The Lucas Bean Show

The Republican Party used to stand for something. You can argue about whether what it stood for was good or bad, but it had a platform. It had principles. It had ideas that existed independently of any single person.

That party is gone.

What replaced it is not a political party. It is a loyalty structure built around one man. And the psychology behind how that happened is not new. It is one of the most documented patterns in the history of democratic collapse.

The Fateful Alliance

In 2018, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt at Harvard University published How Democracies Die. They studied democracies that collapsed not from military coups or foreign invasions but from the inside. From elected leaders who dismantled democratic norms while using democratic institutions to do it.

What they found was a pattern so consistent it had a name. They called it the fateful alliance.

The pattern works like this. An extremist emerges who is too loud, too angry, and too popular for the political establishment to ignore. The establishment does not believe in him. They do not respect him. But they see an opportunity. He brings energy. He brings voters. He brings people the party could never reach on its own.

So they let him in. They make the deal. They tell themselves the same thing establishment parties have told themselves in every country where this has ever happened.

We can control him.

They never can.

The extremist does not assimilate into the party. He consumes it. He replaces the party’s principles with personal loyalty. He replaces policy debates with performance. He replaces internal disagreement with purges.

And one by one, everyone inside the party who refuses to fall in line gets destroyed.

The Purge

Liz Cheney voted with Trump the vast majority of the time. She was the third highest ranking Republican in the House. She was Republican royalty, the daughter of a former Vice President. None of that mattered. She voted to impeach Trump after January 6th and her career was over. The Republican National Committee censured her and ceased all support. Not because she lost an argument. Because she refused to pledge loyalty.

Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for President in 2012. The party chose him to represent them on the biggest stage in American politics. He became the first senator in American history to vote to convict a president of his own party during an impeachment trial. Donald Trump Jr. called for him to be expelled from the GOP. The party’s own chairwoman, who is Romney’s niece, publicly rebuked him. He did not lose an election. He was forced out by a party that no longer had room for anyone who would not kneel.

Adam Kinzinger served in the Air Force. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard. He was a conservative Republican from Illinois who was once considered a rising star in the party. He served on the January 6th committee and was censured by his own party for it. The RNC voted to cease all support for him as a member of the Republican Party. Not for being liberal. For telling the truth.

These were not fringe members. These were the center of the Republican Party. And they were destroyed for one reason. They refused to put one man above the party and the country.

The Pattern

Levitsky and Ziblatt documented this same sequence in democracy after democracy. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez was invited into the political mainstream by establishment figures who thought they could use his popularity. Within years, he had hollowed out every institution that could check his power. In Hungary, Viktor Orban was a mainstream conservative before he systematically dismantled judicial independence and press freedom from inside a democratic framework. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan rose through democratic elections and then used his power to eliminate the independence of courts, media, and political opposition.

Every case followed the same playbook. A conservative party invites in an extremist. The extremist takes over. The party disappears. And what remains is not a political party anymore. It is a vehicle for one person’s power.

What’s Left

The Republican Party in its current form does not have a platform that exists independently of Donald Trump. It does not debate policy. It debates loyalty. It does not ask whether an idea is good for the country. It asks whether the idea is good for Trump.

The internal structure of the party is no longer organized around ideology. It is organized around proximity to one man and willingness to do whatever he asks. The question that determines a Republican’s survival is not whether they are conservative enough. It is whether they are loyal enough.

That is not a political party. That is a loyalty cult with a voter registration card.

The Republican Party is dead. The people who killed it still walk around wearing its name. And they are not smart enough to realize the difference.

