The first time Trump ran for president as a Republican, when I spoke with his followers I encountered a superficial denial of Trump’s prejudice that suggested a quiet approval of it. They would deny that Trump made bigoted remarks or proposed discriminatory policies while also defending those remarks and policies as necessary. What I found this time around were people who were far more deeply embedded in an unreality carefully molded by the Trump campaign and right-wing media to foment a sense of crisis—and a belief that they were being exploited by a shadowy conspiracy that Trump alone could vanquish. Whereas many supporters I spoke with at rallies in 2016 rationalized or dismissed Trump’s yarns as exaggerations or bombast, in 2024 they would repeat them solemnly and earnestly, as gospel.
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I noticed a particular disconnect on immigration; people I spoke with emphasized their support for legal immigration and, unlike Trump, did not single out particular ethnicities or nationalities for scorn. They said they would welcome anyone as long as they came legally. It’s possible that this was merely something they were telling themselves they believed so as not to interrogate their own motives further. ...One Trump voter I met among the cheerful crowd of supporters milling around outside a packed rally outside Atlanta, who identified himself only as Steve and said he worked in telecommunications, managed to touch on virtually every immigration conspiracy theory put forth by the Trump campaign in about 30 seconds. Yet even Steve told me the issue was people coming in illegally, not that they were coming in at all. “You’re not coming in legally; you’re not pledging to the country; you’re not saying you’re going to support that country,” Steve said. ...A retired English teacher who did not want to give her name emphasized that “I believe in immigration, but do it legally. Don’t make your first act of coming to America be coming illegally … We’re taking away from servicing children who don’t even get to eat because you’re giving housing to the people coming in.” Another retiree in North Carolina, named Theresa Paul, gave me a hard look and said she was supporting Trump because “when you take illegals over our citizens, that’s treason … We’re being worked to death, taxed to death, and for what? So we can put up people that’s coming in illegally, and putting them up way superior to us.” I asked her why she thought the Biden administration would want to do that. She grasped my arm lightly and said, “To replace us, right?”
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There are, I’ve come to see, three circles of MAGA that make up the Trump coalition. The innermost circle comprises the most loyal Trump allies, who wish to combine a traditional conservative agenda of gutting the welfare state and redistributing income upward while executing by force a radical social reengineering of America to resemble right-wing nostalgia of the 1950s. ...This faction wants a government that works to preserve traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, or at least one that does not seek to interfere with what it sees as the natural order of things. ...These people understand what Trumpism’s goals are, and most of them also understand that, absent the particular devotion Trump inspires, their plans would not be politically viable.
There is a second, slightly larger circle around this first one, comprising devoted Trump fans. These fans are the primary target for a sanitized version of the “Great Replacement” theory, which holds that American elites have conspired to dispossess them of what they have in order to give it to unauthorized immigrants who do not belong. They are not ideologically hostile to the welfare state—indeed, many of them value it—but they believe it is being wasted on those who have no claim to it. People in this circle are acting rationally in response to conspiracy theories they have chosen to believe, and are bewildered by those who refuse to acknowledge what they are certain is true. This bewilderment serves only to further cement their feeling that they are the victims of an elite plot to take from them that which they deserve. This is the group you might refer to as true believers.
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Then there is the outer circle: Americans with conservative beliefs who may be uneasy about Trump but whose identification with conservative principles and the Republican Party mean they wish to persuade themselves to vote for the Republican candidate. They may be ardently anti-abortion, or small-business owners, or deeply religious. They do not believe everything Trump says; in fact, their approach to the man is dismissiveness. These are voters who fall into what my colleague David Graham calls the “believability gap.” They don’t like Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric but also don’t think he will follow through with it. This is the “What’s the downside for humoring him?” faction.
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Denial is the mortar that holds the three MAGA circles together. The innermost circle denies the radicalism of its agenda to the middle ring of fervent Trump supporters, presenting any criticism as the lies of the same liberal elites responsible for dispossessing real Americans of what is owed them. The outer circle treats Trump’s authoritarianism and racism as regrettable and perhaps too colorful, but equivalent or similar to other common character defects possessed by all politicians. To acknowledge the liberal critique of Trump as correct would amount to a painful step away from a settled political identity that these outer-circle members are not willing to take—they would have to join the Never Trumpers in exile.
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“In social movements … conspiracy theories that may be absurd and specious on their face nevertheless contain valid information about the motivations, grievances, insecurities, and even panics among their promoters, so they cannot be simply dismissed,” the historian Linda Gordon wrote in The Second Coming of the KKK. “Among Klan leaders, conspiracy theories also did a great deal of organizing work: they provided identifiable and unifying targets, supplying a bonding function that explanations based on historical analyses do not deliver.” Political and national identities of any ideology can be forged by the sense that some part of your identity is under assault. When that assault does not truly exist, conspiracism can provide it.
