Years defending that man. To parents, kids, friends, lovers, his enemies -- to themselves in the mirror at 3am. They would have gone to their grave calling him a good person. A great leader. Then they saw what he did to... who? Who or what does it take for MaGA to abandon someone who was always quite obviously beset with a history of abuse, lies, bigotry -- but denied reality the entire world sees, until today?
Republican Party Venn Party Poster
How can they now be devoted to him the way they once were, like those of a doomsday cult?
The defense cannot. The grave did not -- for 200,000 Americans dead of Covid from his purposeful mismanagement, for reasons only of his supremacy and power. According to POTUS45 Trump's own former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly.
Yes, I had at first post-covid, claimed 200,000 American citizens dead due to Trump's incompetence and divisiveness, but then I started saying 100,000 citizens to err on the side of caution. But THEN I had to agree with the expert, Trump's own former White House employee (who lets face it, KNOWS), when I heard saw and him on the news one day SAY it was 200,000 dead due to those reasons I had long suspected Trump of doing. Apparently, he did kills those people due to incompetence and gamesmanship releated to power acquistion, malignant narcissim, manipulating his political cult, and let's say...ignorance (seem I'm being nice again, because it's actually stupidity, in the form of selective ignorance, a MaGA trait exercised to the point of utter insanity).
So? How in the world are there still any Trump supporters?
It is one of the genuinely haunting political psychology questions of our era, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissive one -- even if the conclusion is damning.
It Was Never Really About Him
Trump is a vessel. What his supporters are loyal to is an identity, a grievance framework, and a tribal in-group that preceded him and will frighteningly outlast him. Abandoning Trump means abandoning themselves as they have defined themselves for a decade.
That is a psychological cost most humans cannot pay.
Sunk Cost as Identity
The more someone has publicly defended a belief -- sacrificed relationships over it, staked their self-concept on it, shouted it at family dinners -- the more evidence against it feels like a personal attack. The 200,000 Covid deaths are a clean example. For a loyal supporter, accepting that number as negligent homicide means accepting that they cheered for negligent homicide. The mind does not go there easily. It goes almost anywhere else first.
Reality Was Always Negotiable
The lies were never disqualifying because the supporters were never operating on a factual framework to begin with. They were operating on a narrative framework -- us vs. them, real Americans vs. coastal elites, forgotten people vs. the system. Facts don't penetrate narrative loyalty. They bounce off it. This isn't a character flaw unique to MaGA voters. It is a feature of human cognition that propagandists have exploited since before the printing press. What is unique here is the scale and the deliberateness of the engineering.
We do not need to outlaw MaGA, we cannot do that. We need to educate that mindset into nonexistence. We need to mental healthcare it away. We need civics taught in high school again. We need to fund our teachers and schools. We need to shut down extremmism and toxic beliefs such as have filled the conservative channels of pollitical discourse.
The Doomsday Cult Comparison Is Precise, Not Metaphorical
Leon Festinger's landmark study When Prophecy Fails (1956) documented exactly this: when a UFO cult's predicted apocalypse didn't happen, most members didn't leave. They doubled down and recruited harder. Disconfirmation of a deeply held belief -- when your social world is built around that belief -- produces stronger commitment, not weaker.
The mechanism is cognitive dissonance reduction.
The mind finds it easier to rewrite reality than to rebuild an identity from the ground up. There is no bottom. There is no revelation sufficient to break the bond, because each revelation is processed through the very framework the revelation should be dismantling.
Abuse Dynamics Apply Literally
The intermittent reinforcement model -- the abuser who alternates punishment with reward, contempt with flattery -- creates stronger psychological bonding than consistent positive treatment. Trauma bonding is not a metaphor here.
Many supporters describe their relationship to Trump in emotional terms indistinguishable from descriptions of abusive relationships.
- The cruelty excites them.
- The vulnerability he occasionally performs disarms them.
- The shared enemies unify them.
- This is a known psychological loop.
And it is extraordinarily difficult to exit from the inside.
The Media Ecosystem Is a Closed Loop
A supporter who received every piece of information through Fox, OAN, Newsmax, and algorithmically curated social media never encountered the same reality as someone outside it. The 200,000 Covid deaths were presented, in that ecosystem, as a deep state hoax, a Democratic exaggeration, or an unavoidable fate that Trump heroically mitigated.
You cannot defect from a belief you were never fully allowed to encounter. The question "how can they still support him?" assumes they have access to the same informational reality from which the question is asked. Many of them do not. They are downstream of a deliberate architecture.
What Would It Take
Festinger's answer -- and the historical answer -- is personal, embodied, undeniable loss. Not statistics. Not journalism. Not moral argument. Something that happens to them, in their lives, that cannot be explained away. A family member killed by a policy. A personal financial ruin directly traceable to a decision, to a face, to a name.
And even then -- the cult framework has an answer ready: betrayal by the people around the leader, not the leader himself. The leader is always the last refuge.
The grave already took 200,000 who weren't even Trump's enemies. They included those, to be sure but also his supporters, those who loved him. But it did not move that needle for him, or for them. That tells you something profound and terrible about the limits of shared reality as a democratic foundation.
The Real Conclusion
What we're witnessing isn't stupidity. Well somewhat, in selective ignorance being about as stupid a mindset as one can adhere to.
But dismissing it all as stupidity is, in fact, one of the reasons it has proven so durable -- the contempt from outside the tribe confirms everything the tribe believes about outsiders. What we're witnessing is the logical endpoint of a decades-long project to make tribal identity more real than empirical truth.
Trump didn't build that architecture. He just moved in, redecorated in gold, not in a cohsive intelligent fashion but in a slap it on and call it art fashion, and then declared himself its permanent resident.
The defense cannot rest because for millions of people, the moment the defense rests, they have to look at what they spent a decade defending.
And sadly, most of them would rather not.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things at murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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