Sources

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, Crown Publishing, 2018

NPR, “Liz Cheney Removed From GOP Post Over Trump Criticism,” May 12, 2021

NPR, “Republicans Censure Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger for January 6 Committee Work,” February 4, 2022

Reuters, “Romney Says He Will Vote to Convict Trump in Impeachment Trial,” February 5, 2020

Deseret News, “Why Mitt Romney Voted to Convict Trump and Mike Lee Voted to Acquit,” February 13, 2021

Axios, “Republicans and Democrats React to Mitt Romney Voting to Convict Trump,” February 5, 2020

Time, “GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger on Where the Jan. 6 Committee Goes Next,” June 2022

ABC News, “RNC Votes to Censure Cheney, Kinzinger for Roles on House Jan. 6 Committee,” February 4, 2022

A woman looked directly into a camera and said illegals must have dumped algae into the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

She did not cite a source. She did not reference an investigation. She did not pause for one second to consider whether what she was saying was based on anything real. She just said it. With total confidence. Like she was reporting a fact she had personally verified.

She had not. There is no evidence that anyone dumped algae into the reflecting pool. Environmental scientists from Tufts University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Wright State University all confirmed that algae blooms are a natural and expected occurrence in a shallow, still, unshaded pool fed by nutrient-rich water that had been painted dark blue. The pool has been prone to algae since it was built in 1922. The National Park Service’s own internal documents confirmed the algae was caused by residual algae left in supply lines that sat dormant during eight weeks of construction.

But none of that mattered to this woman. It felt true. And feeling true was enough.

If you watched the video, you already know what psychologist Eryn Newman calls this. Truthiness. This Substack goes deeper into the research, the reflecting pool disaster, and why this one cognitive bias explains how the entire MAGA information ecosystem works.

What Is Truthiness?

The word was coined by comedian Stephen Colbert on the very first episode of The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. Colbert defined truthiness as “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” He was satirizing the George W. Bush administration’s tendency to make claims based on feeling rather than evidence. The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Year for 2005. Merriam-Webster followed in 2006.

But Colbert was a comedian. He was making a joke. Psychologist Eryn Newman turned it into science.

Newman completed her PhD at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She is now an Associate Professor at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on distortions of memory and cognition, specifically how people come to believe things are true even when they are not.

In 2012, Newman and her colleagues Maryanne Garry, Daniel Bernstein, Justin Kantner, and D. Stephen Lindsay published a landmark paper in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review titled “Nonprobative Photographs (or Words) Inflate Truthiness.” The study examined what happens when people evaluate claims that are paired with information that looks relevant but actually proves nothing.

Their finding was specific and alarming. When people saw a claim paired with a related but completely uninformative photograph, they were significantly more likely to judge the claim as true. The photograph did not contain any evidence. It did not prove the claim. It just made the claim feel more real.

Newman found that truthiness operates most powerfully under conditions of uncertainty. When people are evaluating an unfamiliar claim, when they do not already know the answer, they are most vulnerable to the truthiness effect. Their brains take the feeling of familiarity or ease produced by the photograph and interpret it as evidence of truth. The claim feels true. So it must be true.

This is not a minor effect. Newman’s research showed that truthiness persists over time. A follow-up study with Kathy Pezdek published in Acta Psychologica in 2013 found that the truthiness boost from photographs did not fade. People who were influenced by nonprobative photos continued to believe the false claims days later.

Newman described truthiness as “using feelings and pseudo-evidence to decide what is real, instead of drawing on facts.” That is the single most accurate description of how MAGA supporters process information.

The Reflecting Pool: A Case Study in Truthiness

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is a perfect case study in how truthiness operates in the real world.

In early 2026, Trump ordered the reflecting pool renovated and painted “American Flag Blue.” The project was rushed. A no-bid contract was awarded. The pool was refilled in early June 2026. Within days, algae blooms appeared. The blue paint began peeling off the bottom. The pool looked terrible.

Scientists were not surprised. Steven Chapra, a water quality modeler and professor emeritus at Tufts University, explained that algae would be expected in a shallow, still, unshaded pool painted dark blue, because dark colors absorb more heat and warm water accelerates algae growth. Hans Paerl, an environmental sciences professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, confirmed that blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, was the initial bloom. Wayne Carmichael, a biological sciences professor at Wright State University, explained that the hydrogen peroxide the National Park Service used to kill the initial algae bloom actually made room for a more persistent green algae to take over.

