Trump and the truth about his supporters

It’s certainly not because we’re brainwashed. It’s because we like what we see after decades of establishment failure and outright lies about immigration, economics, international relations, and American life.

It’s yet another common refrain in media circles:  President Trump’s supporters are brainwashed in some fashion, beholden only to what he tells them, and unable to understand the danger he poses, as stated by his detractors.  In this view, supporting the former President is akin to being a member of a cult and therefore the millions of people that support him need to be deprogrammed.  Vanity Fair helpfully illuminated this belief in 2021, asking “Can Trump’s Cult of Followers Be Deprogrammed?”  The article focused on a supposed expert on cults, Steven Hassan, who was once a member of the Moonie cult himself, and who authored a book, The Cult of Trump.  “Trump, he holds, has all the characteristics of a cult leader, and his followers the qualities of a cult, from the all-consuming devotion to a single malignant narcissist to the daily consumption of ‘alternative facts’ to immunize them against cognitive dissonance (a.k.a. reality). It’s a frightening prospect to consider millions of Americans being brainwashed by a reality-TV celebrity with a now defunct Twitter feed…The question is whether Trump’s followers can be ‘deprogrammed’ the same way that, say, followers of Sun Myung Moon or L. Ron Hubbard have been.”  Even more helpfully, “Hassan says they can be, but the process will require not only empathy and individual family involvement but a wholesale change in how social media and information systems separate fact from dangerous fictions.” “I would put undue influence or mind control as the number-two most important thing that we address for the planet,” Mr. Hassan explained. “Because otherwise authoritarianism, using social media, is a threat.”  Note who he deftly weaved together the Trump supporters are brainwashed meme with the idea that democracy itself is at risk – because of President Trump and his deluded supporters.  A year later, Politico did much the same, writing “The One Way History Shows Trump’s Personality Cult Will End.”  This time an “expert on autocracy assesses how far America has slipped away from democracy, and what it will take to get it back,” once again combining the two disparate memes in an entirely circular fashion.  Author Ruth Ben-Ghiat had “seen enough of Donald Trump’s behavior over the preceding five years to know how neatly he lined up with other strongmen she had studied and how his autocratic tendencies would influence his behavior whether he won or lost.”  Now, “she professes even more concern that Trump’s sway over the GOP has permanently transformed the party’s political culture.”  “He’s changed the party to an authoritarian party culture,” she told the publication. “So not only do you go after external enemies, but you go after internal enemies. You’re not allowed to have any dissent.”   The Atlantic was equally helpful when they followed up on this topic just last year, claiming “The End Will Come for the Cult of MAGA,” noting “Those who call Trumpism a cult can point to his popularity with Republican voters increasing with each of his four criminal indictments.”

So prevalent is this belief in media circles, that rarely is the notion questioned in any serious manner and it frequently permeates coverage beneath the surface in matters large and small.  For example, CNN noted in their recent takeaways of President Trump’s massive victory in the South Carolina primary that Republican voters “claim to believe his 2020 election lies,” implicitly suggesting that anyone who questions the 2020 election, only does so because former President Trump told them to.  The Guardian said something similar after the former President’s victory in Iowa last month, writing “Trump’s resounding Iowa win shows his 2020 election lie is working.”  Even if you set aside the obvious insult inherent in claiming Trump supporters are part of a cult, too ignorant to think for themselves, it’s worth considering what this position actually means in practice and whether or not anything like it has happened in the entire history of the world.  There have certainly been dictators and other leaders that have enjoyed the blind obedience of their subjects – Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. – but under normal circumstances, that obedience comes after they are in power, when refusing to blindly support them comes with a cost up to and including your own life.  President Trump’s supporters, however, suffer from an opposite dynamic, where expressing your support subjects you to ridicule at best, ostracism in some circles at worst.  Putting this another way, especially when he is currently out of office, few if any benefit from still supporting him, meaning they do so by either choice, blind obedience as the media believes, or a lack of knowledge about his supposed shortcomings.  Before we consider which option is most likely, we should attempt to quantify the amount of support the former President has in the first place.  Though the MAGA movement in general is frequently treated and talked about as some kind of extreme fringe, clung to by a small percentage of retrogrades, limited to white rural voters as Nobel Prize Winner and New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman recently suggested, the data reveals a far larger and broader movement.  According to the Real Clear Politics average of polls pitting President Trump against President Biden, Trump has not fallen below 42% in the past two years, reaching a high of 47.5% support last month.  In the 2020 election, there were a total of 158.38 million votes cast, suggesting that President Trump has a floor of around 66.5 million voters.  Elections are, of course, a zero sum game and that figure will include some who do not fully support Trump, but cannot bring themselves to back Biden under any circumstances.  We can consider President Trump’s approval rating to reduce this effect.  According to Gallup, his approval while in office ranged from a high of 49% to a low of 34% after the January 6th riots, suggesting a committed base of support, those who will back him under almost any circumstances, of around 34% of registered voters, a total of some 54 million people.  While a few of these supporters might fall into what the media would describe as the “uneducated” camp, it stands to reason that those would be part of Trump’s softer support, as represented by the peak of his polling and approval rating.  Putting this another way, next to no one in the country did not hear about January 6th and 34% still backed him anyway.

