What Do You Say to Someone Who Still Supports Trump?

Source: ABC News

Advice from a psychologist who studies how minds are changed.

The 2024 election left many people asking the same question: How is this still happening?

How do so many working- and middle-class Americans continue to support someone who has—by nearly every policy metric—failed to deliver real material gains for them?

Why vote for school closures, crumbling infrastructure, rural hospital shutdowns, and soaring food prices?

It’s tempting to reach for easy answers: racism, ignorance, conspiracy thinking. But that misses what’s really going on underneath.

As I wrote in a previous article, The High Cost of Feeling Superior, it’s not about policy. It’s about psychology.

Donald Trump doesn’t promise help. He promises something more powerful: recognition. He offers identity. Belonging. Protection from cultural shame. A kind of emotional refuge for people who feel that the country has left them behind. Or worse, turned against them.

Responding to recognition isn’t stupidity. It’s human nature. And it’s time we started treating it that way.

So, if we want to truly reach people, we need to stop shouting at their reasoning and start listening to their motivation. Here’s how to do it.

1. Affirm before you persuade

This is the step most people skip. We want to jump straight to correction—“Here’s why you’re wrong,” “Here’s what you’re missing.” But the human mind doesn’t work like that.

When someone feels seen, they open up. When they feel judged, they shut down.

That’s where moral identity comes in. People want to see themselves as decent. As fair. As reasonable. If your approach threatens that self-image, they won’t change their beliefs. They’ll just dig in deeper.

Instead of challenging their worldview right from the start, begin by validating what’s real to them.

Try this:

“It makes total sense that you’d want someone who speaks directly and doesn’t talk down to you. That you’d want someone who doesn’t act like the rest of the politicians. A lot of people feel that way.”

If someone tells you they support Trump because they feel forgotten, don’t contradict that. Validate it.

“I get it. For a long time, it felt like nobody cared what happened to working people in this country. Factories closed. Wages flatlined. People with degrees kept telling you what to care about.”

You’re not agreeing with them. You’re giving them dignity. And once that’s established, you have a shot at real dialogue.

Psychologically, this is about reducing reactance—the resistance we feel when someone tries to push us into a different belief. When you affirm, you ease the tension. You give them back their autonomy. And that’s when they’re most likely to listen.

Here’s a failure-proof phrase I use often: “I can understand why you would feel that way.” Not agreement or disagreement, just recognition. Also, this phrase is gold when talking to your spouse (you’re welcome).

2. Redraw the lines of “us”

Trump’s strategy is textbook ingroup/outgroup psychology. “We” are the real Americans. “They” are the threat. Immigrants, urban elites, protesters, trans kids—his rhetoric casts these groups as dangerous outsiders who need to be kept in check.

This creates what psychologists call status threat—the perception that your group’s values, norms, or identity are under attack, even if your material life hasn’t changed.

You can’t beat that framing with facts alone. In fact, laying out your facts may guarantee you don’t beat it. Instead, you beat that framing by expanding the definition of “we.”

This is where storytelling matters. Introduce people to characters who don’t match the stereotype. And not as abstract victims, but as relatable people.

“You know, my neighbor Rosa works two jobs in elder care. She’s an immigrant, and she sends money back to her family, but she also volunteers at the fire department and bakes cookies for the church fundraiser. That woman is this town.”

The more personal, the better. That’s how the brain makes room for empathy—when it can imaginesomeone else’s story as part of its own.

You’re not erasing group boundaries. You’re shifting them. You’re inviting people to widen their circle of concern just enough to let someone new in.

People don’t change beliefs when they feel blamed. They change when they see themselves in someone else.

3. Shift the blame—without shaming

Many Trump supporters have been let down. By globalization. By automation. By rising income inequality and decades of neglect by both Democrats and Republicans.

What Trump offered them wasn’t a fix. It was a villain. And blaming someone—anyone—feels better than sitting with betrayal.

This is where system justification kicks in. People want to believe that the system is basically fair. That they’re still in control. Admitting they’ve been conned—or that the game is rigged—feels like admitting weakness. That’s a hard pill to swallow.

So, what do we do?

We offer a new target for their ire—but we do so carefully.

Instead of shaming people for being manipulated, help them see the bigger con.

“Look, I don’t think your instinct to want change was wrong. But I think the folks who sold you the story—about immigrants being the problem, or teachers being the enemy—were covering for something bigger. While we were all arguing about drag shows and banning books, they were cutting Social Security and shipping jobs to Mexico.”

That’s not a callout. It’s a reframe. It allows the person to maintain their dignity while questioning the narrative they were sold.

People know they’ve gotten screwed; they need to be angry. The goal is to help them point that anger in a different direction—toward systems, not scapegoats.

This is persuasion, not performance

People don’t easily abandon their identities. They don’t just “snap out of it.” They need a new story to live in. One that still honors their values—hard work, fairness, pride in country—but doesn’t require scapegoats for them to feel whole.

If you go into these conversations trying to win, you’ve already lost. The real work is slower. It’s messier. Most importantly, it requires us to resist our own psychological need to feel morally superior.

But if we want to bring people back from the brink, to pull them out of grievance-based identity politics that damage our entire country, we need to meet them where those identities were formed—through emotion, through relationships, and through stories.

So, don’t say “You’ve been duped.”

Don’t say “You’re voting against your own interests.”

And definitely don’t say “You’re the problem.”

Instead, meet them where they are—psychologically. And that might be enough to change someone’s story.