Interior Department officials told the Washington Examiner that the algae was caused by residual algae left in supply lines that sat dormant during eight weeks of construction. This was the government’s own explanation before Trump got involved.

Then Trump decided to blame vandals. He claimed someone used a “box cutter or a knife” to make a gash in the bottom of the pool. The gash was 250 feet long. Then 300 feet. Then 350 feet with multiple slashes. He claimed people had “illegally placed chemicals” in the water. He claimed “radical left vandals” had deliberately sabotaged the pool. He provided no evidence for any of it. The Washington Post sent reporters to inspect the pool for signs of vandalism and found none. Snopes, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and CNN all investigated and found no evidence supporting Trump’s claims.

Internal government documents obtained by the New York Times showed that while National Park Service workers found two small cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not related to the paint peeling or the algae.

None of this mattered. Trump said it. His supporters felt it. And a woman looked into a camera and said illegals must have dumped the algae.

She did not need evidence. She did not need a source. She did not even need Trump to have specifically said “illegals.” Her brain took the feeling that someone was to blame combined with the feeling that illegals are always to blame and produced a claim she stated as fact. That is truthiness operating in real time.

Why You Cannot Fact-Check Someone Out of Truthiness

Newman’s research explains something that drives fact-checkers and journalists insane: correcting false claims often does not work.

The problem is structural. Truthiness does not operate through evidence. It operates through feeling. The person who believes the claim did not arrive at their belief by evaluating data, reading studies, or consulting experts. They arrived at it because it felt true. The feeling came first. The belief followed.

When you present a truthiness-based believer with contradicting evidence, you are not correcting a mistake. You are threatening a feeling. The brain does not process this as new information. It processes it as an attack. The evidence is rejected not because it is weak but because accepting it would require the person to admit that their gut was wrong. And for many people, their gut is the only authority they trust.

This is why the woman who blamed illegals for the algae will never change her mind. You could show her the Tufts University analysis. You could show her the NPS internal documents. You could show her the Washington Post investigation. You could show her every environmental scientist in America explaining that algae grows in shallow warm water. It will not matter. Because she did not use evidence to get to her belief. And you cannot reason someone out of a position they felt their way into.

Newman’s 2015 paper with Christian Unkelbach expanded this finding. They demonstrated that truthiness and its opposite, “falsiness,” depend on judgmental context. The same claim can feel true or feel false depending on the emotional and cognitive context in which it is encountered. This means that truthiness is not just about individual gullibility. It is about the information environment. When a person is surrounded by media, social media, rallies, and communities that all reinforce the same emotional frame, every claim inside that frame feels true and every claim outside it feels false.

That is the MAGA information ecosystem. It is not designed to deliver facts. It is designed to deliver feelings. And once the feeling is in place, the facts become irrelevant.

The Social Media Amplifier

Newman’s research on photographs and truthiness has a direct application to how misinformation spreads on social media. Her key finding was that nonprobative photographs boost the perceived truth of claims by making them easier to picture in your mind. The technical term is cognitive fluency. When information is easy to process, it feels familiar. When it feels familiar, it feels true.

Social media is a truthiness machine. Every post comes with images, videos, graphics, and formatting that make claims easy to process. A meme with a bold statement over a photograph of the reflecting pool covered in green algae does not need to be accurate. It just needs to feel right. The photograph provides the cognitive fluency. The bold text provides the claim. The emotional context provides the motivation to believe.

Trump himself amplified this exact dynamic during the reflecting pool saga. He posted AI-generated images on Truth Social. He shared memes from supporters. He repeated the vandalism claims at increasing intensity, each time adding new details that were never verified. Each post came with visuals. Each visual made the claim feel more real. Each repetition increased the feeling of truth.