This brings us back to the original question, how likely is it that 54 million people can be brainwashed by a man the great majority of them have never met?   The “Moonie cult” mentioned by the expert earlier was also known as the “Unification Church.”  It was founded in 1954 by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who claimed he was instructed by Christ himself to finish his mission and create a state of purity for humanity, one without sin.  Moon himself was only 15 at the time and a fervent anti-communist.  He lived until 2012 and reached the peak of his powers in the mid 1980s when he was estimated to have 3 million followers around the world.  The science fiction author, L. Ron Hubbard, is the founder of the Church of Scientology, which many also consider to be a cult.  This too was founded in the 1950s, and in 2007 claimed to have 3.5 million members, though that number has been received with widespread skepticism.  There are studies that suggest total membership is less than 100,000.  Regardless, the Unification Church and the Church of Scientology are among the two largest groups in the history of the world that have been called cults – most instances of the phenomena number a few hundred or at most a few thousand – and both achieved their numbers over the course of decades.  In comparison, President Trump boasts about 18 times the total number of supporters, and given he didn’t become a politician until 2015, would have to have attracted his followers in less than a quarter of the time for the Unification Church and less than a tenth of the time for the Church of Scientology.  By any measure his would make him the most successful cult leader in the entire history of the known universe, so outpacing anyone else that the comparison begins to lose its meaning.  For Trumpism or MAGA as a cult to be true, one would have to believe that President Trump was gifted with a hitherto unknown power to mass hypnotize tens of millions of people he never met and do so almost instantaneously, not to mention near permanently.  Needless to say, this stretches credulity well past the proverbial breaking point, suggesting that there is an alternative scenario, namely that President Trump’s personal charisma, style, anti-establishment rhetoric, and policy positions resonate with a large segment of the American electorate, making him another extremely popular politician, not unlike others of his kind throughout history.  Teddy Roosevelt, for example, was known as an almost irresistible personality, attracting the support of millions even when he had little chance of victory.  In 1912, he ran as a third party candidate and still managed to garner 27% of the national vote in what was considered a futile third shot at the White House.  Some might have said Roosevelt had a cult of personality in the popular sense of the phrase used to describe high profile celebrities, but no one suggested that being a Roosevelt supporter was the equivalent of being an actual cult member.  In this view, President Trump is no different, a modern incarnation of a familiar phenomenon, which prompts the question:  What do his supporters see in him that the mainstream media, the establishment in general, and some in his own party do not?  What makes him special in their eyes?

This, of course, is an impossible question to answer with complete accuracy, but to me at least, a few things are apparent.  First, Trump reflects deep seated, near-reflexive disappointment with the establishment’s seeming inability to solve the challenges facing the country – in some cases for decades – if not their general lack of interest in these challenges in the first place.  Name an issue, almost any issue, and it is likely to be a topic that has remained unresolved for as long as a good portion of the country has been alive.  Ronald Reagan infamously offered amnesty in exchange for border security as part of a so-called comprehensive reform deal in 1986.  At the time, there were an estimated 3 million illegal immigrants in the country.  A mere twenty years later, that number had tripled, and George W. Bush was another President insisting comprehensive reform was needed.  During this same period, US manufacturing jobs rapidly dwindled.  In June 1979, 19.6 million people were employed in the sector.  By June 2019, that number had declined by 35 percent and many jobs had also declined in pay.  The establishment, meanwhile, demanded more outsourcing and claimed it would ultimately benefit everyone, that the loss of these jobs was essentially for our own good in a global economy.  The combination of a continued influx of illegals and the dearth of well paying, middle class jobs that required no advanced learning, solidified the sense that the establishment has complete failed to protect the American worker.  President Trump might well be unlikely to solve both problems himself, but at least he speaks directly to the issues and has shown some preliminary results.  Between 2017 and 2020, before the start of the pandemic, manufacturing jobs increased by 100,000 more than they had in President Obama’s entire second term, a net increase of more than half a million jobs.  Conversely, the number of border crossings dropped dramatically, before increasing more dramatically than ever before since Joe Biden has been in office.  Undoubtedly, Trump has also been aided by an establishment that regularly refers to anyone who believes a country requires a secure border a racist or a xenophobe, and anyone who questions globalist orthodoxy, an isolationist.

