The world is a messy, complex place, and I think it's a natural, human desire that it be simplified. Some of us know that that desire isn't attainable, but the wish is too powerful in others.
We see the wish in action in some crime stories. Take Spiderman, for example. He's got certain advantages over policemen. Aside from his "spider strength" and his ability to swing through the air on his webbing, he also has no need to follow the rules policemen are meant to follow. He doesn't need a warrant to enter a building, and he catches criminals red-handed, wraps them up in webbing, leaving them and the evidence of their crimes for the police to find. The reader or viewer is happy that the bad guys can be caught without his having to follow all those silly rules.
There has been lots of newsprint (an archaic noun, I know) spent trying to figure out the Trump voter. It has always amused and puzzled me that people who consider themselves true Americans, from the real America (quaint small towns in the popular imagination in the heartland), should take as their champion a loudmouth from the anti-American no-go zone of New York City. What does he offer them?
Well, he's the guy who offers a simple world. He tells his followers that America is a hellscape, and that it's simple for him to clean it up. Why are we so nice to criminals? Why can't police knock a few heads now and then? (Of course, in the Trumpian imagination, these thugs who are getting their heads knocked are mostly black and brown men and their welfare-cheating women.) Trump wants it to be OK for police to shoot shoplifters on sight. The judicial system is too expensive and takes too long (I'll leave it to the reader to roll their eyes at the irony here).
In short, Trump nourishes his followers' worst instincts and calls them virtues.
A little aside about Trump's "hellscape": Make America Great Again? It would be considered an outrage if a liberal were to suggest that America is somehow no longer great. How does Trump get away with that assertion? Well, it's a simple matter if your predecessor in the presidency is that office's first Black. I have said before that, for a certain kind of American, a Black president upended their worldview. When Trump tells them that eight years of Barack Obama left a shattered America, they believe him.
Funny thing is, Trump is trying to convince everyone that, in Biden's not-quite-yet-four years, the city of Washington DC has crumbled to pieces and is unrecognizable. You may recall that, as a result of Trump's actions on January 6, 2021, he bequeathed us a damaged Capitol building with shit on the walls. He also left the city with a tacky hotel it didn't have before. That hotel is now a decidedly un-tacky Waldorf Astoria, and the Capitol has, of course, been cleaned up and repaired.
The city is better off since 2021, and we don't need Donald Trump to come back and fuck it up again.
