Members of Donald Trump’s entourage understandably want to interpret the election results as a mandate for more far-right policies, which include carrying out mass deportations and crushing their political enemies.

But how many Trump supporters think that’s what they voted for?

Many appear not to do so – persisting in their denial not only of Trump’s negative qualities and the extremism of his advisers, but also of the idea that he would implement policies they disagree with . There was the day laborers who seemed to think that mass deportations would only happen to people they — unlike someone like Trump adviser Stephen Miller — considered criminals. There was the restaurateur and former asylum seeker who told CNN that expelling law-abiding workers “wouldn’t be fair” and that Trump wouldn’t “throw them out”; they don’t expel, they don’t expel people who care about their family. There are the pro-choice Trump voters who do not believe he will impose drastic federal restrictions on abortion; voters who support the Affordable Care Act but pulled the lever for the party that intends to repeal it.

This denial suggests that voting for Trump was not an endorsement of these things but a rebuke of the ruling party for what voters saw as a lackluster economy. The recurring theme here is that Trump’s advisers have a very clear authoritarian and discriminatory agenda, one that many Trump voters do not believe exists or, to the extent that it exists, will not harm them . It is remarkable, illusory and frightening. But this is not a mandate.

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During the last weeks of the campaign, when I was traveling in the speaking South among Trump voters, I encountered a tendency to deny easily verifiable negative facts about Trump. For example, one Trump voter I spoke with asked me why Democrats “call Trump Hitler.” The reason was that one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, relayed the story about Trump wanting “the kind of generals Hitler had” and saying “Hitler did good things.”

“Look back at the story of Donald Trump, who they’re trying to call racist,” a Georgia voter named Steve, who declined to give his last name, told me. “If you ask someone, ‘Well, what did he say that was actually racist?’ ”, he usually fails to find an answer. They’ll say all sorts of things, and it’s like, “No, what? Just because the media says he’s racist doesn’t mean he’s racist.

I found this extraordinary because the list of racist things Trump has said and done in the past year alone is long, including slander Haitian immigrants and supervising his former rival Kamala Harris as DEI hire pretend to be black. He made comments about immigrants “poison the blood of the nation” and have “bad genes”, an unsubtle proxy for race. Trump is very rise to the head of the Republican Party began when he became the leading champion of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn’t really born in America.

This is consistent with Trump voters ignoring or disregarding facts about Trump that they don’t like. Democratic pollsters said The New Republicby Greg Sargent that “voters did not hold Trump accountable for the appointment of Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wadesomething Trump openly bragged about during the campaign.” Sargent added: “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the most high-profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency — even though they viewed those things negatively — were his fault. » Charlie, a Trump voter in North Carolina, who also didn’t give me his last name, told me he was frustrated with gas prices, comparing them to how low they were. when he took a road trip during the last year of Trump’s first term. term. That year, energy prices were unexpectedly depressed by the pandemic.

Many Trump voters seemed to simply rationalize negative stories about him as being fabricated by an unreliable press that was out to get him. This shows the effectiveness of right-wing media in not only presenting a positive image of Trump, but also suppressing negative stories that might otherwise change perceptions of him. And because they helped avoid many of the worst-case scenarios during Trump’s first term, Democrats could also be victims of their own success. Many people may be inclined to view warnings about what could happen as exaggerations rather than real possibilities that could yet happen.

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Seeing Trump “go from someone who is loved in the spotlight to someone who is absolutely abhorred by anyone… in the media, it’s completely… I don’t understand. That doesn’t make any sense to me,” another Georgia Trump voter, who declined to give his name, told me. “And usually things that don’t make sense are resolved by the simplest answers.”

This speaks to a quiet dynamic in Trump’s victory: Many people who voted for him believe he will only do the things they think are good (like improving the economy) and none of the things they think be bad (like acting like a dictator). ) – or, if he does these bad things, the burden will be borne by other people, not them. This is the problem with a political movement rooted in deception and denial; your own supporters may not like it when you end up doing the things you actually want to do.

All of this could become moot if Trump succeeds in establishing an authoritarian regime that is unaccountable to voters – in many illiberal governments, elections continue but remain non-competitive by design. If his voters are allowed to, some may change their minds once they understand Trump’s true intentions. Yet the election results suggest that if the economy remains strong, for the majority of the electorate, democracy may be an afterthought.