How loyal is the Donald Trump crowd? Well, Trump himself once bragged that his supporters would stick with him even if he shot someone in the middle of Times Square. On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel revealed that this may be one Trump boast that isn’t BS. Apparently Trump’s supporters are so loyal to him that even the most outrageous revelations about him wouldn’t sway their votes.
Kimmel, like most of the reality-based world, wants Trump to release his tax returns. After listening to Trump’s numerous excuses for why he isn’t willing to open his kimono, Kimmel wondered–what if Trump actually did release his returns? Would there be anything in them that could potentially faze the pro-Trump crowd? To find out, Kimmel devoted his latest segment of “Lie Witness News,” which surveys people on made-up topics, to an effort to find out what would happen if Trump’s supporters learned about potentially dicey issues in the Donald’s tax returns.
Watch the results here.
Kimmel’s team hit the streets of Hollywood to collar Trump supporters and ask them what they thought about what lurked in their man’s taxes. We got an idea where this was going when Kimmel’s reporter told a man the Donald wrote off his first two marriages as “entertainment.” His response? If there’s a loophole, you should use it. Would he say that if his wife, sister, or daughter were around?
A woman was told that while Trump has told the world he’s worth $10 billion, he actually told the IRS that he’s only worth $42,000. To this woman, however, it’s no big deal since “we all fib a little bit.” Apparently this woman has a funny definition of a little fib.
When another woman was told that the Trump Foundation donated $100,000 to the legal defense fund of Walter Palmer, the dentist who killed Cecil the Lion in cold blood, this woman thought it was just peachy. After all, in all likelihood Palmer would have had trouble affording his mounting legal bills before officials in Zimbabwe opted not to charge him.
Along similar lines, another woman thought there was no problem with Trump donating to the legal defense fund of serial child molester and child pornographer Jared Fogle. That same woman had no problem with revelations that Trump was “leasing” his wife, Melania, to the campaign. After all, “every person’s leaseable.”
We already got a look at what makes the Trump crowd tick when Trevor Noah and “The Daily Show” subjected some of them to the kind of “extreme vetting” their man would implement for everyone who wants to immigrate to this country. But if anything, Kimmel and his crew provided an even more revealing look. For the better part of a year, I’ve wondered how anyone could remain loyal to a guy who plasters private cell phone numbers on social media, mocks the disabled, condones violence at his rallies, and other outrages too numerous to count. Well, now I have part of my answer.
I’ve seen this mentality before. Many of my longtime readers both here and at Daily Kos know that I was tricked into joining a borderline cultish campus ministry in my days at Carolina. After getting out, I learned that their church’s pastor had been deliberately hiding his past ties to Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the more notorious “campus cults” from the 1970s and 1980s. When I told my now-former friends about this, their response was basically, “so what?” They were so determined to convert the campus that they were not only willing to overlook this pastor’s blatant deceit, but actually became complicit in it.
And now we seem to be seeing this same mentality with the Trump crowd. All that matters to them is defeating Hillary Clinton–no matter how many outrages come out about their Donald. That should send a chill down anyone’s spine.
(featured image courtesy Arturo Pardavila III, available under a Creative Commons-Attribution license)
