The line between hard reality and narcissistic fantasy has never been stable for Donald Trump.

He really believes the 2020 election was stolen from him. He truly thinks the middling economic record of his first term produced “the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world.” He is certain that a million people came to his 2017 inauguration.

A lot of people exaggerate their accomplishments or tell themselves comforting untruths to get them through the day. In small doses, it’s pretty harmless; I still think I have a great jump shot. But when lying to yourself becomes a deeply ingrained habit, a desperate psychological need, it’s a sign of a low character; only weak people do that. (Adam Kinzinger and I talked about how Trump is really a weak man pretending to be a tough guy here.)

But weak people can still be dangerous; wounded animals will attack. And that’s what we are living through in this country, with a deeply unstable personality in the most powerful office in the world. Trump’s broken, boiling id spills out of him into the body politic every day—his desperate need to be affirmed and glorified, his self-evident terror at being exposed as the sagging, wretched weakling he actually is, his rage at at the slightest hint of dissent among his underlings. The nauseating sycophancy he demands in his cabinet meetings marks a low point in our history; the only explanation for those grown men and women to grovel so is that they fear the wounded animal at the center of the room will lash out and bite them.

But paradoxically, there is a greatness in Trump’s weakness. Through sheer force of that broken personality, Trump has proven himself able to get tens of millions of Americans to embrace the whole catalogue of lies that sustains him. For a vast number of our fellow citizens, Trump can bend reality.

That’s why the crisis over the Epstein files is so dangerous for the president and his administration. Reality is peeking through into the MAGA movement. He told them Jeffrey Epstein was the key to exposing the infinite wickedness of Democrats, and he promised he would release the secret files that would prove it. The perverts that run the liberal establishment would be exposed and brought to justice; the guy who shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in DC would be proven right.

But then Trump changed his tune, and the ground beneath MAGA trembled and shook. Not only did he betray his promise and refuse to release the files, but he castigated his most loyal supporters for rejecting his demand that they stop talking about Epstein. WHAT? This was, for so many, the cause of their lives, a crusade to expose true evil in the world, save the children, and bring the perpetrators to justice. Now Trump was telling them them to shut up or be banished.

And so MAGA faced the dreaded “disconfirmation crisis.” This is the moment in mass movements when the core belief, the prophecy and promise that all the faithful had together rested their hopes in through one great effort of the suspension of disbelief, suddenly seems phony. False. Disconfirmed. This can be a terrible psychological injury to true believers.

The rest of us watched in anticipation and not a little schadenfreude. Who among the MAGA leaders would be the first to break ranks? Would the scales fall from Charlie Kirk’s eyes? Would Megyn Kelly, who once at least gestured at challenging Trump and who now abases herself regularly for him (it’s a living, I guess) flip-flop back into taking him on? Would he lose support in Congress?

C’mon. Who are we kidding?

For people in what the psychologists call “totalizing belief systems,” losing faith is too much. It almost amounts to a form of self-harm, a direct attack by a person on her own, or his own, sense of self. For many in MAGA, the belief in Trump has come to be fundamental to their personal identities, and like all people in the grip of a mass movement, they will fight ferociously to resist any external and internal challenges to their faith commitment. I have some compassion around this issue; it’s so human. Whenever we have to admit we were wrong about something, especially something very important, we are forced to acknowledge a personal failure of the first magnitude, and that can be psychologically intolerable.

But being an adult, being a good person, entails being able to confront one’s own errors and sins. Believe me, I know. It’s hard work, for sure, but necessary.

Right now, MAGA won’t do it. Desperate to get back into the fold, into the comfort of true belief in Trump with so many millions of others, the faithful are surrendering their brief flirtation with skepticism of The Leader. Their strength, as individuals and as a power in the land, is in their numbers. They get that, and it fosters the weird resilience to plain and obvious facts in MAGA, and in other such movements.

In 1954, a Chicago woman named Dorothy Martin predicted the world would end on December 31st of that year. It didn’t. But the disconfirmation of her prophecy only reinforced the faith in Ms. Martin’s clairvoyant gifts among the truest of her true believers. After a momentary crisis of faith, many of them cooked up all kinds of rationalizations to explain away the fact that the world was still there. (The classic study of this phenomenon is “When Prophecy Fails," by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter.)

Thus the story in The Wall Street Journal that offered solid evidence of Trump’s close and sexually corrupted relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has become a rallying cry of MAGA resistance to the facts in front of their faces.

Charlie Kirk said the Journal piece “didn’t pass the smell test.” Steve Bannon told CNN, “We are finally on offense.” Laura Loomer, the influential MAGA racist conspiracy monger, said with palpable relief, “Trump is still our guy.”

And Congress? As always when confronted with a challenge to Trump, the Republicans on the Hill are turning tail and heading for the high grass. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson actually cut short the House’s session and sent members home for the summer, all in order to avoid uncomfortable votes Democrats sought to release files related to Epstein.

“We’re not going to play political games with this,” Johnson declared, as he announced the political game he was playing in order to avoid accountability on the issue.

They may get away with it. Because, deep down, MAGA doesn’t want the mental pain of seeing Trump for who he actually is.

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