The Left Still Doesn’t Understand Trump’s Appeal
By: Steve Qj
Tags: Politics, Donald Trump, Elections, Election 2020, Government

A few years ago, I attended a lecture about alternative therapies. The doctor giving the talk spent a lot of time explaining that while many alternative therapies are no more effective than a placebo, many patients are convinced that they work miracles.

The medical community wanted to understand why this was, so they spent years trying to figure out what these practitioners were doing that doctors weren’t. If it wasn’t the treatment that was making the difference, what was?

The difference, it turns out, was the level of basic human care and attention the typical patient received. Doctors spend an average of seventeen minutes talking to each patient. That doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that their patients have an average of six health concerns to discuss.

The doctor and patient would typically spend about ten minutes discussing and diagnosing the main issue, leaving just over a minute each for the rest. A minute isn’t a long time to talk about something that’s worrying you. It certainly isn’t a lot of time to get an answer that will put your mind at ease. Maybe sixty seconds were all it took for the doctor to be convinced that the problem wasn’t anything serious. But their patients needed more time.

Alternative therapists, on the other hand, give each patient a much higher degree of individual care. They take concerns that doctors might dismiss as trifling or petty, seriously. Their treatments are far more often in the form of personalized, hands-on therapy than a prescription for some pills. As a result, the patient feels valued, they feel heard, they feel like their problems are being taken seriously. And surprisingly often, that’s enough to make those people feel better.

If you set aside the Trump supporters who voted for him because they want a tax break or because they’d never vote for a bleeding-heart Liberal, you find people who’ve spent a lot of time feeling as if they weren’t being heard. People who were so desperate to feel that somebody was listening, that when Trump said the things they wanted to hear and addressed the concerns they had, even though the insincerity dripped from every word, they felt better.

When you’ve been feeling ignored for long enough, even if you have no good reason to feel that way, you’ll throw your arms around anybody who claims they care about what you’re going through. Say what you want about Trump (and there’s a lot to say), he made a large swathe of the American people feel acknowledged. Hillary called fifty percent of them, “Deplorables”.

Biden might have learned from her mistake, but the votes show he’s been ineffective at making them feel heard. Maybe that’s because putting their minds at rest would require a degree of dishonesty he’s uncomfortable with. Maybe he’s unwilling to placate voters with promises of “clean coal” and “big, beautiful walls” when he knows he can’t deliver. I can respect that. But they don’t. They take his unwillingness to say the right things as a lack of interest in their concerns. The Left still hasn’t figured out a way to speak to these people so that they feel heard. It’s a gap that people like Trump will always profit from at the polls.