A Poisoned Generation: Trump’s True Believers
How Did We Get to the Point of Trump’s Absolute Control of the GOP?
There are many today who wonder how a man like Donald Trump could capture a political party so completely that it’s members would surrender all to support him, even when they would never had supported a similar man not long ago. Seeing the comparatively small numbers of his cult protesting outside the courthouse in Miami today left me shaking my head. Listening to various GOP leaders calling for violence was disturbing.
Former GOP strategist and “Never Trumper” Steve Schmidt asked this on his Substack page, The Warning with Steve Schmidt:
“Why are so many Americans enthralled by the most rancid, ignorant, lecherous, bully and imbecile amongst us? Why did so many Americans decide to deal with what needed reform and renewal with a blow torch of such irredeemable and stupendous idiocy? How did a man like Donald Trump become the most popular demagogue and powerful pathological liar in American history? How did it happen? What incandescent level of cynicism and delusion combined to delude the nation into believing the greatest scumbag amongst us should lead us? How did it happen? Why did it happen? Will it happen again?”
Schmidt asks questions that I have been committed to answering since Trump first rode down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in June 2015 for the Republican nomination for President.
To understand how we got to Trump and how so many people would pledge their undying loyalty to him in spite of two impeachment trials, an attack on the Capitol designed to keep him in power, a judgment of civil liability for a sexual assault, and two felony indictments with a combined 71 felony counts, and several more criminal cases awaiting indictment.
The fact is that we got to this point because a generation of conservatives, especially Republicans and Libertarians, tolerated evil means and manners from their leaders going back to the rise of the Christian Right and its fealty to the Republican Party going back to 1980. The roots go deeper than that, to the former Jim Crow Democrats of Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats who became Republicans after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Likewise, the things that began the Christian Right as a political movement are the direct result of its leaders opposition to Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The antecedents of these events are directly related to the Confederate Christian Nationalism that served as the ideological heart of the Confederacy and the twin myths of the Lost Cause and the Noble South which twisted American politics, life, religion and history for over a century following the war.
Most middle-class Whites, including me grew up insulated from poverty, we didn’t know racism because most of our neighborhoods and schools were geographically segregated. Poverty was on the bad side of town, racism was something you heard about on the news, but didn’t recognize when it was right beside you. It wasn’t until the late sixties and early seventies that most of White American began to realize that there was trouble in “River City.”
Lucian Truscott IV wrote the other day:
“Of course, the era we were living through only looked gentle, from where we were in our New York apartments and lofts or sinecures in college English departments or jobs with corporations that seemed benign because we had decent paying jobs. The hurricane of racism and sexism raged all around us, but you had to go looking for it to see it up close.”
This was amplified by the influence of Christian television and radio led by highly influential, politically savvy, and unscrupulous preachers, including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, and Chuck Swindoll. They were followed by AM talk radio hosts when President Reagan ended the fairness doctrine, giving provocateurs like Rush Limbaugh and many like him unlimited opportunities to attack the foundations of our Republic and democracy. Then in 1996 Rupert Murdoch and Republican strategist Roger Ailes launched the Fox News Network which despite its deceptive labels “Fair and Balanced,” and “We Report, you Decide,” was nothing more that the propaganda arm of the Republican Party.
These people and organizations worked to overthrow the old Republican Party, and to indoctrinate readers, listeners, and viewers in a decidedly unconstitutional worldview all while claiming to support it. They undermined our institutions, and finally created a dystopian dialectic of the Democrats being godless, communists, socialists, or fascists intent on destroying all that the White race had accomplished.
Their words about African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asians, and other racial minorities harkened back to the days of the Know Nothings, the Slavocracy of the Antebellum South, the Confederacy, Jim Crow, Manifest Destiny and the eradication of the Native American First Nations, the war against Mexico which forced Mexico to give up 40% of its territory, the acts excluding Chinese and Japanese from citizenship, and the incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast in our own concentration camps, coupled with the legal theft of their homes, property, and businesses.
In 2009 Limbaugh defended the extermination of American Indians said, “Holocaust? Ninety million Indians? Only four million left? They all have casinos — what’s to complain about?” Limbaugh wasn’t alone, popular Christian commentators and fake historians like Brian Fischer and David Barton have said similar, if not worse things. Add in the host of current and former Fox News television and hosts such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly, and Tucker Carlson and a host of Right Wing Christian televangelists and pastors, millions of Americans, including the 30-40% of Republicans who support Trump were propagandized to the point that facts were wrong if they conflicted with their now fully indoctrinated minds.
In 1935 the American writer Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel called It Can’t Happen Here. It was a semi-satirical novel about a Fascist state coming to power in the United States. In it Lewis wrote these words:
“A country that tolerates evil means- evil manners, standards of ethics-for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end.”
