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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMany Voters Think Trump's a Self-Made Man. What Happens When You Tell Them otherwise?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/17/many-voters-think-trumps-a-self-made-man-what-happens-when-you-tell-them-otherwise-224019Who is Donald Trump? Ask Americans and many of them will describe a self-made billionaire, a business tycoon of unfathomable success. In research recently published in Political Behavior, we found that voters are not simply uninformed about President Trumps biographical background, but misinformedand that misinformation has serious political consequences.
Large swaths of the public believe the Trump myth. Across three surveys of eligible voters from 2016 to 2018, we found that as many as half of all Americans do not know that he was born into a very wealthy family. And while Americans are divided along party lines in their assessment of Trumps performance as president, misperceptions regarding his financial background are found among Democrats and Republicans.
The narrative of Trump as self-made is simply false. Throughout his life, the president has downplayed the role his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, played in his success, claiming it was limited to a small loan of $1 million. That isnt true, of course: A comprehensive New York Times investigation last year estimated that over the course of his lifetime, the younger Trump received more than $413 million in todays dollars from his father. While this exact figure was not known before the Times report, it was a matter of record that by the mid-1980s, Trump had been loaned at least $14 million by his father, was loaned at least $3.5 million more in 1990, had borrowed several more million against his inheritance in the 1990s after many of his ventures failed, and had benefited enormously from his fathers political connections and co-signing on loans early in his career as a builder.
Of course, someone born into wealth may have great business acumen, and the question of whether Trump is a great businessman is a subjective evaluation. The focus of our work, however, is on whether indisputable facts regarding candidate biographieswhich are often invisible to voters over the course of a campaignaffect public opinion.
It turns out that they do. Using a 2017 University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll, we found that believing Trump was not born very wealthy leads to at least a 5-percentage-point boost in the presidents job approval, even after considering the many factors that can influence public approval ratings. This shift is rooted in the belief that his humble roots make Trump both more empathetic (he feels my pain), and more skilled at business (he is self-made and couldnt have climbed to such heights without real business know-how).
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Many Voters Think Trump's a Self-Made Man. What Happens When You Tell Them otherwise? (Original Post)
Demovictory9
Jan 2019
OP
rmac3075
(31 posts)1. Beliefs
You are talking about people that think 41,000,000 babies are aborted in the US every year, that every illegal family gets $4,056 every month and that white Christians are the most persecuted minority in America.
JI7
(89,289 posts)2. yup, Trump supporters believe what they want to believe
even with proof in front of their eyes they will make excuses. the access hollywood tape is an example of this.
watoos
(7,142 posts)3. Yup, I live among them in central Pa.
and I quickly learned to not waste my time talking politics with them, they are zombies.
anarch
(6,535 posts)4. they stand there and stare at you with mouth agape
and then maybe shake their head and say "fake news!" or something, and then walk off muttering to themselves.
Or they just tell you that's all lies made up by the Democrats to make this great, great man look bad, because they are all jealous of how awesome he is. Puke.