This is truthiness at industrial scale. Not one person making one gut-level claim. An entire media ecosystem engineered to produce the feeling of truth without ever delivering any.

The Gut vs. The Brain

Newman’s definition of truthiness is precise: using feelings and pseudo-evidence to decide what is real instead of drawing on facts.

What makes this so dangerous in the current political environment is that MAGA has made the gut the ultimate authority. Evidence is elitist. Expertise is suspicious. Data is fake. But feelings are authentic. Feelings cannot be wrong. If it feels like illegals dumped algae in the reflecting pool then illegals dumped algae in the reflecting pool. If it feels like the election was stolen then the election was stolen. If it feels like Trump is a winner then Trump is a winner.

The entire movement runs on the principle that truth comes from the gut, not books. Stephen Colbert said it as a joke in 2005. Eryn Newman proved it was real. And 20 years later, it is the operating system of the most powerful political movement in America.

You are not dealing with people who used evidence to get to their beliefs. You are dealing with people whose gut told them something and they never questioned it once.

And you cannot reason someone out of a position they felt their way into.

Sources

Newman, E. J., Garry, M., Bernstein, D. M., Kantner, J., and Lindsay, D. S. (2012). “Nonprobative Photographs (or Words) Inflate Truthiness.” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 19, 969-974.

Fenn, E., Newman, E. J., Pezdek, K., and Garry, M. (2013). “The Effect of Nonprobative Photographs on Truthiness Persists Over Time.” Acta Psychologica, 144, 207-211.

Newman, E. J., Garry, M., Unkelbach, C., Bernstein, D. M., Lindsay, D. S., and Nash, R. A. (2015). “Truthiness and Falsiness of Trivia Claims Depend on Judgmental Contexts.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41, 1337-1348.

Newman, E. J. and Feigenson, N. (2013). “The Truthiness of Visual Evidence.” The Jury Expert, 25, 1-6.

Newman, E. J. and Zhang, L. (2020). “Truthiness: How Non-Probative Photos Shape Belief.” In The Psychology of Fake News, Routledge.

Newman, E. J. (2014). “Don’t Always Trust Your Instincts: Mistaking Truthiness for Truth.” Washington Post Op-Ed, June 30, 2014.

Snopes (2026). “Trump Blamed ‘Vandals’ for Reflecting Pool Damage Without Providing Evidence.” June 24, 2026.

FactCheck.org (2026). “Trump’s Unsupported Claims About Reflecting Pool Vandalism.” June 2026.

CNN (2026). “Fact Check: Trump’s False and Unproven Claims About the Reflecting Pool.” June 24, 2026.

PBS News (2026). “Was the Reflecting Pool Vandalized? Experts Cast Doubt on Trump’s Claims.” June 2026.

PolitiFact (2026). “Looking Into the Reflecting Pool: We Examined Trump’s Vandalism Claims.” June 26, 2026.

Washington Examiner (2026). “Trump Says ‘Criminally Made’ Algae Purged from Reflecting Pool.” June 2026.

I have been wondering for years why millions of Americans look at Donald Trump and see themselves in him.

Why are we able to see so clearly that Trump is a narcissistic, abusive, mediocre criminal and his followers love him for it?

So I decided to do some research on presidential symbolism to understand what is actually going on here.

Donald Trump mocked a disabled reporter on camera in front of thousands of people. He attacked a Gold Star family on national television. He became the first convicted felon to be elected president in American history. His approval among his base did not move. Not after any of it.

Presidents do not just change policy. They change who the country believes deserves power. Barack Obama broke a barrier that should have been broken centuries ago when he became president. Trump also broke a barrier. But it is not the flex you think it is. He opened a door to hate, racism, open crimes, and bigotry that should have remained shut forever.

And yet here we are.

Here are the five psychological reasons Trump’s base sees themselves in him.