Trumpist conspiracy theories perform a similar function. In his stump speeches, the former president calls the United States an “occupied country” that will be “liberated” from criminal migrants when he retakes power. He tells his audience that crime by undocumented immigrants is not simply a social problem that might be solved with more restrictive immigration policy but a deliberate plan by those in office. “Kamala is importing millions of illegals across our borders and giving them taxpayer benefits at your expense,” Trump declared in Greenville. ...It is one of the most obvious con-man tricks in history—you got scammed, you paid too much, but if you give me your money, I’ll get you a better deal—and it has worked on tens of millions of Americans for a decade.
These conspiracy theories create communities that are hostile to dissenters, and they legitimize radical, even violent actions. This is how thousands of Trump supporters ended up ransacking the Capital on January 6, 2021, hoping to overturn an election on the basis of a conspiracy theory about voting machines, spread by elite figures who knew it to be false. The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News and the congressional inquiry into January 6 revealed that although much of the right-wing leadership class understand they have created a monster they cannot control, they lack the courage to confront it. Trump and his closest aides, by contrast, are well aware of the hold they have on their audience and see it as useful for their own purposes.
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Perhaps most important, the breadth of the conspiracy and the power of the conspirators place any solutions beyond the reach of ordinary politics. At the rally prior to the storming of the Capitol, Trump warned the audience that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Then he retreated to the safety of the White House and watched the mob attack Congress, hoping that by some miracle his supporters would succeed in keeping him in power by force. In such dire circumstances, only a messianic figure will rescue the virtuous from the corrupt. The logic of grand conspiracy thus elevates the strongman.
In the conspiracist mind, Trump is not simply the only logical solution but the only hope, the only man not compromised by the grand cabal that opposes him and its puppet politicians.
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Typically, when I go out to rallies, I do not argue with voters or offer my own views, because I am there to find out what they believe and why. But because of my affiliation with The Atlantic, several people I spoke with asked me to explain my views—occasionally referring to the story as “fake news” or “Democrats calling Trump Hitler,” having heard the story wrongly characterized this way.
In one exchange, I mentioned that as a man married to a woman born to a West African immigrant father, I did not appreciate Trump’s remarks about Black immigrants, and recounted the story of Trump complaining about not wanting immigrants from “shithole countries.” The Trump supporter had not heard of the 2018 incident and refused to believe that it had occurred as I relayed it.
In two other conversations, when asked about my views, I explained that, as a Texan, if I choose to have another child, I have to worry that if something goes wrong, doctors may refuse to treat my wife because of the state’s abortion ban. Doctors in Texas are afraid to provide lifesaving medical care to mothers with pregnancy complications because the Republican-controlled state government has passed laws that punish abortion providers with steep fines, loss of their medical license, and jail time. The Texas courts have repeatedly refused to clarify or expand the exceptions to the ban—these exceptions are simply meant to ensure sufficient political support for those bans. Because of this, Texas parents have to roll the dice with a pregnancy, knowing that their existing children may end up without a mother.
Not only did the people I spoke with react in disbelief that an abortion ban would be so strict; they did not believe that a doctor would refuse to treat a woman until she was at death’s door.
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There is a distance between the views of many of the most ardent Trump fans and the policy goals of the people they would put in power. The innermost MAGA circle understands this, even if many of the people whose votes they rely on don’t. ...Trump rallies are where the mask usually comes off. At the rallies, the different circles of MAGA lose their distinctiveness; in the anonymity and unity of the crowd, they can indulge the feelings of anger and hatred without the oversensitive, judgmental liberals of the outside world making them feel ashamed. Here, they can be themselves.
This is why the insult comedian Tony Hinchcliffe thought he was in the right place to call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in late October. “These are the kind of jokes that normal people tell,” the conservative media figure Matt Walsh declared. Hinchcliffe was hardly an outlier. Other speakers that night called Harris a prostitute, “the anti-Christ,” “the devil.” The disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Harris as “the first Samoan Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”
The big mistake made by Hinchcliffe was that, in wrestling parlance, he broke kayfabe. The Trump campaign has fine-tuned its line-stepping over the years, invoking racist stereotypes with just the thinnest veneer of deniability, the better to cast liberal criticism as hypersensitive hysteria. ...In 2024, Trumpism remains a politics of bullying marginalized groups and framing those unwilling to do so as possessing a lack of virtue. Do you want to coddle murderous illegal aliens? Do you want men in women’s sports? Why are you okay with gangs taking over our cities?
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The crisis caused by Hinchcliffe’s routine and remarks by other speakers that night is that they troubled voters in that outer MAGA circle by briefly revealing what Trump’s entourage actually believes—that when Stephen Miller says “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he is referring to a very limited number of people. The event pierced the veil of denial for those who are otherwise inclined to dismiss such criticisms as the tedious whining of an oversensitive age.
The Puerto Rican Reggaeton singer Nicky Jam renounced his support for Trump after the rally, saying, “Never in my life did I think that a month [after I appeared at a rally to support Trump] a comedian was going to come to criticize my country and speak badly of my country and therefore, I renounce any support for Donald Trump, and I sidestep any political situation.” Those people who renounced their support for Trump after realizing that the contempt he has expressed for others also applies to people like them must understand: He was always talking about people like you, even when you didn’t want to believe it.
The December Trading Post Is Cool as Ice
The December Trading Post Is Cool as Ice
Poor dev decisions made in WoW history.
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