Achi news desk-
A a few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right wing media world. He said crime is “increasing,” a claim that happened to promote the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.
I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime increased in the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in every year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my colleague at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, DC, were increasing, as if a national decrease in crime could not be matched by increases in individual cities. He insisted that the data I quoted were false, implying that they were a product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “No one is buying the narrative that crime is improving.”
Eventually, after I responded to each of his allegations, he reluctantly admitted that crime, rather than surging, was drop — but attribute the source of the increase to Republican states. I corrected him on that claim as well. (Crime is down in red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime is down, and in blue states too, but he said the drop was inevitable, the result of the end of the pandemic. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was on the rise and insisted that Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is down.
I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. Its basic story has not changed. Almost every day he insists that life in America under Biden is hell and that his re-election would lead to his destruction.
Welcome to the world of MAGA.
i mention this change because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters are deeply invested in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to scare his supporters out of their wits. It did this in 2016 and 2020, and is doing it again this year.
“If he wins,” Trump He said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying. “
Other politicians have been scaremongers, but none have been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the aim of converting that terror into votes.
But as I argued recently, Biden has been president for almost three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and bitter parts of Trump’s base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious freedom they have ever had, and are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, which was of particular concern to evangelical Christians, fell steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, when there was a reduction of almost 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since then. Roe v. Wade decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)
For many Trump supporters, therefore, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for him. They use fear to rationalize their support for Trump. They need to burn to promote disaster, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.
But why? What drives their continued, deepening loyalty to Trump?
Part of the explanation is party loyalty. Each party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is thriving under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.
But that reasoning only takes us so far in this case. For one thing, it’s almost unimaginable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon only committed a fraction of Trump’s actions, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.
Beyond that, Trump was not a duty on this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats kept their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and his party dragged down in the process, he was shown the exit. But even though Trump is a loser, Republicans remain fascinated by him. So something unusual is happening here.
Hhuman beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal ties. Some are drawn to what Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists like Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual anger binds people together. Sharing anger can be very enjoyable, and the internet makes it easier to do this orders of magnitude.
For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually vulnerable to these predispositions. Grievances had been mounting, with Republicans feeling disrespected and disrespected by an elite culture. Those feelings were fueled by figures like Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who demoralized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.
A remarkable connection was formed between Trump and his base when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and used his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has chosen targets to channel his hatred, which seems inexhaustible, and has increased his rhetoric to the point that he now echoes lines from My fight. In the process, he has ignited the fury of his fans.
Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend of mine observed that Trump makes his supporters feel like they are warriors in a battle making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, a powerful source of personal meaning and social unity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.
But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has established himself as a Christ figure being persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. In a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your righteousness. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your revenge. I am your revenge.”
“You don’t sell ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” said Steve Bannon, one of the architects of the MAGA movement. The New York TimesCharles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to repeat to his followers, ‘This is it [expletive] revenge.’”
Malice, hostility, resentment: These are the emotions that drive many Trump supporters. That is why they not only accept but revel in the ferocity and brutality of Trump’s politics. This is why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base is constantly looking for new targets, new reasons to be angry. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a coercion loop.
Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; although he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, although that would be the effect. What seemed to animate him – as it has done for the entire Biden presidency – is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for the world of MAGA. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people – Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers – he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.
In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, everything Trump supporters hold dear will die. This is not true, but it does not matter to them that it is not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” law-and-order champions, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they hated him once.
Even as Donald Trump’s politics have become more vicious, his threats aimed at opponents more hateful, and his humiliation of others more frequent — he has become increasingly revered by his supporters.
I imagine that even some of the harshest liberal critics of the Republican Party could not have predicted a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to prevent a peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It has been an extraordinary moral reversal, a sick descent. And it is not done.
