If you look at poll numbers devoted to the current US Presidential race, a couple of statistics seem especially noteworthy. Men overwhelmingly support Trump, women Biden, and by wide margins, non-college educated whites prefer Trump over Slow/Sleepy Joe Hiden.^[1]

Now, I’m not suggesting that not having graduated from a college means a voter is unintelligent. Shakespeare, Yeats, Faulkner, nor Hemingway graduated from a college or university.^[2] I myself am a graduate-school dropout, and despite that the school where I taught for thirty-four years offered to pay my way for a Masters, I declined, despite the salary increase and enhanced status an advanced degree would bring. 

On the other hand, most non-anti-intellectuals would agree that college provides an opportunity intellectually to expand one’s horizons. Potemkin Villages, McCarthyism (co-starring Roy Cohn), wintertime invasions of Russia/USSR, statistical analysis, deductive and inductive logic, cultural anthropology, quantum mechanics, ecological biology, etc. are subjects not necessarily covered in high school, or if covered, not in depth. For example, if you knew that Trump’s personal lawyer in the 1980s, Roy Cohn, was once Joseph McCarthy’s righthand man and spearheaded the Red Scare of the 1950s, you might be a bit more skeptical when Trump or one of his minions accuses the Democrats of McCarthyism.

I sometimes wonder if being a Trump supporter is culturally isolating. I mean, none of the late-night comedians can abide him; virtually every world class musician files a lawsuit whenever one of his or her tunes blasts from speakers at a Trump rally. The artists who support Trump tend to be B-listers at best, like James Woods, Nick Nolte, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock. Is the fact that our most celebrated actors, musicians and comedians – Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen and Barbra Streisand, Stephen Colbert and Amy Schumer, e.g. – support Biden over Trump a product of undergraduate brainwashing or a sign of a sophisticated world view? I recently received an invitation to join a group called Writers for Biden, and I’m trying to imagine who would be spearheading a group called Writers for Trump. The poet Billy Collins once told me he didn’t know of any poet who would be willing to read at the Inauguration of George W Bush. I suspect that’s even more so in the case of Donald J Trump.

I will say that Trump has been very successful in creating a cult of personality, as some pictorial depictions of him suggest, echoing, if you will, the enhanced physical renderings of charismatic leaders of yore. 

The truth is that if you buy the argument that the man in heels with dyed blonde hair and orange make-up pictured below is walking through the consequences of a future Biden Administration, you should perhaps consider enrolling in a class devoted to logical fallacies.

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^[1] If you think Trump’s nicknames for his enemies are clever, chances are you dropped out of school in the 6^th grade.

^[2] Easy trivia question: Which of the above worthies did not receive the Nobel Prize for Literature?