1. The Psychological Wage of Whiteness

For over two hundred years, every American president was white. Every inauguration confirmed the same assumption. The highest office in the country belonged to one racial group.

In 1935, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois studied why poor white workers in the American South sided with wealthy white landowners instead of with Black workers who shared their economic struggles. He found that whiteness itself worked as a form of compensation. White workers were given access to public spaces, respect, and social standing that Black workers were denied. The pay was not money. It was status.

Du Bois called this the psychological wage of whiteness. The unearned social status white Americans received simply for being white. It kept them loyal to a racial hierarchy that did not serve their economic interests. They were still just as poor as their Black and Hispanic neighbors. Yet somehow they thought they were superior for just existing.

The American presidency reinforced that wage every four years for over two centuries.

Then in 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency. He shattered a symbolic barrier that had stood since the founding of the United States. His election told Black Americans and other excluded groups that the presidency was no longer reserved for one race. The assumption that had been quietly reinforced for centuries was broken in a single night.

A status payment people collected just for being white was gone.

When that status floor breaks, people do not quietly adjust. They backlash. Obama did not just win an election. He took something they did not even know they were depending on. They did not earn it. But they thought that status was stolen when Obama got elected. And now they have been trying to take it back however they can.

2. Participation Awards

Trump supporters do not just support him. They become him. They wear his clothes. They fly his flags on their trucks. They try to talk like him. They mimic his hand gestures. They adopt his insults as their own vocabulary.

In the 1970s, psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner studied how people build their sense of self through the groups they belong to. They found that when a group member achieves high status, other members of that group experience a boost in their own self-worth. The success of one becomes the validation of all.

Tajfel and Turner called this social identity theory. The psychological process by which an individual’s self-esteem rises or falls based on the status of the group they identify with.

When the leader is like you, his status becomes your status. His legitimacy becomes your legitimacy. His power becomes your power. You do not have to accomplish anything yourself. You do not have to earn anything. You just have to belong to his group. And his victories become yours.

Trump supporters do not admire him from a distance. They absorb his identity because it validates their own. They are exactly the same person Trump is. And they love the permission that gives them. To be the toxic person they have always wanted to be in public.

3. Mass Delusion

Trump supporters do not just love America. They need the world to admit America is superior. And when they feel that recognition is being withheld, they respond with hostility, resentment, and aggression.

In the early 2000s, psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala studied people whose attachment to their group is driven not by pride but by a deep insecurity that their group’s greatness is not being recognized. These individuals do not just love their country. They need constant external validation that their country is the best. And when they do not get it, they lash out.

Golec de Zavala called this collective narcissism. The belief that your group is exceptional combined with the feeling that the rest of the world refuses to acknowledge it. We are the best. Now recognize we are the best. Or else.

Normal people watch someone humiliate another person in public and feel that it is wrong. They see cruelty and they know it is wrong. But people who carry narcissistic traits see something different. They see someone getting away with it. They see someone being rewarded for the same behavior that has cost them relationships, jobs, and the respect of the people around them in their own personal lives. And they feel validated because their president is just like them.

Trump did not attract his base despite the cruelty. He attracted them because of the cruelty.

His supporters are not loyal because he is good. They are loyal because he proves you do not have to be good or kind to be president. Just like the psychological wage of whiteness was broken because Obama got elected, Trump validated to a lot of losers in this country that it was cool to not be educated or go to college. That you can be a narcissistic horrible person to people and somehow it is okay now. That even if you are a mediocre narcissistic person, maybe you could be president too. That narcissistic mediocre bullies and how they behave to other people is not wrong anymore.

4. Conspiracy Theorists

Anti-vaxxers. False flag believers. QAnon followers. Moon landing deniers. Bigfoot hunters. People who reject basic verifiable facts.

Before Trump, these people were a cagey group who kept to themselves. Society had a word for them. Fringe. They were not taken seriously. They were not given platforms. They were not treated as credible voices in any room that mattered.

