Why They Stand By Their Man: A Selection from David Frum’s Trumpocalypse (2020)

“Have you ever known anyone swindled by a scam? It’s remarkable how determined they remain, and for how long, to defend the swindler—and to shift blame to those who tried to warn them of the swindle. The pain of being seen as a fool hurts more than the loss of money; it’s more important to protect the ego against indignity than to visit justice upon the perpetrator. We human beings so often prefer a lie that affirms us to a truth that challenges us.

Any Trump supporters who allowed themselves to recognize Trump’s swindle would immediately confront other, even more hurtful, doubts. If Trump was lying, did that imply that their trusted friends on radio and television had deceived them too: Sean and Rush and the Fox & Friends gang? Fox News and the Facebook feed have become for many Americans friends more intimate and more trusted than family or neighbors. The validation of their prejudices by television and Facebook is a validation of themselves. And so, for the sake of flag and faith, millions of decent conservative Americans countenanced scandals, wrongs, disloyalty, and crime. . . .

Trumpism drew its strength from older Americans, especially the baby boom generation. Until the year 2000, Americans over the age of sixty-five did not regularly vote notably differently from those younger than them. But as the country has become more diverse—and with the rise of Fox News after 1996 and Facebook after 2006—older Americans have been radicalized. Over-sixty-fives voted for Trump over Clinton fifty-eight to thirty-nine in 2016. Over-sixty-fives are much less likely to care about climate change than younger Americans—and radically more likely to describe immigration as ‘a threat to our way of life.’

People over sixty-five are less able to recognize fake news when they see it, more likely to be influenced by it after they see it, and vastly more likely to share it on Facebook. And very soon, there will be a lot more of them. America’s elderly population will grow fast. People born in the peak year of the baby boom, 1958, turn sixty-five in 2023. By 2030, almost one in five Americans, 19 percent, will be older than sixty-five. . . .

American media culture in the 2020s not only reports on polarization—but enflames it. Americans still get more news from television than from any other source. By far the most-watched form of television news is local news, relied upon by 37 percent of Americans. That market is dominated by the lavishly pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcast Group, 193 stations in 100 markets reaching 40 percent of the American television market.

The second most important television news type is cable, a medium of course dominated by Fox News, now reinforced by the new Fox-on-meth One American News Network (OANN).

Next to television in importance are social media. About four in ten Americans say they get news from Facebook. About two in ten also get news from YouTube. Facebook and YouTube are the most important conduits for alt-Right and pro-Trump disinformation. Together, Fox News and the right-wing Daily Wire accounted for about 10 percent of the top ten thousand news stories on Facebook in the first quarter of 2019. The single biggest advertiser on Facebook in the summer of 2019, after the Trump campaign itself, was the Epoch Times, a far-right source of pro-Trump conspiracy theories and false news.”—David Frum, Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020)