Picture the Venn diagram of Americans who can affirm both of the statements in my headline—loudly, proudly, without reservation, in front of any audience. It is small, and getting smaller.

Both of those statements are demonstrably true. Both have been confirmed wherever the question came into contact with a court, a coroner, a police report, a sworn deposition, or an honest election official with a name. And yet to say them plainly, in many places in America today, is to mark yourself; in one room you’re branded a traitor, in another a fool.

But that Venn diagram is what I want to talk about here. What it reveals about us. We are witnessing a profound shift in our old-fashioned, small-r republican, small-d democratic habits of mind.

Take the second one first, because it just happened and is fresh in our minds. And, in what to me is particularly dismaying, its believers are mostly people who pride themselves on being the reality-based community.

The theory holds that Donald Trump has staged the attempts on his own life—at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the golf course in Florida, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The motive for Trump doing this—well, the motive seems to shift as needed: a sympathy bump in the polls, a pre-election gambit down the home stretch in 2024, a pretext for the ballroom he wants.

The shifting itself is a tell. Real conspiracies have stable motives sometimes lasting for years; conspiracy theories generate new motives and rationales as required, because the function of the theory is to maintain the conclusion regardless of the explanation.

So set against this theory a wall of facts.

Two people were killed at Butler. A Secret Service officer was shot at the Correspondents’ dinner. There are manifestoes and statements from the shooters.

And those shooters who have been arrested and now face decades or life in prison—they are just silent about the plot? their lawyers are silent? their relatives are silent? local police—in DC, PA, FL—who also investigated these attempted assassinations are silent? and everyone in the White House and federal government who might have known or suspected something are silent? all of them and more are silent--forever?

Any one person in that chain of silence could make a fortune blowing the whistle. The shooters could trade the truth they know for their freedom, in addition to book deals, film rights, etc.

Also, think about the federal government. Any conspiracy theory about the Trump attempted assassinations must presume absolute mastery and competence, absolute fidelity and silence, in the federal government. It is a theory that requires the United States government to function, for this one purpose, with a precision and discipline it has never demonstrated for any other.

Hollywood conditions us to believe that all people who work in the CIA or reach the heights of power are Jason Bourne or Frank Underwood. In reality, they’re closer to Dilbert.

Yet, people I love and admire are inclined to believe that Trump has manufactured the attempts on his life. Some see, in tiny details, evidence of a vast staging. Trump’s facial expression as the shooting happens. The way Erika Kirk touched her chin just before. JD Vance and the cabinet members smiling behind Trump at the White House press conference hours after. Every look, every gesture seems pregnant with meaning.

A neighbor of mine, not a believer, nevertheless was not convinced of the official story. He just shook his head the other day. It’s weird, he said.

The inclination to suspect Trump is well-earned. The temptation to doubt reality is strong.

Now the first statement: Joe Biden won in 2020. Court after court said so, including courts presided over by Trump-appointed judges. Republican secretaries of state said so. Trump’s own attorney general said so. Recounts said so. Audits said so.

The Stolen Election Theory has been tested and rejected at every point of contact with sworn testimony or evidentiary process, and yet it remains an article of faith in the Republican Party, and no heresy from it is permitted, because the Leader demands that it be true.

Even those Republicans who cannot bring themselves to say that the Ghost of Hugo Chavez or whomever rigged the voting machines in 2020 rarely declare their independence from the conspiracy theory. Instead, they shift to a weaselly fallback—Covid accommodations were unfair—and change the subject.

Our country is seeing ghosts, engaged in forms of magical thinking.

The Stolen Election is now a creed. It is enforced. It functions as a loyalty oath, and the test is whether you will say it aloud. It is the closest thing American politics has produced in my lifetime to idolatry: the public profession of a thing known to be false because the leader requires it.

The Staged Assassination is something else. It is not enforced; it is seen. It spreads among people who pride themselves on noticing what others miss. It is the temptation of the smart, who therefore become uniquely foolable in a particular direction. And it is closer to witchcraft than to creed; the conviction that dark forces and hidden hands are at work behind plain reality, accessible only to those with eyes to see.

Remember that great, terrifying scene in The Crucible, where the girls are crying out that Mary Warren has sent her spirit on them? They aren’t lying. That’s Arthur Miller’s point. What they have together done is persuade each other into an unreality, and the unreality is now in the room.

We are living in a time when forms of religion are being conducted under the guise of politics.

This is what frightens me.

American democracy has been characterized through most of its history by a sturdy republican pragmatism—a preference for what works, a willingness to be corrected by results. Our Constitution’s architecture assumes that ordinary people, given the facts, could govern themselves.

What we are watching, on the right and on the left, is the waning of that confidence. The voting machines are haunted. The cabinet’s smiles are a tell. True believers are no longer reasoning from facts to conclusions but from conclusions to facts, and the facts have been instructed to comply.

I know that writing this will anger people I do not want to anger. Friends among them. So let me say it as plainly as I can: the inclination to distrust this president is well-earned, and the grief and rage of those who cannot accept his return are not, in themselves, irrational. But there is a line between distrust and incantation, between rage and ritual, and I watch people I love crossing it without quite noticing they have.

Joe Biden won in 2020. Donald Trump did not stage the attempts on his life. These are plain truths. They should be easy to say. That so many Americans now find one or the other of them impossible—that is the news.

—Terry