I wonder if a large chunk of the audience read this article's position that they should listen to other people, threw away this idea because they couldn't empathise with the author, and didn't watch the video, confirming the research mentioned.
This is the Facebook/Snapchat era, scan headlines or memes for 5 seconds of outrage in bite size nuggets and then move on to the next outrage.
Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? Probably some variation of that, but worse.
People watch videos of political opponents all the time and don't relate to them better afterwards. How does Jon Stewart exist if that's the case? How does Hannity?
What's missing?
Kudos for trying to understand someone else.
I showed a clip of him speaking to a bunch of Indians who saw virtually nothing of him except whatever they read in TOI. (TOI and most other Indian English language papers can be thought of as being Indian branches of the cathedral, at least for this purpose.) They started by mocking him, yet they quickly quieted down and watched the video with rapt attention until the end.
After watching this video they were very much against Trump cutting off the rest of the world to Make America Great Again. As in, they were using Trump's language and accepting his premises, in spite of knowing they were wrong.
This is one of the great failings of democracy. People like Trump (or Obama, who had similar abilities) can blatantly lie or just say nothing meaningful, and people will relate to them and follow them.
Supporters hear the (real) problems he describes and a commitment to fix it. The details are where it breaks down.
Many public people who are good at what they do are amazing at flattening complex problems and making people understand and agree. Bill Clinton in his prime was capable of that -- he had a Steve Jobs like magnetic force.
If you look at some of more right-wing political people, many of them lack charisma, but use speech and body language techniques that are taught to evangelical pastors and others and are really effective in those audiences, but come off creepy to others. Kinda like how Mormons are awesome telemarketers because of skills acquired on missionary work.
Combined with the fact he may be suffering from early Alzheimer's/dementia like his father and you have present day Trump.
Trump has what best can be called a serious addiction to praise. It his hard to imagine empathizing a narcissist but from an abstract level it isn't much different from many psychological ailments. When Trump is criticized he may appear to be strong to some but I now imagine based on watching him it is extremely painful for him.
He also tended to flatter powerful people, so the most hostile people were probably the small businesses he randomly refused to pay. Now he's made many powerful enemies during the campaign.
I have to imagine this is wildly more stressful.
Those crazy idiots are up to it again! You won't believe that
you're the same species as these people once you see this.
As all right-thinking people know, the best flibbets are the ones
that gyrate. Of course you know that; everybody around you knows
that, that's why you were taught in school about how important
gyration is in flibbets. I mean, fucking duh, right?
But wait until you get a load of what these doofuses recently vomited
forth on their latest Sunday morning talk show appearance:
[very unflattering picture of the speaker here]
"Gyrating flibbets are... the worst things ever. Everyone
knows that flibbets... should wobble."
And they go on for a while, but as you can imagine they never give
any reason for their crazed beliefs about flibbets! Ha ha! I won't
even dignify their rant with a link. How could you think flibbets
should wobble? What's a flibbet experience without a bit of quality
dizziness brought on by the gyration?
(I don't know if it's just me or what lately, but I've also been seeing a lot of claims lately that "there is no evidence that..." when in fact there is some sort of evidence; simple denial of existence is now substituting for even sneering dismissal. Evidence is actually pretty easy to come by in a complicated world; any time you here that there is no evidence your ears should perk up. The problem that makes the real world such a challenge is that it's too easy to find evidence to support any given position, not that there isn't any.)