A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.
Four days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.
Because most people follow the one that shouts the loudest. The person who claims to have the answer to all problems usually does really well during elections, especially when there are many things not going too well. It doesn’t matter whether these persons actually have a solid solution, they don’t even have to have a plan, only shout they know what to do. People don’t want to spend their time to figure out whether a poliyion consists of empty promises and lies, people expect politicians to be honest. Most of the time the populist politicians not just claim they have the answer and solution to all, they also make their competition look evil by claiming they are corrupt, nazis, communists, pedophiles, etc. “You don’t want to vote for a pedo, do you?” No matter the acts they committed themselves. For example, Hitler claimed to be a national ‘socialist’ while claiming the dirty communists are evil, winning the socialist votes. Putin, who is a full nazi based on his actions, invades Ukraine “to fight nazis”. Trump, who is an extreme right wing politician with a long friendship with Epstein and now a criminal record, claims his opponents are nazis, pedos and criminals and those should never hold office.
Facts don’t matter, it’s all feelings. The one who knows how to hit that usually is very popular during less stable times. So when billionaires claim they can end wars, bring us to Mars, fix the economy, drive out those criminal desease infested immigrants (or jews in nazi Germany setting) (see, making them look super evil, dehumanizing them, creating a villain only they have a solition to), people just think “he’s successful with all his money, lying on such a large scale can’t be possible right, the opposition apparently is super evil, he must be a good candidate”.
TLDR: Fueling hate and anger, claiming to be the only one with a solution usually works to get people’s votes. And the general public is too dumb to see beyond empty promises and they dismiss facts over feelings.