President Donald Trump is an habitual  liar. Expert psychologists say he is mentally ill, and I defer to their judgement. I think the Atlantic’s Peter Wehner describes Trump accurately in this snip from an article titled, The Trump Presidency is Over:

Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been.

My opinion of Trump is based on evidence going back to 1987, when his first (ghost-written) book, “The Art of the Deal,” was published. I got the book from the library, read a couple of chapters, and concluded, “This is not a man I can respect.” Everything he’s done since then confirms my early unfavorable impression. Trump’s record of divorces and bankruptcies are unquestioned. The pee tape probably is a fabrication invented by his enemies, but the “Grab ‘em by the pussy” recording is real. I don’t like the guy because the evidence shows he is a bad man.

A majority of Americans also dislike Trump for those reason or for reasons of their own. Trump has consistently been the least popular president since presidential approval ratings have been recorded. And yet millions of Americans like (or claim to like) Trump. In the 2020 president election, 71-million American voted for him.

One of the duties of a citizen is to respect the opinions of others. So, in the spirit of doing that, I offer the following reasons why a person might support Trump.

Some Trump supporters are deluded or deceived

Many Trump supporters, especially older ones, have lived through a transition in journalism. Reporters and news anchors used to maintain strict objectivity in everything they wrote. Lots of people grew up believing news sources that deserved to be believed. You could simply believe what Walter Cronkite told you. Because Cronkite told the truth.

Today, the internet and social media and the major networks are loaded up with news sources that skew every story in the direction favored by their owner/editors and their corporate sponsors. A lot of the news today truly is fake news. You have to sift what you hear from Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow through a truth filter. Some of what they say is blatantly false, but everything they say is designed to turn you into a left- or right-leaning partisan.

Biased journalists and party hacks are not the only deceivers. Many decent people are deceived by advocates for particular causes, including religious leaders. It is right and reasonable for church leaders to oppose abortion. But many religious leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, make abortion the only issue. They have trained up a generation of voters who support candidates who mouth anti-abortion rhetoric, regardless of any other factor. They overlook the actual harm those candidates do after they get into office. A lot of voters went with Trump in 2016, and supported him again in 2020, solely because he talked against abortion in front of anti-abortion crowds. Trump did nothing to curb abortions, but he talked the talk during the campaign.

Some Trump supporters are deceived by what they hear. They are told that Trump has accomplished great things, and they believe it. If you believed anyone else had done as much good as Trump supporters believe Trump has accomplished, you would support that person, too.

Some Trump supporters are just loyal

Folk singer John Prine sang about a grandfather who, “Voted for Eisenhower, ‘cause Lincoln won the war.” The lyric speaks of a remarkable consistency. Prine’s grandfather thought that Lincoln’s great leadership in the 1860s obligated him to vote for the candidate from Lincoln’s party 92 years later.

Millions of real-life Americans live by that principle. I know dozens of people whose political reasoning doesn’t go beyond, “I just always vote Republican.” If you point out that a particular Republican candidate is unqualified, or corrupt, or holds views opposite to theirs, these people will say, “Yeah, I know. But I always vote Republican.”

That behavior isn’t hard to understand. They know their single vote isn’t going to alter the outcome of the election. They may be aware that the party they are loyal to no longer deserves their allegiance. But the other party has never done anything for them, either. So they use their vote to express personal integrity and loyalty to tradition. They know the party has broken faith with them, but they take pride in knowing they have not broken faith with the party.

 Some people support Trump because his actions benefit them

The Trump Administration hasn’t accomplished much. Few of Trump’s ideas could get through Congress, and several of those were immediately declared unconstitutional. So not many changes have happened since Trump took office. But there have been some changes, and certain people have benefitted. Trump’s tax policy changes, for example, benefit the rich. Trump’s executive orders about environmental regulations benefit polluting industries.

A weaker form of this argument can be made for people who just want a strong president. They see America losing stature in the world and they want someone in the White House who won’t diminish America further. They suppose that Trump’s loudmouth belligerence is the way to accomplish that.

It bears remembering that Trump ran against a very unpopular and deeply flawed opponent. Hillary Clinton’s abuses of her email server was a real scandal. She didn’t deserve to win, either.  

Some Trump supporters are bad people

This should not be controversial. There are bad people in the world and in America — people guided by hate or selfishness or fear. These “bad people” aren’t necessarily evil. They may be broken in spirit or mind. They may not choose to be bad. A Psychology Today article from early in the Trump presidency lists five characteristics that research correlates with support for Trump. 

• Authoritarian Personality Syndrome – “Authoritarian personality syndrome—a well-studied and globally-prevalent condition—is a state of mind that is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to one’s authority. Those with the syndrome often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. The syndrome is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.”

•  Social dominance orientation – “Social dominance orientation (SDO)—which is distinct but related to authoritarian personality syndrome—refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones.”

•  Prejudice – “[Trump] routinely appeals to bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims ‘dangerous’ and Mexican immigrants ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers.’”

•  Intergroup contact -- “[T]he racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”

•  Relative deprivation – “There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers are actually being lost due to the accelerating pace of automation

There is also a subset of bad people who are just kind of naughty. I am on the email share list of an elderly Trump supporter, and I get his email forwards. He thinks it is funny to still be sharing criticisms of Obama in 2020. When I get his messages, I often check factcheck.org or Snopes or the Washington Post fact checker and immediately find evidence to debunk the claim in his messages. And when I write back to my elderly friend offering proof countering his message, he thinks it is even funnier.

So, to summarize, Trump supporters have their reasons. Some people support Trump because they benefit from his actions. Other are deceived by dishonest media and thought leaders. And some Trump supporters are naughty or genuinely wicked people. Then, many people support Trump out of loyalty to what the Republican Party stood for before Trump took it over. And lastly, some people support Trump because the Democrats haven’t convinced them that they’d be any better.