Internationally, the establishment has not fared much better, particularly after the 9-11 terror attacks and our disastrous response.  Even prior to, challenges in the Middle East had seemed largely intractable with the failure to secure peace between Israel and Palestine, and the failure to contain Iran, but until the Twin Towers fell, the issue appeared safely beyond our shores and wasn’t something the average American dealt with on a daily basis.  The Bush Administration’s decision to launch two wars that would prove to be unwinnable fundamentally changed that dynamic and the establishment’s refusal to admit their own errors compounded the distrust.  The war in Afghanistan would be the longest in American history, ending in abject defeat after the country was returned to the hands of the very group that provided safe haven for the 9-11 attacks.  Iraq didn’t fare much better.  Ten years after the invasion, President Obama withdrew all of our troops, Iran filled the power vacuum, and ISIS was born.  The combined cost of these failures was astronomical in blood and treasure, $2.2 trillion in absolute dollars, almost all of it borrowed, pushing the total cost to an astounding $8 trillion according to Brown University.  Over 7,000 soldiers died while they don’t even bother to estimate the total number of injuries anymore.  As Brown University put it, “Common combat injuries include second and third degree burns, broken bones, shrapnel wounds, brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, nerve damage, paralysis, loss of sight and hearing, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and limb loss.  The true count of Americans injured or sickened in the war is exponentially larger than the figures given on the official Department of Defense (DOD) casualty website. That official total includes only those ‘wounded in action’…All of this makes it difficult to estimate the number of those U.S. service members injured in the wars.”  That we did not accomplish a single one of our goals is a tragedy the establishment has completely refused to acknowledge, transforming globalism from an economic challenge into an existential one, creating the impression that the establishment cared far more about what happened beyond our shores than they did for events at home. 

The second Trump phenomenon is cultural and more difficult to quantify, except to say that over the last several decades the average American has witnessed radical changes in how the establishment views the world, changes that leave them out of the picture.  By the early 1990s, most fair minded people had long since embraced Martin Luther King’s dream to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of the skin.  Generation X, of which I am a proud member, grew up after the Civil Rights movement and the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act, generally accepted the notion that racism was unacceptable and while not perfect by any means, took great pains to treat everyone as fairly as possible, more receptive to diversity in America than any previous generation.  The more casual signs of racism, sexism, and homophobia that lingered throughout the 1970s and 80s were steadily purged from polite discourse, and even gay marriage – which was quite honestly unimaginable when I was a kid – rapidly gained acceptance.  These were all good and necessary developments, broadly supported by the majority of the country, but around 2010, the establishment suddenly decided they were not enough.  White people became privileged almost overnight, even those who were poor and simply struggling to get by were somehow better off than rich black celebrities and athletes.  The entire country was deemed white supremacist, a patriarchy controlled entirely by white men and designed from the very beginning to be so.  The Founders, revered for generations, were reduced to slave owners, and even those who fought against slavery such as Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant were now suspect.  If Generation X had purged the present, the new goal was to purge the past, targeting cherished icons and history in a manner that showed no regard for anyone who disagreed.  Likewise, the acceptance of gay marriage rapidly devolved into the belief that men can become women and women can become men, a radical new transgender ideology that insists you can be a child abuser if you refuse to permanently alter a child.  As we saw with the immigration debate, anyone who disagreed with these rapid changes to the underpinnings of American culture was branded a racist, a sexist, a transphobe, and more.  Further, the past was not all the establishment had in mind:  Equality was replaced with equity, and it became a publicly stated and widely embraced goal to intentionally exclude white people from the public sphere because, whatever their qualifications, they were over represented.  Today, a supposed academic can deliver a lecture informing students that white people are “psychopaths” with no repercussions.  The connection to President Trump’s support is not an easy thing to define, but is it any wonder that millions seek to rebuke an establishment that has either advocated these radical changes or allowed them to happen?

As I have argued, much of it comes down to a matter of trust.  Earlier this week, a progressive friend of mine on Facebook asked why I pay little attention to some in the Trump Administration who have since declared him unfit, suggesting I was showing a cult-like devotion to “dear leader.”  The answer is simple:  Rightly or wrongly, I trust little or none of what they have to say, and based on the last thirty years of establishment dominance, the lies about Russia, and the obvious political persecutions, I believe I have every reason to do so.  This doesn’t mean I believe Trump is the perfect vessel.  He certainly has his flaws including a penchant for engaging in petty squabbles and at times, a lack of focus and discipline, running his mouth when it is better to remain quiet.  He has certainly made mistakes and failed to deliver on key promises such as when he could not convince John McCain to vote to repeal Obamacare.  At the same time, he has never stopped fighting for the things that I personally feel are important and as a conservative, he has governed more so than any President since Ronald Reagan.  In fact, the outrage he encounters everywhere is a testament to that fact, at least to his supporters.  I am not the first to note that Trump “pisses all the right people off.”  As a result, the mainstream media may see a disgraced cult leader clinging to power in a desperate attempt to assuage his ego, but I – and millions of his supporters – see man facing close to billion in fines and 700 years in jail who remains completely unbowed, still completely himself when almost anyone else – save for perhaps Teddy Roosevelt – would have slunk away to a placid retirement.  This, perhaps more than anything, is why millions of people of all backgrounds, education, and jobs – including a lawyer and PhD in my own family, a doctor next door, and millions of others rich and poor – still back him to the hilt and then some. It’s certainly not because we’re brainwashed. It’s because we like what we see, especially compared to the alternative, and insulting us certainly isn’t going to help.