eric a blair wrote:
well to be charitable it's not crazy to suggest health care CAN be simple...that we have indeed made it complicated.
Single payer would be a bit simpler overall, true, but I'm pretty confident that Trump's remarks had nothing to do with that.
well wrote:
I just think it's a useful exercise to consider other points of view and other motivations that some people may have for supporting him. It's easy to say something like "they support him because they are stupid" but I don't find that to be very constructive
Ah. Well, I understand why you feel that way; I used to agree with you. I think bipartisanship and considering other points of view are important, too, but the reality is that the Republican Party turned its back on the notions of compromise and mutual understanding a while ago (see, for example, the article from 1994 below).
The in-your-face stupid articles and comments on popular right-wing outlets like Breitbart, Drudge, and Infowars are available for you to peruse at your leisure. Radiowaves full of angry voices calling liberals anti-american traitors are there for anyone to tune into, as they have been for decades. This administration is 100% tapped into those base sentiments. Attempting to combat it by being nicer to its supporters is a futile exercise at best. I would argue that it's actually counterproductive.
You can try to put yourself in their shoes and go digging for some sensible, less ugly explanation as to why they believe the things they do, but, frankly, there's no there there. When you come right down to it, the people who continue to support Trump are either bigly misinformed, scared of minorities, or willing to stand side by side ignoramuses and bigots for the sake of bad economic policy. That's not to say they're all necessarily deplorable, but none of them have a leg to stand on anymore.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/12/us/republicans-get-a-pep-talk-from-rush-limbaugh.html