Notes from the edge of the abyss

Trump's voters - plus who would you back in the Jenrick-Badenoch contest?

Days to go till that election in America. In several states they’ve already begun voting, the polls are close. With a week lost to hurricanes Kamala Harris was taking risks by going on unfriendly networks to get her message over. So was to be found being interviewed on Fox News by one of their least demented presenters, Brett Baer.

Ever since it had been announced that she would do this interview Baer had been under social media siege by Trump supporters pressuring him to give her a terrible time. And he did have one very tricky line of questioning. In saying Trump is a lying, anti-democratic demagogue wasn’t Harris effectively insulting that half of the American people who seemed to be supporting him? Ie if he’s deplorable, isn’t she (in her liberal Hillarian way) accusing them of being deplorable?

It's actually a very good question – for a social psychologist. For a candidate it’s an attempted gotcha. Small D democratic politicians – of whom Trump is not one – are forced to make a distinction between the voter – whose voice is the voice of God – and the opponent. There is no good answer such a politician can make to Baer’s point. If Trump voters are fooled, then they’re fools, if they’re lied to, then they’re gullible, if they just haven’t noticed the mist basic aspects of his personality, then they’re ignorant, and if support him because he’s a lying racist, then – well you get the point.

Baer sidetracked himself with a quasi-fact check on Harris’s direct quotes concerning Trump’s characterisation of his political opponents as an “enemy within” who might need to be dealt with by the authorities. Trump was now saying he had been misunderstood. But Harris had (as they say these days) the receipts. And she reminded Baer that Trump was the one to “demean, belittle and diminish”.

But what you might call the Baer Necessity – the essential unanswered problem – bewilders so many of us who, voteless but affected, watch the contest with extreme trepidation. Why do so many Americans intend to try and put this obviously monstrous and dangerous narcissist in the world’s top job?