The Trump delusion
By 
How is it that, despite everything, 40% of America continues to support Donald Trump? I’ve suggested that Trump’s supporters can be sorted into a few broad categories, with many of those supporters belonging to more than one of these groups:
*White nationalists
*Alienated burn it all down anti-establishment types (these are what social scientists have characterized as paradigmatic chaos inciters).
*Upper class Republicans who want big tax cuts and fewer regulations on their money-making activities.
*Religious conservatives, overwhelmingly white evangelicals, who see Trump — depending on their level of absorption into the cult — as either a necessary evil that must be accepted to stop the politically correct coastal secularist trans gay elite takeover of America, or a messianic figure, whose apparent total personal decadence is just part of the Mystical Nature of the Divine Plan, which ever confounds the heathens.
*Low information voters who always vote Republican out of tribal habit. These people have the most fantastical ideas about Trump, such as for example that he’s a “successful businessman,” rather than a “politician,” which is why he manages to “get things done.”
This last group in particular includes a lot of overlap with the more cultish strain of religious conservatives, and together the two groups probably make up the majority of Trump’s continuing support. Relatively few people are capable of maintaining a genuine lesser of two evils attitude toward the leader of an essentially charismatic — to use Weber’s typology — political movement. Almost everyone in the movement must eventually embrace the delusion that the leader is actually a good person, despite all evidence to the contrary.
For example, the following message has gone viral on social media over the last few days. The text is headed by the photo at the top of this post:
By Anonymous-
Let’s look at this man for one damn second!!!! A 74-year-old man is coming back home from work at 2 AM while most men his age are retired in their vacation homes. He comes back after a long day that probably started before the sun rose and gets back home exhausted with his tie open and hat in his hand, feeling that an accomplished day is finally over.
This amazing man is in the age range of many people’s grandfathers, great grandfathers, or my grandfather when he passed away, but this man just came back home from work, for me, for you. This man left his massive gold-covered mansion where he could retire happily and play golf all day long. But this man put his wealth aside and went to work for free, for $1 a year, for me, for you, for us, for AMERICA.
While other presidents became rich from the presidency, this man LOST over 2 billion dollars of his wealth during this short 4 years of his life. He put aside his amazing retirement lifestyle for getting ambushed every single day by the media and the Radical Left Democrats that trash this man who works for them until 1 AM for free!
No, he doesn’t do it for money or power, he already had it. He is doing it so their houses will be safe, so their schools will get better, so they will be able to find jobs or start a new business easier, so they will be able to keep few dollars in their pockets at the end of the month.
Look at this picture again, that man is at the age of your fathers, grandfathers or maybe YOU! Where is your respect? Honor? Appreciation? Are you THAT BLIND? THAT BLIND to not see a thing this man is doing for you and for your family? THAT BLIND that after all his work for minority groups in America you keep calling him a racist? I am the son of an Auschwitz Survivor and someone who lost 99% of my family to the camps and ovens of Nazi Germany. And I’m no fool! DONALD TRUMP IS NO RACIST OR ANTI-SEMITE!
Are you THAT BLIND to not see how much this country developed in last 4 years? President Donald J. Trump, I want to thank you with all my heart. I am so sorry for blind hatred you have been made to endure. You are a good and generous man. I KNOW THIS.
What I don’t know and think about often is what kind of people is it who can be so hateful in their hearts to spew such hate and evilness, not just at you but at your family too? Or people mocking and making jokes of you because you’re not a professional politician groomed in speech making and straight faced lying. Or how about them attacking your wife and young son? How awful that must make you feel.
People are sure they have not been manipulated. People believe their hatred is their own. But for why, they can’t articulate. What kind of people are these? WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE ARE THESE?? People not realizing they have been manipulated and brainwashed by such a deep-rooted EVILNESS MOTIVATED BY AN EVIL MEDIA AND DEMOCRAT PARTY. The American People are in a bad place right now….in their hearts and souls. God help us…Trump is not the problem.
This level of frankly delusional thinking is, I believe, far more common than either an enthusiastic embrace of anyone resembling the actual Donald Trump, or the sort of arms-length transactional support of people who recognize him for what he is, but have concluded that Paris is worth a mass.
Which is a fancy way of saying that a lot of his supporters are, at this point, basically insane.
. . . Meanwhile: