Trump supporters are in a cult.
Very seldom do I encounter a Trumpist in the flesh. I'm not a very socially extroverted person. I work from home and my social interactions center around live music performances. My Facebook bubble consists mostly of people with whom I have a significant overlap of beliefs and positions. Twitter is the social media locale where I see what the other side says and believes (or says that they believe!). Recently I have had conversations with two people who were pretty solidly on the MAGA side of the fence. The first, somewhat mildly, the other, full-bore all the way. Both of these people claimed, in preface to giving their political opinions, that they didn't know much about politics.
The first person was what one might assume was a typical Fox "News" viewer, since almost all of her opinions seemed to be recitations of the official Fox News line. Conversations with this person revealed no knowledge whatsoever of national level policies of either Trump or the Democratic Party. Her opinion of Trump seemed to be based entirely on the myth that "they" never gave him a chance, that "everyone" was out to get him. Her opposition to mainstream Democratic politicians seemed to be based entirely on whether their manner of speaking annoyed her. She would bring up Fox News talking points like "Hunter Biden's laptop". Any attempt to engage her on a possible alternative to her mindset was met with the protest of "I don't know much about politics".
The send person was also typical of what I would envision a Trump supporter to be, but in different ways. He was born in a small rural town, currently lived in a somewhat bigger, but by no means urban town, and worked a blue collar job. He seemed to be a decent enough, hard-working family man. He told me that he was apathetic about politics before Trump. He thought all politicians, law enforcement, the legal system - all of it, was corrupt and that voting didn't make a difference. He never voted until he voted for Trump in 2016.
Somehow he thought that Trump would be different.
It's completely understandable to have the position that politicians are corrupt, that the system itself is corrupt. I've known many people over the years who never voted for precisely that reason. It's not an unreasonable position to take. How often have we seen the rich and powerful get away with things that the rest of never could? How often have we seen back room deals take precedence over what is clearly the public interest? Fair enough. But why would any clear thinking person think that it was Donald Trump who would be the one to "drain the swamp" and eliminate the corruption within government?
Trump was (and is) by any objective measure a con man. His business dealings were failure after failure, with unpaid contractors investors, defaults on loans and bankruptcies. But his skill (his only skill) as a conman and convincing liar enabled him to continue to arrange financing for more projects. He would always ensure that his own salary or consultant or management fee was paid, and make sure his own money wasn't at risk as business after business crashed and burned. Anyone who considered what actually took place during Trump's career, versus what he claimed had happened, quickly come to the conclusion that Trump was most certainly not the guy to clean up government corruption. But most people don't look at the details, they look at the big, brash personalities, they listen to the promises without considering the operational likelihood that they can be accomplished. Trump took advantage of this weakness in the average voter. He stood out from the pack of other Republican hopefuls - the other almost 20 fell into two main categories: Traditional candidates like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and John Kasich - senators or governors and a much smaller group that included non-politicians such as CEO Carly Fiorina and neurosurgeon Ben Carson. It was almost predetermined that Trump, in a category of his own, would surge to the front of the pack. He was saying what people wanted to hear, that no one else was saying.
[Trump's barely disguised racism and misogyny, including an admittance on tape of sexual assault, was part of what appealed to some. I didn't get any of that from the person that I talked to, for him, it was the "drain the swamp" aspect.]
One of the things you hear sometimes in religious contexts is "there's no zeal like the zeal of the newly converted". People like my second Trumper had just recently been converted to caring about politics and the catalyst was Donald Trump. And just like a new convert to any religion, these Trump supporters were fervent in the belief. And like any cultist, it didn't matter that the facts didn't line up with the rhetoric. Virtually none of what drew people to Trump was accomplished. The Wall wasn't built, and the only significant accomplishment was a tax cut that mostly benefitted corporations and the ultra-wealthy. (Conservative additions to the judiciary, which ended up with Roe vs. Wade being overturned, would likely have occurred under any Republican president). The "drain the swamp" aspect was a joke, with actions of questionable ethics taking place continually throughout his four years. The "swamp", if anything, got swampier, with Trump businesses even making money by charging the Secret Service for rooms to protect the president and his family and to accompany Trump sons on business trips around the world. (A full list of all the unethical actions is a topic for another day). Yet the faithful stayed loyal.
One of the things that keeps people in a cult, or in any harmful situation, is looking at the time spent as a sort of investment. If you get out, you have "wasted" all the time you spent inside. Related to this is the reluctance for most people to admit that something that they so fervently believed in was a fraud, so they stay on, convincing themselves that what was wrong was right and what was black was actually white. Trump's four years are full of examples of why he was incompetent, dishonest and corrupt. In addition to the tendency of people to want to ignore the inconvenient, Trump himself kept up a steady drumbeat, undermining confidence in everything, the media, Congress, the courts, everything but him.
Trump steadily built up a cult of personality around himself. It didn't matter if he succeeded in any of his promises, it didn't matter when his words were exposed as lies, his people would stand by him. In the case of the second of my two Trumpists, he was already primed to believe that corruption was rampant, it was but a small step to imagine that corruption would be directed at his messiah, the one who said "I alone can fix it". To this man, it didn't matter that no evidence was ever produced in court of election fraud because the judges were corrupt. The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago? Corrupt FBI. Any negative story you read or hear? Corrupt media.
With this kind of mindset, facts don't matter because they can be ignored or explained away. No other source of information is to be trusted, every other source of information is corrupt, all except one man.
If that's not a cult, I don't know what a cult is (and I know what a cult is)
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