Remove Bias and Gain Insight Into "True Trump Supporters"

It is an unfortunate fact that news stories often seem written for the greatest number of clicks as opposed to the greatest amount of accuracy when it comes to conveying information.

In the past year, nowhere has this been more true than any analysis or coverage of President Trump, which is continuously written as a negative form of clickbait. One study posted in late October of last year, just before the election, found that an incredible 91% of candidate Trump’s coverage on broadcast news was “hostile.”

Day after day, night after night, the continuous drumbeat of negative coverage continues. It has become routine for me to watch the news while shielding my eyes and ears from the inevitable President-bashing that will take place.

And so I shouldn’t have been surprised that someone recently claimed Trump supporters are anti-gay, because they resist “marriage equality.” As proof they cited a recent survey by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal that singled out “True Trump Supporters,” meaning that we’re in favor of President Trump on his own merits, not just because we opposed Hillary Clinton as a candidate.

Now I am a sociologist by training but you don’t have to be a a sociologist to point out the obvious: People are entitled to their personal beliefs, including the belief that marriage ought to be between a man and a woman. People can have those beliefs for any reason, whether based on religion or simply because they just feel like it. That’s called living in a free country.

But the writers of the article about the survey, Dante Chinni and Sally Bronston, were biased in their presentation of its findings. Through them, NBC virtually assailed anyone who dared to have a dissenting personal opinion as somehow backward.

“The country’s movement toward accepting gay and lesbian marriage has been remarkable. In just seven years, Pew Research data shows the public opinion has gone from a plurality opposing the unions to a strong majority in support. Republicans have lagged behind the broader national trend and that’s even more evident among true Trump voters.”

The fact of the matter is, opposing gay marriage personally (note: I favor gay marriage) does not mean that you oppose it civilly. Mature adults can tolerate that people have civil rights. To take it a step further they can also say, “I may disagree with gay marriage but I will not discriminate against a legally recognized married couple.”

The survey did not ask whether Trump supporters distinguished between their personal views and their views on the civil rights of the gay and lesbian community to marry. So no conclusion can be drawn about that data, but you wouldn’t get it from the superficial and biased presentation brought to us by NBC News.

In a similar vein, there is another question in the survey which talks about “diversity” and then throws in a word salad about “different lifestyles, gender roles, languages, cultures, and experiences,” ultimately claiming they found that 56% of Trump supporters are “uneasy” about questions like this.

Of course, once again, the implication is that anyone who questions the general vague dogma of political correctness is a Neo-Nazi. This would somehow include me, even though my grandmother, may she rest in peace, was a survivor of Auschwitz.

The fact of the matter, however–and this is based on more than a year immersed in the pro-Trump movement–is that true Trump supporters oppose the ideology which says you cannot have gender altogether. 

We oppose the slippery slope toward radical “progressive” leftism, Antifa lunacy, transgender lifestyles foisted upon children, and most horrifying, the normalization of pedophilia as a legitimate alternative lifestyle. We oppose in the strongest terms the glorification of the “introduction” of minors to this lifestyle–a traumatic, soul-stealing crime, an an excuse for child molestation.

Trump supporters couldn’t care less what consenting adults do in private, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone. What we do care about is an Obama-fueled cultural revolution where Chris Cuomo chides parents for not wanting their little girls to share a public bathroom with transgender men.

Yes, of course, some people have strong religious beliefs and to the extent they cluster in the “True Trump supporters” camp their attitudes will differ.

But we Trump supporters think about the radical attack on gender norms from a much larger perspective. We see how ivory-tower campus extremists and other elite influencers and opinion-leaders glorify the rejection of religion as regressive and oppressive and the nuclear family as the same.

We oppose the notion that it’s a good thing to break children away from their parents, from a home with a mom and a dad, so as to indoctrinate them into a free-floating, borderless world where globalism is the ideal and dictatorship by powerful and unseen elites is inevitable.

The truth of the matter is that the “True Trump Supporter” is not preoccupied with what people do in bed in private. But neither will we seek to destroy and overturn the basic values and traditions that are the bedrock of our nation.

Yes, we are nationalists. We believe that defending our Nation is good.

And we take care of our own people. Including the belief that you should live and let live, and let people have the values that they choose, as long as they’re not hurting anybody else.

Don’t believe people who make money from making up stories, whether for the sake of clicks or cheap political gain.

Insist on quality when it comes to survey research and its interpretation.

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Copyright 2017 by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal. All opinions are Dr. Blumenthal’s own. All rights reserved. Photo by Geralt via Pixabay (CC0 Creative Commons).

– By Dannielle Blumenthal, Ph.D.