As I wrote about my own cult experience, no one who is in a cult thinks they're in a cult. No one sets out to join a cult. Once you're in, you rationalize behaviors that would have horrified you pre-cult. You make excuses for your cult leader and either deny that you ever believed differently or you portray yourself as an enlightened convert. The goalposts representing success change along with the cult leader's moods. Trumpism is no different.
Trump was re-elected in large part due to a widespread belief that, despite any of his other defects, the economy was in better shape with him in charge. This makes sense if you squint and cover one eye. The traditional measures of economic health were all good from 2017 -- 2019, including low inflation, low unemployment, and robust stock market performance. During Biden's term two out of three of those were still true, but high inflation gave the understandable impression that the economy was in free fall. There were reasons for inflation that had nothing to do with any presidential action (and some that did), but people's short memories apparently wiped out all of 2020 as Trump's bungled Covid response, lack of coherent leadership, and undermining his own team had equally terrible effects. These effects naturally carried over into the early parts of Biden's term. It was hard to argue that Trump wasn't better for the economy with people who didn't understand basic economics.
Maybe some people actually believed what they were saying, but I have concluded, for the vast majority, the talk of economics was mere cover for their cultish support for Trump, right or wrong. They were going to vote for him no matter what he said or did; pointing to the economy was no more than a way to make it sound as if they were making a reasoned decision. Hand in hand with this faux reasonableness was the demonization of anything associated with the Democratic Party. Trumpists and other Republicans have convinced their people that Democrats are communists and pedophiles. They have convinced their base that Joe Biden, a moderate, middle of the road, plain vanilla politician, was a raging dictator.
But the economy was what Trumpists pushed as the rationale for re-electing Trump. I doubt anyone listed siding with Putin over Ukraine and systematically dismantling the government as good reasons to put him back in the White House. But here we are. People who were calling Biden a dictator for trying to cancel student loan debt are cheering on Trump for governing by fiat. People who loudly claimed to be Constitutional absolutists (at least when it came to the Second Amendment) are perfectly fine with an attempt to repeal part of the Fourteenth Amendment by way of Executive Order; those who were losing their minds over a years-old clip of Harris wanting to hold social media companies accountable, claiming it was a First Amendment infringement, are happy with Trump suing media companies, freezing out the Associated Press and deciding what news organizations can cover him; the people who screeched about Trump being held accountable for his alleged crimes were now drawing up lists of "enemies".
The rank and file of the Trump base sees nothing amiss with an unelected "special government employee" rampaging through the government, firing people with no due process, bypassing both the union and their immediate supervisors. They shrug as whole agencies are gutted; agencies whose mission and funding had been authorized by Congress (and incidentally approved by whoever was president at the time). There's no process, no oversight, and certainly no "auditing for fraud and corruption". They don't blink when Trump claims that only he has the authority to decide what the law means or when his appointees testify that some court rulings can be ignored. There's a word for an individual who takes all government power and authority unto himself.
The Trump Cult is not interested in facts or logic. The claims by Trump that he would solve inflation and lower prices has been abandoned, so they have acted as if that were never "a thing". They act as if now rooting out "fraud and corruption" are the most important issue facing the nation, despite zero evidence that anything other than the defunding of programs Trump doesn't like has been accomplished. They have convinced themselves that cozying up to Putin, a brutal dictator, aligns with our national values.
It's always been a cult. Now it's a cult that supports a dictatorship.
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