I believe a significant number of them understand exactly what kind of man Trump is. Some have even compared him to Cyrus the Great, an outsider appointed by God to deliver the Jews from the Babylonians, which tells me they understand he’s a bad guy. But God works in mysterious ways, right? I know my own sister couldn’t refute that Trump was a bad guy and simply resorted to, “Harris would be worse.”
“Remember before the internet when we thought people were dumb because they didn’t have access to information? Yeah. That wasn’t it.”
Personally I think the problem is much bigger than Trump and MAGA, and that only makes it harder to surmount.
Last year Gallup did a poll and found 37% of American adults believe in young earth creationism. I don’t mean to hijack, but it is just your mention of a parallel reality and I think facts like this reinforce just how true that is. If they can be made to ignore all the contradictory data on that, then I think they can trivially be lied to about the state of the US.
I think upthread I believed an economic depression would wake MAGAs up, but on further reflection, I’m not sure if they’d even accept that there wasn’t an economic boom in progress.
I forget exactly where I saw it, but apparently it’s patriotic to pay higher prices now that Trump’s in office.
I also happened to read this opinion piece a few minutes ago. It makes the argument that for the MAGAs at the top, not the rank-and-file, fucking up the economy is part of the plan:
What’s most striking here is the totalizing theory detailed in Project 2025 that America is hopelessly “woke,” and that most Americans have been consumed by what Vought and his ilk see as secular decadence. Project 2025 authors present a view of the nation as a diseased entity that can only be purified by fire. It’s certainly ironic that someone who claims to despise bureaucracy as much as Vought has embraced the bureaucratic approach to Armageddon: simply stopping the checks. But of course, the essence of MAGA is psychological projection, in this case refracted through his frankly theocratic worldview.
I’ve been saying (essentially) that for a quarter of a century or so.
Daniel Moynihan once said “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
The right wing media disagrees. They have built an industry of providing a separate set of “facts” that support right wing beliefs.
The central pillar of this industry is “people are saying”. You can report all kinds of things which aren’t true by reporting that people are saying it. For example, Fox News could broadcast a news item reporting that people are saying inflation has dropped twenty percent since Trump took office. That’s true in the sense that there probably are people saying that. But it’s not true that inflation has actually dropped twenty percent. But a lot of listeners would miss that distinction and believe that inflation had gone down.
I heard a Trump voter on the Smerconish show (SXM POTUS) the other day. He said he voted for Trump for only two reasons, Lower Business Taxes and to see the left wing media heads explode. He said he’s very disappointed in all the shit Trump’s been doing, he’s a grifter, terrible appointments, etc., but he maintained his vote was all the left wing media’s fault for their relentless attacks on the man. It was like he had to vote for him to teach the left a lesson in civility or something. He seemed disappointed in Trump, but angry at the left for putting us in this position.
Look at what you made me do!!!
Yeah, that’s bullshit.
He, like a lot of people, got taken in by the con several years ago and hates having anybody point it out. So, it’s their fault for pointing it out, not his for being a gullible asshat.
Head I win, tails it’s your fault for making me flip the coin.
Except the problem with that is if you felt that way, regardless of how you spoke to others about it I don’t think you’d vote for him again.
When the shit hits the fan they will strut proudly and wear shit on their faces as If was warpaint.
I’ve heard that a lot ever since 2016. “I know he’s not fit for the job but they made fun of us for so long, I really didn’t have any other option!” Up here in Canada as well…there’s a reason Doug Ford keeps getting elected.
And part of it, I think, is that politics is now seen like a sport. In the same way that Yankees and Red Sox fans will hate on each other over the teams. It’s irrational, but in that case it’s mostly just fun. But somehow that mentality became applied to politics, and there the impact has consequences.
I’m really not sure how we got to this point in that regard.
Nah, he still got the lower taxes and fewer regulations. Or at least thinks he did. Those are the most important.
But there’s a social cost to admitting they’re really so sociopathic that saving a few bucks is worth more to them than all the other stuff. But they can’t admit that, so they have to shift the blame somewhere else. Hence, “it’s your fault I’m hitting myself in the face for my own good”
Even if the spell finally breaks, you’ll never hear these people say, “I was wrong about Donald Trump.” Like their emperor, they’re incapable of admitting that they made a mistake. What will happen is they will start treating Trump the way they do George W. Bush nowadays - pretending, basically, that he never existed.
I remember plenty of conservatives in the early 2000s talking about Bush the same way they do about Trump - that he was a divinely-ordained figure who was destined to lead America to greatness. When that didn’t happen, they just stopped talking about him and moved on to the next shiny thing. You might hear Trump and a few of his cronies trash GWB every now and then, but otherwise you never hear any Republicans mention his name. And likewise, you’ll never hear any Republican talk about how they once supported the War in Iraq, about how grateful they were to have Bush in charge after 9/11, or really anything else that happened during his administration.
This is an excellent observation. It fits with the facts as we experience them, and with all that we know about human nature.
Double down on your mistake, then studiously ignore your mistake: it’s a way of life for so many.
It’s older than the internet; it’s religion. This is exactly what the people who criticized the prevalence and respect for religion in America said would happen. We teach people from childhood that it’s virtuous to believe what you are told and to deny reality and logic, that good people ignore facts and logic that contradict dogma while evil people are those whose speak of those facts, and this is what you get when that mindset is applied to politics. The Right is all about faith-based poetics; they believe what they want to believe and consider acknowledging the actual facts to be evil. We created a culture where facts and logic are looked at as tools of the devil, and are paying the price for that.
The Trumpists are going to keep on denying reality no matter how often it smacks them in the face, because we’ve taught them all their lives that doing so is a virtue. It shows faith. And only evil people deny faith.
Don’t forget that this admin’s policies will not only hurt many, if not most, of its supporters, but will still hurt minorities more than they hurt its supporters.
I forget the exact wording for it–I’m sure someone here can post it. This fits in with the “give them someone to hate” method. That’s all they need.
Just to be clear that this isn’t a both sides though.
Harris tried to run on a message of a hopeful future for all and simple policies to help ordinary americans (yes, you may have missed this, as most people just saw edits of interviews that tried to make it appear that she didn’t answer questions).
Trump and surrogates referred to dems as communists, fascists, pedophiles…“low-IQ” was an insult against Harris often, and that she had slept her way into the job, and that generally liberals are the “enemy within” that “hate america”.
If it’s a cage match it’s because one person knocked the other unconscious and dragged their body into the octogon, and is now stamping on their chest.
[Sorry not sure why this is shown as a reply to @Little_Nemo when it’s a reply to @Great_Antibob]
My take on it is a little different but related. Trump’s views are highly sociopathic and his supporters share those views. When the Trump voter that @Procrustus heard says:
… what he really means is “I could have refrained from voting for Trump if grift and incompetence were the only issues, but my vote for Trump was revenge for the left wing media’s relentless attacks on [me]”. But there is (to paraphrase your comment) a psychological cost to admitting to themselves they are so sociopathic - so they have to obfuscate.