigrant, Cristhian Rivera.

On their face, the two stories have little in common. Fox is simply covering the Iowa murder because it distracts attention from a revelation that makes Trump look bad. But dig deeper and the two stories are connected: They represent competing notions of what corruption is.

Cohen’s admission highlights one of the enduring riddles of the Trump era. Trump’s supporters say they care about corruption. . . . And yet, Trump supporters appear largely unfazed by the mounting evidence that Trump is the least ethical president in modern American history. When asked last month whether they considered Trump corrupt, only 14 percent of Republicans said yes. Even Cohen’s allegation is unlikely to change that.

The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”

Fox’s decision to focus on the Iowa murder rather than Cohen’s guilty plea illustrates Stanley’s point. In the eyes of many Fox viewers, I suspect, the network isn’t ignoring corruption so much as highlighting the kind that really matters. When Trump instructed Cohen to pay off women with whom he’d had affairs, he may have been violating the law. But he was upholding traditional gender and class hierarchies. Since time immemorial, powerful men have been cheating on their wives and using their power to evade the consequences.

The Iowa murder, by contrast, signifies the inversion—the corruption—of that “traditional order.” Throughout American history, few notions have been as sacrosanct as the belief that white women must be protected from nonwhite men. By allegedly murdering Tibbetts, Rivera did not merely violate the law. He did something more subversive: He violated America’s traditional racial and sexual norms.

[F]or Trump and many of his supporters, corruption means less the violation of law than the violation of established hierarchies, their behavior makes more sense.

Why were Trump’s supporters so convinced that Clinton was the more corrupt candidate even as reporters uncovered far more damning evidence about Trump’s foundation than they did about Clinton’s? Likely because Clinton’s candidacy threatened traditional gender roles. For many Americans, female ambition—especially in service of a feminist agenda—in and of itself represents a form of corruption.

Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity. And in the struggle against that form of corruption—the kind embodied by Cristhian Rivera—Trump isn’t the problem. He’s the solution.

Stated succinctly, Trump's supporters want a return to the white Christian dominated era of the 1950's when America economically dominated the world, gays were closeted, blacks were subjected to the Jim Crow laws, and women were largely confined - at least in their mythic world - to being June Clever styled house wives and homemakers.  As long Trump continues to bring back that awful period in time, there is no wrong he can do in the eyes of his very scary would be fascist supporters.  To my Trump supporting "friends," I suggest they take a good long look at themselves in the mirror and admit what really motivates their support for Trump.