Why Has Donald Trump Lost So Much Conservative Support?
In the case of Donald Trump, the impulsiveness and lack of restraint are so noticeable that numerous conservatives have pointed to those characteristics are reasons to shun Trump. The National Review ran a set of 22 short essays by prominent conservatives who oppose Trump. At least half drew attention to Trump’s intemperance: “at least Ross Perot kept his craziness confined mostly to private matters” (David Boaz), “a boor” (Mona Charen), “restraint is clearly not in his vocabulary or his character” (Steven F. Hayward), “Trump says he would order the military to kill the families of terrorists . . . a direct violation of the most basic laws of armed conflict” (Michael Mukasey), and “the id is supposed to be balanced by an ego and a superego ... Trump is an unbalanced force” (John Podhoretz).
One would expect liberals to impugn Trump differently, drawing attention to Trump’s racism and sexism, but even liberals are pointing to his impulsivity. When Hillary Clinton had the convention floor, her criticism of Trump built up to this line: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
As this punchline shows, opponents can easily portray Trump as a threat, a maniac whose recklessness will cause an immediate disaster.
According to some social scientists, the most significant psychological feature underlying conservatism is sensitivity to external threats (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2014). This makes Trump particularly repellent. In fact, conscientious people become more conservative when a nation is under systemic threat, which partially explains the link between those traits (Sibley et al., 2012).
Given human frailty, every conservative candidate is likely to have some flaws, but in many cases these flaws do not appear directly threatening. In the past fifty years, the U.S. has had Republican presidents who have variously been senile, clumsy, doltish, and paranoid. Though unappealing, these characteristics convey unreliability, not explicit danger. Only two candidates—Goldwater and Trump—have shown a level of impulsivity that allowed their opponents to portray them as direct threats. Goldwater came across as impulsive because he seemed overly keen on attacking the Soviet Union militarily. He was portrayed as a harbinger of nuclear war, and this, among other reasons, caused him to lose in a landslide. Trump is not only sanguine about nuclear war, he also expresses other forms of imprudence that Republican national security experts have evaluated as direct threats to American safety. Moreover, he has derided Gold Star families and retired members of the military, an institution that defends America against threats.
Given that Trump is the embodiment of an impulsive and dangerous person, it might be surprising that he became the Republican candidate at all. One likely reason for his success is that he appeals to voters who believe that people on the margins of society, such as Muslims and immigrants, deserve to stay at the margins. This attitude, which psychologists call right-wing authoritarianism, is not exclusively conservative, but it is more commonly found among conservatives than liberals (Duckitt, Bizumic, Krauss, & Heled, 2010). Trump also promulgates the idea that hierarchical social arrangements are desirable—some classes of people deserve to be at the top and others deserve to be at the bottom. This attitude is called social dominance orientation, and it is also not exclusively conservative, but more common among conservatives (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). Some conservatives, like Reagan, believe that we live in a just society that already has this hierarchy and we simply need to maintain it. Trump, however, is an anti-elitist populist (Oliver & Rahn, 2016). He proposes to upend the status quo and restore a once regnant hierarchy. This is still an appeal to social dominance orientation, albeit one that Americans have not recently seen. These appeals to right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance likely caused enough Republican-leaning voters who share authoritarian and social dominance attitudes to overlook both his formerly liberal attitudes and his problematic temperament.
