America needs a big healthy dose of cynicism to get over Trump

America’s democracy is being torn apart not just by Trump’s lies, but by the blind loyalty of his followers — and the cynical apathy of those who stayed home, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

AS AN AUSTRALIAN watching the bin-fire of the Trump Presidency, I still cannot fathom that Americans re-elected Trump after his disaster of a first term. America’s problem seems to be a mixture of too much cynicism, mixed with not enough cynicism. What is needed to fix this democratic crisis is a balance of healthy cynicism and trust in each other to collectively overcome Trump’s assault on democracy.

The group with not enough cynicism is Trump voters, including his cult-like MAGA movement. These people make up 49.8% of the voting public and they’re infuriatingly devoid of healthy doses of cynicism about Trump.

As I’ve written about before, Trump’s supporters should not be mischaracterised as motivated to vote for Trump because of economic anxiety. In fact, exit polling data shows that White, non-college-educated voters who are not evangelical Christians in their majority vote for Democrats. It’s the evangelical Christians – college-educated and non-college-educated – who make up the White majorities for Trump.

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What is clear is that Trump’s voters – including the vast majority of White evangelical Christians – are willing to completely turn off all critical thinking, all cynicism, all evidence of Trump’s complete and utter dishonesty, incompetence and ineptitude, in order to maintain their loyalty to him. Come what may, their loyalty seems impossible to budge.

Nowhere is this lack of cynicism more evident than in Trump voters’ acceptance and lack of concern for the President’s blatant dishonesty.

The Washington Post found Trump made 30,573 false and misleading claims (I call them lies) during his first Presidency. Trump supporters might claim that this fact-checking can’t be trusted because it was carried out by the “fake mainstream news”. But this mistrust of mainstream journalism (because Trump said so) and their related blind faith in Trump demonstrates that his supporters cannot spot a lie when they see one.

Trump can say the sky is green and even when his supporters’ eyes tell them the sky is blue, they say, “Yes, Mr President, it sure is very green today”.

Take, for instance, Trump’s famous lie – his alternative fact – that his 2017 inauguration crowd was bigger than President Obama’s. Photos clearly showed this was a baseless lie. Yet, Trump’s supporters just shrug, the same as they do when they’re faced with lies from Trump’s Republican colleagues, or his media allies, whether they be on Fox News or from Elon Musk on X.

Trump voters’ loyalty to Trump despite his dishonesty raises many questions, all related to their lack of healthy cynicism. There’s the question of why so many Americans are willingly lied to. We have all been raised to mistrust liars — when you know someone is likely lying to you, you learn they cannot be trusted. Why is Trump different? When Trump lies, why do his voters not feel betrayed? Do they care that they are being manipulated, or is their love for Trump enough to override this concern?

It also raises the question of why many of the most fervent MAGA members bend over backwards to accommodate, endorse and even fight for Trump’s blatant lies. This includes taking Trump’s lies to extremes, like the lie that Biden stole the 2020 Election, which became the motivation behind the Capitol insurrection — an attack on the heart of American democracy.

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Someone only needs a tiny bit of healthy cynicism to know that a compulsive liar can’t be trusted and that everything they say is likely to be just as untrue as the last thing they said. Yet, it feels like the slim majority of voters – the 49.8% who re-elected Trump after he spent his first election campaign, his first term and all of his second election campaign, lying through his teeth – do not have enough healthy cynicism to see through Trump’s dishonest character. Indeed, they do not seem to have any cynicism at all in their assessment of Trump or the Republican Party he leads.

This lack of cynicism is a huge problem for American democracy. When honesty counts for nothing, dishonesty is not a problem, fact-checking no longer matters and lies can get you elected, democracy is clearly dysfunctional.

Yet, there is another problem of cynicism in American democracy, which is equally as problematic, possibly even more so — the problem of those so cynical about politics that they do not vote at all.

In fact, those eligible to vote who chose not to were the largest cohort influencing the 2024 U.S. Election. With 64% turnout, Trump voters made up 31.9% of the voting age people, Kamala Harris voters were 30.9%, third party voters were just over 1% and those who did not vote were the clear winner at 36%.

There are, of course, many Americans who would love to vote, but whose votes are suppressed by Republican efforts to disenfranchise minorities who vote Democrat. Yet, the majority of those who do not vote choose not to for their own cynical reasons.

Whatever their reason for not voting, such as protesting the Democrats, a relatedly (cynically misplaced) perception that “both sides” are the same as each other, or a belief their vote wouldn’t matter, the non-voting electorate’s cynicism was decisive in the election of Donald Trump. And ironically, their over-cynical assessment that nothing would change if they voted has been met with nothing but bad change because they did not vote.

Whether they like to admit it or not, eligible voters who opted out of American democracy are just as responsible for the consequences of Trump as Trump voters are.

As I continue to watch American politics unfold in utter terror and devastation, I wonder if at least some of these overly cynical non-voters might rethink their choice next election. Hopefully, they might consider whether they want to use the only democratic power they have to make their country better, by voting for the collective good, for valuing honesty over corruption, lies and incompetence, and voting to protect and celebrate American democracy.

Of course, one vote cannot fix everything. It takes a collective effort. That’s the whole point of democracy. It is not up to one person to make the effort to get involved. It’s up to all of them.