When asked who is the politician most divorced (no pun intended) from facts it would be Donald Trump. His whole life has been of a con artist grifting to make money, and since 2015 playing to voters without regard for the truth. But we keep asking, how is it so many of his supporters are gleeful to follow along? New data strongly suggests as NBC reported this week, that his base is easily led by Trump due to the fact they are utterly uninformed about the facts of the political world around them.
Since 2015, the year of the infamous escalator ride followed by the disgusting racist language about Brown people, I noticed a trend among our friends to have like-minded people sit around a fire pit or gather for dinner and commiserate about the state of our politics or the fate of our democracy. More than in prior years there seemed a real need for a community of logic-based conversations and connections with others who care about our core values of the country. In these gatherings of friends, I started to note not so much a polarization but a higher awareness about the type of people who gathered and the types of people we talked about. It was not elitism, snark, or disdain but a clear realization that there was a very distinct undereducated subsection of the country that had fallen for the antics and crudeness of Donald Trump. But why did they exist in such numbers and what accounted for their lack of awareness about the issues of the day?
In 2018, two political scientists at Brigham Young University, Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope, carried out online surveys of almost 1,600 respondents who completed a political knowledge quiz, which asked five questions. Group loyalty, they found, “is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.” Republicans use partisan cues to judge peers’ political knowledge to a greater extent than do Democrats, coinciding with the polarization in the American electorate: “Low-knowledge respondents, strong Republicans, Trump-approving respondents, and self-described conservatives are the most likely to behave like party loyalists by accepting the Trump cue.”4
As we were to learn from data in all 50 states Trump attracted a disproportionate and in historically researched terms an unprecedented number of what have become termed “low-information voters”. They were easily duped into whatever Trump was spewing, be it from xenophobic anti-Muslim rants, fear-mongering about Brown people at the border, the Chinese taking jobs from these shores, or racial stirring over Black people and the American Dream regarding housing. Redlining was again a dog whistle in Trump Land. If the conservative partisan appeal could be made into an easy-to-understand emotional rallying cry, forget the facts and just sign up the under-educated Trump voters.
The president has made politics about culture—not just policy. He found a way to attract new voters, particularly rural and non-college educated whites who previously thumbed their nose at conventional politics. Because he’s a pure attention merchant, he doesn’t care what screen he appears on, as long he is there. Because he lacks an ounce of shame, it all works, with or without the blessing of the legacy press.
I find it troubling for our political culture and democracy to have these low-information voters continually creating negative impacts on our nation. What we know from data collected over the years is a large section of Trump voters simply do not know certain basic facts about government be it the process of law-making or the basics of law and order within the framework of governing. As a friend pointed out this past week during a conversation on our lawn there is a more powerful undertow within the Trump base in that they do not come to their news reading or viewing with the necessary tools to reason or think about not only complex issues but how to evaluate new information. What they are left with then is listening to harsh right-wing media and politicians such as Trump for their ‘information’. Or as I say, their talking points.
My parents were not college graduates, in fact, my father was a Depression-era kid who never had more than an 8th-grade education. But in our home, the concept of thinking being fun was a foundation that was instilled in our family. Dad would urge me to do the crossword puzzle in the daily newspaper as it would challenge me. I do not sense that the Trump base desires to be challenged mentally, and as evidenced by their lack of political education preferred to do things with little thought being required. I would love to be proven wrong. But since 2015, there has been too much data to show what we long suspected is indeed true.
The latest evidence is reported by NBC’s Ben Kamisar with illuminating details from a new poll on where voters get their news. Or more to the point of this post do not get their news. Biden has a notable advantage among registered voters who still rely on traditional news sources (newspapers, TV), while it is shown that Trump has a massive lead — 53 percent to 27 percent — among the uninformed, who don’t follow political news at all. The tossup category is people who get their news mainly from digital and social media: Trump has a narrow 3-point edge among this group.
“It’s almost comic. If you’re one of the remaining Americans who say you read a newspaper to get news, you are voting for Biden by 49 points,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the poll alongside Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt.
Need I write more………?
CAFFEINATED POLITICS 
It’s obvious that Trump supporters are an ill informed electorate in America!
It was so obvious that Trump supporters are not only ignorant, but gleeful over their lack of education. So many examples, but the one that pops center stage was their approval of how Trump acted the first weekend he was in the Oval Office in 2017 when he traveled to the CIA. It was there that he demonstrated again, a lack of regard for the men and women who have died working for this nation while CIA operatives. His bulky suit and word salad took place in front of the wall that has a star for each person from the CIA who has died in the line of their work. It was there that Trump went into campaign mode and spoke glowing about himself and sent another stinging rebuke to the press–another group who works to make democracy more solid in this land. A place for quiet respect turned into an ego-driven crazy rant. It was a most shameful display, one that his equally shameful and tawdry base of supporters ate up. It was so telling about what his supporters were then and continue to be.