That is how we got to today. But let us look at some history about movements like Trump’s MAGA and America First. The people that make up these movements didn’t just magically appear out of thin air. The older White Baby Boomers grew up in a magical but mythical era where all seemed right on the surface but the reality was that it was a veneer that allowed them to segregated suburbs, prosperity that put cars and color televisions in every living room, stay home mothers, and dads with stable well paying jobs, excellent Public Education, which often provided by the taxpayers who realized that their taxes enhanced their lives. Likewise, that standard of living was often due to the work of Labor Unions, or Federal programs such as the the G.I. Bill, VA loans, massive spending on infrastructure like the Interstate Highway System, hydropower and electric projects like the Tennessee Valley Project, aqueduct systems that boosted agricultural production and provided clean fresh drinking water to cities with little of their own, airports and an air traffic control system, jet passenger aircraft, and inventions that began in the defense industry or space program that are so common now we don’t even think about them, including the internet.
However, the sense of tribal grievance and fear stoked originally stoked by men like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and their political guide Richard Vigure allowed conservative Christians and others to ignore everything good and turn government into a malevolent force intent on taking their money and freedom.
We can also look to history for examples of times where situations had similarities to our time. I am thinking about Germany and France in the 1930s.
William Shirer was one of the few American news correspondents in Hitler’s Germany following the Nazi takeover to the German declaration of war against the United States. Shirer wrote of his experiences with the German Press, propagandists, and people and how hard it was to maintain one’s objectivity in the face of propaganda:
“I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”
Shirer also wrote of how Fascists undermined the French Republic in the 1930s, which might be more helpful to understanding where we are today:
“And more and more, as the last years of the Third Republic ticked off, the wealthy found it difficult to put the interest of the nation above that of their class. Faced with specific obligations to the country if the state were not to flounder in a financial morass, they shrank from meeting them. The Republic might go under but their valuables would be preserved. In the meantime they would not help keep it afloat by paying a fair share of the taxes. The tax burden was for others to shoulder. If that were understood by the politicians, the Republic could continue. If not… were there not other forms of government possible which promised more security for entrenched wealth? The thoughts of some of the biggest entrepreneurs began to turn to the Fascist “experiment” in Italy and to the growing success of the Nazi Party in Germany.”
Hannah Arendt wrote these pertinent words. They aptly describe many Americans, and not just MAGA, and you can see it anytime you attempt to counter the propaganda narratives.
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
She also wrote about the Germans of the Nazi era words that are frightening when one takes a look at the hold that Trump and his propagandists on Fox News, Newsmax Television, OAN, talk radio, and on thousands of fake news conspiracy theory websites and podcasts proclaim everyday.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote something that is completely descriptive of Trump and his followers: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
I was reminded of the importance of why I write after I read conservative columnist Michael Gerson’s article in the Washington Post in 2019.
Gerson wrote:
“Fascism may not describe what Trump has done, as opposed to what he says. But what he says matters and can create its own dangerous dynamic. It is possible for a leader to be incompetent and still profoundly corrupt the people who follow him, undermining the virtues — tolerance, civility and compromise — that make democratic self-government work. It is possible for a foolish leader to leave the imprint of fascism on a portion of his followers. And the language used by Trump — particularly a certain racially tinged nostalgia and a tribal resentment for the other — strikes me as at a higher level of prominence and acceptance than at any time I can remember. So maybe, rather than fearing a fascist dictator, we should fear the legitimacy of fascist modes of thought in the Republican Party.
This is a more complex danger than most talk of fascism generally suggests. But it is a danger nonetheless.”
The former President is a man incapable of feeling for others, or taking responsibility for his words and actions. The same is true of many of his supporters. Gustave Gilbert who served as a psychologist to the major war crimes defendants at Nuremberg noted:
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Trump has a dark Charisma which his devout followers find irresistible, and since he is not a fringe character, but the former leader of one of the most powerful countries on the planet, this is not something that we can easily dismiss. Likewise, we cannot dismiss the true believers in his cause, despite the fact that so few showed up to protest today. Those protesters are not the people that I am concerned about, it is about violent fanatics who will orchestrate attacks against Federal Law Enforcement, the Justice Department, and maybe even assassinations of Democratic Party Office holders, political opponents, and even former supporters who publicly state that the counts in this indictment damn Trump, especially former Attorney General Bill Barr, a man who forever besmirched his reputation in defending Trump in ways unimaginable for an Attorney General. But now, Barr is now a target.
With such people in the wind awaiting their opportunity we must be vigilant, such attacks by Trump supporters have happened. They are not going to stop of their own accord.
This generation of Trump followers was steeped in poison for decades before Trump came down the escalator in June of 2015. What they learned and absorbed from the likes of Falwell, Robertson, Limbaugh, and so many others is a part of their psychological and spiritual DNA. Their support for Trump and whoever eventually succeeds him as the true leader of MAGA will continue, and they will not admit to facts, the truth, or even defeat.