In an interview with Business Insider, House Rep Jamie Raskin, D-Md, reported that some rioters called Nancy Pelosi’s office, “asking whether there was a lost and found because they forgot their phone there, or they left their purse or what have you.”
“The officers quickly got on the phone and said, yeah, just give us your name, your address, your social, you know, and we’ll tie up those loose ends,” Raskin said.
The reports of people calling Pelosi’s office to ask for their stuff back is shocking in that it demonstrates the infantile mentality of Trump supporters. These are people who apparently have no functioning concept of right or wrong, and who have never faced consequences for their actions. They really can’t be considered “normal adults” and most of them really do belong in an asylum or some kind of group home environment where they can be kept under proper supervision.
One of the greatest challenges of Trumpism for liberals is understanding that a large part of the American public does not function in ways that we consider “normal”. Trump’s most ardent supporters are people who can’t read and comprehend anything written above a fourth grade reading level, cannot follow any of the complex rebuttals to Republican disinformation that appear in the media, and usually can’t even do their own taxes without multiple temper tantrums and ultimately needing someone to finish the forms for them.
Fortunately, intellectual abilities tend to increase with each generation, and it appears that part of the reason that today’s GOP is so hostile towards younger people is that trend may be accelerating, which explains younger Americans disregard for GOP rhetoric. It’s very likely that if an average Trump supporter in his fifties or sixties were to be evaluated by a school psychologist today, he’d be classified as having ADHD, a reading disability, emotional control problems, and below average intelligence.
One of the key challenges to dealing with the phenomena of Trumpism will be figuring out how to manage this population of angry, barely-literate, paranoid and heavily armed individuals who make up the “Trump base”.