The Identity Characteristics that Define Trump Support in 2024 and Now

Trump’s Inexplicable Support

It’s been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in America, AGAIN. We started out last week with Republican primary voters rejecting Bill Cassidy as a Senate candidate in Louisiana and Thomas Massie as a House candidate in Kentucky. Then we moved on to the Trump’s horrific slush fund of grift and paying for his Brown Shirts to terrorize Americans for trying to vote in November — betcha, that’s the plan; just wait for the “stand back and stand by” command. And we finished up with the spectacle of the House adjourning rather than voting on the Iran War Powers Act, which was likely to be passed and limit Trump’s ability to make war in Iran. There were other horrific things, too, but I don’t think anything is gained by going through them in detail, do you? If there is something particularly egregious to you, please bring it up in the comments.

In addition to all of the corruption and political strong-arming, the Grifter-in-Chief held a political rally in Pennsylvania where he asked whether the crowd liked the nickname of “Sleepy Joe” or “Corrupt Joe” to wild applause for both. For me it was the final nail in the camel’s back. I wondered how anyone could get worked up about an insulting nickname for Joe Biden? Who are these die-hard Trump supporters, the dwindling 37% of us approving of the Orange Buffoon? And that buggars the question of who were the seventy-seven million real live Americans who voted for the Insurrectionist-in-Chief in 2024 (I know I keep asking this question, but it truly baffles me)?

Trump didn’t just win the 2024 election, he led in the polls from December 2023!?! And widened his lead after the July 2025 debate. So, what was going on in people’s minds — don’t give me that economic angst nonsense, we knew this is what Trump was going to do; this is what everyone of those 77 million voted for.

Identity Characteristics, Social Relationships, and Presidential Candidates

Luckily, science has an answer for us. As it turns out, there is evidence that we create our social relationships based on the identity characteristics of others. We evaluate all of these traits and if even one of them comes up negative, we don’t associate with them. While your presidential candidate of choice may or may not be a direct member of your social circle, like a celebrity falling out of favor when a gross interpersonal scandal surfaces, it is my conjecture that the folks we use to form part of our identity, like the candidate we vote for for president, do actually form part of our social circle, and the same criteria is used.

The Characteristics that Define Us

Let’s pause here for some boring but important definitions:

• IDENTITY CHARACTERISTICS are traits that we use to define who we are. These traits can be the roles we play and the groups we belong to. Identity characteristics subdivide into personality and social identity traits.
• PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS are the traits that we develop relatively early in life and use throughout our lifetime to define ourselves. The traits typically include the way we respond to situations emotionally, moral codes that guide our behavior, and the story we tell ourselves about who we are. These remain relatively stable over our lives.
• SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS are the traits that form our identity based on our group memberships and social relationships. These includes the institutions we are connected to, our identity based on ethnicity and other cultural aspects of our heritage, gender norms, sexual identity, social expectations. These can change from one situation to another.

The Study of Social Relationships

Okay, then, one more foray into academia before we get back to scratching our collective asses over Trump voters and MAGA. So, deep breath! The researchers used a statistical analysis to determine how personality identity factors influenced the development of our social relationships. Specifically, they analyzed the marriages and friendships of over 40,000 Americans in fifty large cities using data from an Add Health study on friendship networks. The statistical analysis part is important because it makes the analysis objective and eliminates any researcher biases that might creep in, you know, like political affiliation and preferences.

They found that BEFORE we selected the person we married or a friend, we evaluated ALL of their identity characteristics, and if even one of them came out negatively, we didn’t choose them! This finding conforms with findings from behavioral economics that Ye Olde Blogge has reported on before, we make simple emotional decisions based on a like-dislike dichotomy and use our thinking brains to rationalize our choices.

Back to our regularly scheduled snarky sarcasticky profaney analysis. In the 2024 presidential race, several identity characteristics were at play.

The Identity Characteristics of the 2024 Presidential Candidates

Race, Gender, and Age

What’s the single most identifiable identity trait that any of us have? Race.

Any liberal who tells you they don’t see race is just lying and afraid to examine their own racial prejudices. The first things we evaluate upon meeting someone is their appearance, and skin, last I checked, was (a) the easiest thing to see about someone and (b) our largest organ. If you evaluate a race or even racial characteristics negatively, then you’re not likely to include someone from that racial group in your social relationships. It is that simple.

We didn’t have a choice but to evaluate the candidates based on their race either positively or negatively. We can see how that shook out because, remember, if even one characteristic comes out negatively, then that person is rejected.

Another immediately obvious characteristic is gender. Given the blurring of gender roles and norms — I still can’t continence men wearing nail polish, hair bands, and make up; I’m just that old — it may not be as obvious, but with our three presidential candidates it was. Again, given the outcome of two elections featuring female candidates, we can see how that turned out in the evaluation of inclusion.

The third salient characteristics is age. The media narrative had the most influence here, I think. The almost exclusive focus on Biden so old, why he have to be so old stories to the exclusion of Trump’s rapid age related decline is a mystery, but something got the media to evaluate these two that way. And, given that Harris was a spry 59 years old during the campaign, we can see how much age mattered between Trump and Biden and how little it did between Trump and Harris.

Trustworthiness or Duplicitous Corrupt Venal Ways

And the last salient characteristics is trustworthiness (We’re using trust and honesty as a stand in for all of Trump’s duplicitous corrupt venal ways). Trump is the fellow who publicly lied approximately 21 times per day. Who knows how many times he lied in private away from cameras and official recordings? Just for comparison’s sake, most people lie between zero and two times per day. And, Trump’s lies were painfully obvious. Everyone knew he was lying in real time. So, his voters liked his lies in spite of what they’d tell the MSM reporters about not liking what he did but liking his policies. You remember the 2016, the Republican Party platforms, don’t you? Whatever the fuck Trump wants is fine with us. And, the 2020 and 2024 platforms were whitening American and enriching oligarchs while taking away healthcare. You can see from what he’s done in since being elected and what the party has gone along with that it didn’t matter what they told us they wanted. It is whatever the fuck Trump wants.

For Trump voters, the dishonesty, racism, misogyny, and classism was not evaluated as a negative; it was a positive. It wasn’t the bad apple that spoiled the barrel, it was the shit that caught the fly! He got three million MORE votes in 2024 than in 2022 while the percentage of eligible voters casting ballots shrank by three percent and the number of people voting declined by the million people.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I know the predominate narrative is that it was the economy that sank the Harris candidacy and promoted Trump’s. Just for arguments sake, let’s say that’s true — it ain’t, but go with me here — Trump’s dishonesty, racism, misogyny, and classism were still evaluated as net gains because if they weren’t, if both candidates had negative qualities that voters couldn’t countenance, then they woulda stayed home. Instead, Trump expanded his coalition.

We can’t let folks off the hook by crying the economy. As a country we voted for Trump. We knew what he was like and what he would do. We have to look in the mirror and accept that for about thirty percent of the eligible voters, MAGA and authoritarianism is what they want and about thirty percent just aren’t engaged enough to vote. We have to accept that 77 million people liked what they saw in Trump and didn’t like what they saw in Harris.

Seventy-seven million real live Americans evaluated Trump’s identity characteristics and they all came up positive. Seventy-seven million real live Americans invited Trump into the social circles. That’s our reality. Where do we go from here?

Image Attribution

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