The psychology of the Trump cult
By 
It’s been obvious in a general way that Donald Trump has been using the growing stack of criminal indictments and civil lawsuits levied against him as a conscious campaign strategy, but this NYT report documents the details of that strategy in a useful way:
Mr. Trump and his team have deliberately sought to maximize live news coverage of his criminal arraignments. They treat court appearances exactly as they would campaign events — choreographing visuals down to minute details and working with all the networks, including those Mr. Trump has pilloried as “fake news,” such as CNN.
The Trump team has invited reporters into its motorcade, whose black S.U.V.s have been tracked live on television news. The campaign has briefed the networks ahead of time so that cameras can be set up at multiple locations on arraignment days to get the best shots — including along the motorcade route and as the Trump plane lands and takes off.
It quickly became apparent to Mr. DeSantis and other rivals that during the indictment fever they would be responding to the news on Mr. Trump’s terms.
An adviser to one of Mr. Trump’s rivals, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Trump’s legal travails had repeatedly forced his candidate’s campaign to reschedule policy announcements and redo its calendar, describing the indictments as “a solar eclipse-like event.”
To put it mildly, this strategy has paid off, as over the last six months support for Fox News darling Ron DeSantis has totally collapsed, and now apparently nothing at all stands between Trump and the GOP presidential nomination.
This latest development is just the culmination of the logic of the Trump cult, which requires not merely a denial but a literal inversion of reality, in which Donald Trump becomes:
(1) A self-made multi-billionaire
(2) A devout Christian
(3) A defender of the Constitution
(4) An epitome of masculine virtue and virility
The psychological dynamic here is that once you’ve accepted some aspect of the delusional belief system that makes up Donald Trump’s cult of personality, you might as well accept all the others, since you’ve departed empirical reality for the realm of what we might call “faith-based politics.”