Consider just the past few months.
Donald Trump struck a deal with Vladimir Putin for diesel fuel that, whatever its fine print, leaves Ukraine to fend for itself, and floods the Kremlin with money at the same time that Russia is actively supplying Iran with missiles to kill and maim American troops.
Read that again.
Diesel to save Trump and the GOP in the midterms, bought at a price that will likely be paid for in American blood.
A few Republicans who‘ve spent careers standing up to Moscow—who based their political identities on standing up to Putin—are now either bleating impotent protests, or meekly going along.
Trump is also casting ominous, 2020-ish shadows over the coming midterms—seeking to exploit every possible suggestion in the US Code or the Constitution of executive authority over elections (there isn’t much—by design; preemptively talking about “cheating;” and sending federal officers from several departments and agencies across the country to “help.”
He’s gone after news organizations that displease him—screaming at them, banishing some, and now trying to punish them with an antitrust suit.
Notoriously, he has turned the presidency into a family business to an extent that should shock every loyal and decent American.
Out on the stump, his language grows cruder and crueler by the week.
And there is the sheer vanity of this presidency: Lake America, Trump Ocean, the Arch. When asked by a reporter who the arch is for, Trump answered: “Me.”
Any other politician in American history would have been finished by a fraction of this abuse of power.
Yet Trump’s most devoted supporters are undeterred in their adulation, including many who are paying for his policies with their own livelihoods.
Why? What is the hold this man has over so many millions of Americans?
In Georgia a few months ago, I asked a farmer about the Iran war and the tariffs, which were ruining him. He answered quietly: “We farmers, we don’t only vote economics. We’re conservatives, too.”
Now, I respect that. I’ve never been a “What’s the Matter with Kansas” Democrat. Man does not live by bread alone.
That farmer weighed what mattered to him, and his verdict isn’t mine, but it is his.
Still, it’s obvious something more is at work.
In my long years covering politics, I have never seen political identity become personal identity the way it has here and now for the MAGA faithful.
We live in extraordinary times. The normal mechanisms of political choice-making don’t work. People are voting against their own interests in vast numbers.
Why?
He’s given them something many never had. A taste of power. There is real pleasure in belonging to a dominant group, and there is also the giddy excitement in punishing deviants, as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson have learned. And because loyalty to Trump despite everything is such a public act, admitting error carries a real social price. It’s hard to get out once you’re in.
So how does a movement like this end? And do these midterms mark a turning point for MAGA?
I don’t think so.
The tempting answer about how this ends is that it ends when the gap between hard reality and Trump’s relentless sell that we are in a “Golden Age” under his leadership grows so wide that it hurts people’s brains. But in many fervent political and religious movements in the past, that psychological mechanism breaks down. It doesn’t work. People will stick with the authority figure even as they see their lives getting worse.
In the 1950s the psychologist Leon Festinger studied a small group that had predicted a world-ending flood. When the morning came and the flood did not and the world remained the old world yet—the true believers who had one another’s support did not abandon their faith. They cooked up some alternative explanation, doubled down, and went out to recruit new members.
So cognitive dissonance alone rarely ends anything.
Movements fade in other ways: the leader leaves the stage, trusted insiders peel off and give others permission to follow, the young never sign up, and most people simply drift away without announcing it.
That’s a process. And part of it belongs to us, those who were never part of MAGA.
We will have to be kind to people as the scales fall from their eyes. Why? After all the wreckage caused by this administration so far, and the more that will come? Why should people who have no responsibility for the corruption and racism and catastrophic policies be kind to those who made it all possible, if in fact they change their minds?
Because we will have to build the next America, and we will have to do it for all of us. And we will need, in Lincoln’s terms, to be “not enemies, but friends.”
And as a practical matter: Nobody walks through a door marked “I was a fool.”
Which brings me to this Sunday’s poem, by Stephen Crane, from 1895. It is famous, original, chilling, and timely.
Notice in particular that the narrator of this little stick of poetic dynamite calls the man he meets friend.
—Terry
Stephen Crane, 1900
In the desert
by Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.