"She's probably menopausal".... Trump supporters giving new meaning to "WTF??"

We're looking for truth-based logic and reality; they're looking for truth based in authority

Since 2015, those of us on the Left have been seeking in vain to understand how people who might seem to be otherwise lucid, reasonable, and rational could support Donald Trump, who’s none of those things. And it’s not just that they support him; they worship him, seeing him as an almost deity-like personality.

We’ve asked ourselves how seemingly rational, intelligent people could worship someone so profoundly flawed, amoral, and self-absorbed. Even though, by traditional standards, Trump is no man’s Conservative and has co-opted the label to win votes, his base adores him for his “Conservative” and “American” values.

For those outside the clan, and that’s what MAGA World truly is, understanding Trump’s appeal and the depth and breadth of his base’s allegiance to him can be challenging.

A family of Donald Trump supporters attend a protest against Covid-19 restrictions, September 12, 2020. (Photo: Fibonacci Blue)

Could that difficulty rest in the fact that those of us on the outside are viewing and defining the “problem” in moral terms while MAGA devotees see Trump in authoritarian terms?

Matthew Sheffield

makes the argument that the worldview of Trump’s base differs fundamentally from those of us on the outside looking in.

Ever since Donald Trump emerged on the American political scene, many of his critics have sought tirelessly to raise many different arguments about his policies, rhetoric, and criminal actions to help his supporters see just what their unrequited loyalty is enabling. Occasionally, these efforts have yielded fruit, but overwhelmingly, they are unsuccessful.

Last September, the head of an anti-Trump Republican political action committee called Win It Back, formalized the despair of many critics in a memorandum summarizing what his group had learned after testing more than 40 different television ads on 12 in-person focus groups.

“All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” David McIntosh wrote.

“Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability,” McIntosh continued. “This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”

Whether acting in a personal or professional capacity, many Trump critics have seen similar results. Trying to use logical persuasion with your Trump-worshiping friend or relative is not likely to work, not necessarily because they are stupid, but because they have completely different moral and epistemic viewpoints than you or almost anyone else—they genuinely believe that facts do not derive from science, reason, or history.

Roll that one around your brainpan for a moment: “they genuininely believe that facts do not derive from science, reason, or history.”

That doesn’t leave much, does it? Where do facts derive from, then, if not from empirical sources? If facts are not “factual,” what are they? Are they fungible? Can they be changed based on the needs of the moment? Are they even necessary if they can be made up on the fly? And can they even be called “facts” because facts, by their definition, are established, empirical, and known?

Or can “inconvenient” facts be replaced with what then Presidential counselor Kelly Anne Conway called “alternative facts,” the sort of things that can be created as needed to address whatever the narrative of the moment happens to be?

But don’t “alternative facts” cease to be facts if they’re made up on the spot and are no longer empirical?

My brain hurts….

Does objective truth no longer matter? Does it even exist if “alternative facts” can be conjured as needed to back up what the narrative of the moment requires?

Lately, this moral viewpoint has been called “fascist,” which according to scholars of fascism, makes a lot of sense. But fascism is actually part of a much older tradition that goes back to be very beginning of recorded history. That tradition, authoritarianism, is so deeply embedded in most cultures that it is almost never even recognized as a moral philosophy. It is simply “common sense” as far as adherents are concerned.

In popular usage, the word authoritarian generally seems to be a synonym for jerk, but this should not keep us from understanding that authoritarianism is an actual worldview, one in which identities and individuals matter more than moral principles, and that the rightfulness of actions derives from the status of the person committing them rather than their adherence to specific objective moral standards.

Outsiders see hypocrisy when they hear Trump supporters claiming in 2024 to hate “political prosecutions” even though their hero ran for office in 2016 promising to “lock up” his main opponent for an all-too-common legal infraction, but seen through the lens of moral authoritarianism, there is no inconsistency whatsoever. Morality flows downward from authority. People in a higher status are not only more truthful, they are also more moral. 

Trump himself seems to have been shocked when he first encountered authoritarian morality, he expressed this surprise in his infamous remark that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Unlike so many of his boasts, this one was no exaggeration. The act of shooting someone would be immoral based on Christian teaching, but because Trump had been established as the tribal leader by that point, this action would either be of no moral consequence or could even be seen as positive.

Though, as Sheffield mentions, plenty of Jews and Christians don’t believe in divine command theory. But, if you believe God ordained Donald Trump to lead America (which thousands, perhaps even millions of Americans do), that explains a lot.

For instance, it would explain why many support Trump despite his myriad legal and moral challenges. And why so many Evangelicals are so firmly behind him even though Trump is in no conceivable way one of them.

He can be seen as flawed but also persecuted, and thus retain the support of America’s Right-wing Christians, who could still justify their support for someone they see as anointed by God to lead America out of its current moral swamp. The way they see their hero leading them out of said swamp is via authoritarianism.

