Former president Donald Trump is, if nothing else — and at the risk of the understatement of the 2024 election — a man prone to hyperbole. His tendency to inflate numbers to bolster his image has now cost him dearly both in criminal and civil court.
But with a presidential campaign to run and now a Manhattan criminal trial to fend off, it’s full steam ahead on the exaggeration game. The most recent talking point: that hundreds of millions of Americans not only support Trump, but love him.
“When I walk into that courtroom, I know I will have the love of 200 million Americans behind me,” Trump said April 13 during a rally in Pennsylvania, “and I will be fighting for the freedom of 325 million Americans.”
He repeated the comment two days later on social media. He also offered a version of the 200 million claim last year.
By Monday night, his son Eric Trump added on Fox News, “They’re going after the former president of the United States — a person beloved by hundreds of millions of people in this country — over $130,000 [in hush money] from eight years ago.”
This is, to put it mildly, ridiculous. But unlike most of Trump’s ridiculous claims, it’s something worth delving into.
We’re at a tenuous time, after all, and the number of Americans who might be incensed by the criminal justice system prosecuting and convicting a man they “love” is relevant. Devotion is a commodity for Trump in the 2024 election, given his personal problems.
The first thing to note is that, if 200 million Americans love Trump, they have a funny way of showing it. Just over 74 million people voted for him in the 2020 election. That was both 7 million fewer than President Biden and just 37 percent of the number Trump claims love him.
If 200 million Americans loved Trump, he would never lose an election, because that’s roughly 60 percent of the population.
The second is that even voting for Trump doesn’t translate to loving him. An increasing number of Americans vote for candidates they don’t love or even particularly like. Indeed, voters who disliked Trump are why he became president in the first place; he won a decisive number of votes from those who viewed both him and Hillary Clinton unfavorably in 2016.
And even many voters who do like him clearly don’t love him. We can somewhat loosely define loving him as feeling “very” or “strongly” favorably toward him.
In the 2020 election, exit polls showed 38 percent of voters said they strongly approved of Trump — a percentage that translates to about 60 million voters.
But the most recent polls suggest those who feel quite strongly in Trump’s favor is now lower: between 20 percent (a New York Times/Siena College poll) and 29 percent (a Fox News poll). If you apply those percentages to the 2020 electorate, that would be between 32 million and 46 million voters.
Of course, this is just voters. It’s possible many people who fail to demonstrate their love for Trump at the ballot box nonetheless do love him. And you could actually make an argument this accounts for tens of millions of Americans.
A 2020 survey of nonvoters from the Knight Foundation found 23 percent of them had a “very favorable” opinion of Trump — similar to 24 percent among actual voters. Given that there are about 260 million Americans of voting age, that would suggest north of 60 million American adults had a very favorable opinion of Trump at the time, whether they actually turned out to vote for him.
And now we’ll really stretch this to include children. Perhaps many millions of people who love Trump are unaccounted for in these surveys because they are incapable of expressing that love at the ballot box or are excluded from polls, by virtue of their status as minors. This would be curious given Republicans have fought against lowering the voting age, but nevertheless.
Getting good data on kids is hard, mostly because many of their parents are lame and haven’t bought them phones (sorry, my own kids, not happening) to respond to pollsters. But Highlights magazine in 2016 conducted a survey of 6- to 12-year-olds and found their priorities didn’t seem to align with Trump’s brand. A 2018 AP-NORC/MTV survey included teenagers as young as 15 while surveying people under 35 years of age; it found just 12 percent of the sample strongly approved of Trump.
The survey didn’t break out the older adolescents, but it’s safe to assume their views of Trump aren’t appreciably better than young adults, who love Trump significantly less than older Americans. If we charitably assume even 20 percent of children — including babies — somehow know Trump well enough and love him, that would add about 15 million Trump lovers to the above totals.
So all told, on the high end we’re talking about approximately 75 million Americans who it could be argued love Trump — just more than 22 percent of the population and 37 percent of the number Trump claims.
Of course, when you are cautioning the justice system against convicting you, the idea that you’d potentially inflame one-fifth of the population sounds a lot less scary than “200 million.”
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/23/trump-claims-200-million-americans-love-him-how-many-actually-do/