Of course, claiming that morality flows from God is a bit of a problem when it is obvious to anyone that there are no divine beings walking around giving instructions, and that people claiming to see such sites are regarded as out of their minds. Believers in divine command theory got around this conundrum by venerating the concept of hierarchies as an expression of authority as Christian and secular humanists began drawing upon the ideas of ancient authors to construct contemporary democratic moral theories. Christian monarchists crafted a response of their own, an amalgamation of divine command theory, the deistic naturalistic philosophy of Aristotle, and the Apostle Paul’s pronouncements that earthly authorities are the direct servants of God[.]

The beautiful thing about the divine command theory is that it’s endlessly justifiable. Because God is unseen and can never be spoken to or heard from, believers are left to “interpret” His words and intent. Watching how various interpretations invariably seem to fall in line with the beliefs and prejudices of those interpreting can be endlessly fascinating.

When your flavor of God closely mirrors your beliefs, prejudices, and hatreds, is it a faith tradition? Or are you just using it to add divine underpinning to your personal preferences?

Or, in the case of Donald Trump, are you just providing divine camouflage as your Chosen One continues running his grift, this time on the political party he’s (allegedly) representing?

Never mind that I am shocked, SHOCKED, that Trump and his family could be involved in running a grift….

Jay Kuo

argues that with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump (married to Eric Trump, the dumb one), newly installed as the new co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), money donated to the RNC will likely end up in his pocket.

The current RNC Chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel, will resign this week [Ed. note: She already has]. Apart from making her drop the Romney part of her name, Trump is now forcing her to step down from her position. He has not always seen eye to eye with McDaniel, especially during the debates and early primary campaigns that Trump essentially did not participate in. He was particularly off-put when she declared that the RNC would stop covering his legal fees after he declared his candidacy for president out of sense of fairness to other contenders.

McDaniel oversaw one of the worst fundraising years for the RNC on record, certainly the worst in a decade, raising only $87.2 million. This is quite low compared to the DNC, which raised some $30 million more. McDaniel might be excused for the poor result, given the constant dysfunction in the GOP-led House, the chilly relationship between GOP Senate leadership and the rest of the party, and the fact Trump himself has been occupying the field when it comes to fundraising.

Indeed, Trump’s Super PACs—Save America and MAGA PAC—spent more than $50 million on legal bills using money that was raised from donors even after they were told where their money would go. That huge sum has sucked up a lot of the oxygen in the room and likely will continue to leave the rest of the GOP gasping for spare funds.

In McDaniel’s place, Trump has backed his daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair, and campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita as CFO. With Trump’s endorsement, they are a shoo-in. For her part, Lara Trump has been fairly non-committal about whether RNC funds would be used to cover Trump’s mounting legal bills, as it had before he declared his candidacy. Trump’s campaign insists that his Super PACs will continue to foot the costs of his defense.

In the end it doesn’t matter much whether the RNC or Trump’s Super PACs pay the legal pipers. That’s all money that could have been spent on campaign ads and ground games. And with several GOP state parties also in dire financial straits in critical battleground states, including Michigan, Arizona and Georgia, the prospect of much of the money raised from donors going straight to Trump’s lawyers cannot be comforting.

The short version is that Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn about the financial state of the GOP. If he has to bankrupt the party to fund his legal crusade, so be it. And with so many state parties in financial peril, it’s entirely possible that many of them won’t be able to mount much of a fight this fall.

Of course, that will be Trump’s fault…not that he’ll accept responsibility. He’ll throw a few sacrificial lambs under the bus and ruin a few careers, but the blowback will land far from him.

It always does.

At this point, though, he’s got so many balls in the air trying to stay out of prison that one would have to think, eventually, something somewhere will come crashing down. And that will be a very good day.

Get your popcorn ready, kids.

But will any of Trump’s legal machinations genuinely have any impact on his base? Or will they continue to see him as the target of persecution by “Joe Biden’s Department of Justice,” which he’s “weaponized” against Trump? It’s interesting how MAGA World is accusing the DOJ of precisely the same thing Trump has promised to do if he’s elected President again.

It’s an abomination when a Democratic President (allegedly) does it…but perfectly acceptable, even desirable, when God’s Chosen President does it? Yes, the hypocrisy IS almost tangible….

And if you think the GOP is going to have any luck forcing the crazies out of primary races,

Andrew Egger

,

Tim Miller

, and William Kristol are here to disabuse us of that notion.

Because being part of MAGA World very often means having a tenuous grip on what you and I know as “reality.”

But of course. I’m not a Republican. I’m a godless Democratic Socialist, so this is clearly beyond my understanding. From the looks of it, I should probably be eternally grateful, yeah?

I’m beginning to understand how some folks traveled so far down the QAnon rabbit hole. When nothing else in your world makes sense, a decent conspiracy theory probably works as well as anything else.

So here I am, 2000+ words later, no closer to understanding MAGA World. Honestly, that’s probably a good thing. If I were to begin understanding, I may have to start fearing for my sanity…and I have enough trouble with that as it is.

Silly me. All this time, I’d thought there was one agreed-upon version of abject reality. How was I to know that reality could be created on demand and massaged and manipulated as necessary?

Damn. I can be SO naïve at times….

All of my posts are public at this time. Any reader financial support will be greatly appreciated. Currently, there’s no paywall blocking access to my work (except for a few newsletters). That remains an option down the road. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.