In 2014, political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent studied why certain populations are drawn to conspiracy theories. They found that conspiratorial thinking is not about intelligence. It is about powerlessness. People who feel excluded from institutions, dismissed by experts, and left behind by the culture are far more likely to reject mainstream knowledge entirely and replace it with narratives that cast themselves as the ones who truly understand what is going on.

I call this the conspiracy theory psyche. The psychological tendency of people who feel powerless and excluded to reject expert knowledge and adopt conspiratorial narratives that restore a sense of control and superiority.

Trump did not just tolerate conspiracy thinking. He validated it from the most powerful office on earth. He amplified fringe theories on national television. He told people who rejected medical science that they were right to be suspicious. He told people who distrusted every institution that their distrust was justified. He made ignorance feel like insight.

Before Trump these people were called fringe. Now they run the country. Anti-intellectualism is alive and well in America under Donald Trump.

5. The Narcissist Next Door

Trump’s base is not made up of people who were excluded from power by centuries of structural oppression. It is made up of bullies. Abusers. People convicted of crimes. People who treat the people around them like garbage and resent being told to stop. People who have spent their entire lives being told the way they act is not acceptable.

In 2013, psychologist Mitja Back at the University of Münster studied the relationship between grandiose narcissism and political preferences. He found that individuals who score high in narcissistic traits are significantly more drawn to leaders who display dominance, self-promotion, and contempt for norms.

The connection is not ideological. It is psychological. Narcissistic individuals are attracted to leaders who mirror their own traits because those leaders validate the way these people move through the world.

Back called this narcissistic admiration and rivalry. The tendency of narcissistic individuals to seek out and attach to leaders who exhibit the same grandiose, domineering, and norm-violating behavior they use themselves.

Trump proved that you can be a racist, hate-filled person and still hold the highest office in the land. You can break the law and still get elected. You can be a mean, cruel bully who abuses the people around you and still get elected. You can reject science, spread conspiracy theories, and mock the disabled and still get elected. You can be all of it at the same time, in public, on camera, and still get elected.

That is not a message that appeals to normal people. That is a message that appeals to narcissistic mediocre people.

If you read this and recognized every one of these patterns, you are not the problem. You see Trump’s base for what it is. Broken people who found a broken leader and called it strength.

But if something in this made you angry, if one of these sections felt like a personal attack, you are the problem. Normal people do not see themselves in an abuser. Normal people do not celebrate cruelty. Normal people do not feel validated when a convicted felon holds the highest office in the country.

Obama broke a barrier that should have been broken centuries ago. Trump broke every barrier that should have never been broken. And the people who celebrated Trump’s behavior in the last ten years were never good kind people. They are the broken abusers they have always been.

Sources

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Brooks/Cole.

Golec de Zavala, A., Cichocka, A., Eidelson, R., & Jayawickreme, N. (2009). Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 1074-1096.

Uscinski, J. E. & Parent, J. M. (2014). American Conspiracy Theories. Oxford University Press.

Back, M. D., Küfner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry: Disentangling the Bright and Dark Sides of Narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013-1037.

You have seen it a thousand times. Someone says something with complete confidence. The election was stolen. The vaccine is killing people. Obama is not American. They say it like it is a fact. Like they are absolutely certain.

Then you push back. You ask for evidence. You ask them to explain. And they disappear.

“I’m just asking questions.”

“Who knows.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I’m not saying it’s true. I’m just saying it’s interesting.”

Five seconds ago they were certain. Now they are hiding behind curiosity they never had.

If you watched the video, you already know what philosopher Jonathan Ichikawa calls this. Epistemic cowardice. This Substack goes deeper into the research, the real-world examples, and why this one behavior is the engine that drives the entire MAGA information ecosystem.

What Is Epistemic Cowardice?

Jonathan Ichikawa is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from Rutgers University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His research focuses on the nature of knowledge, the ethics of belief, and feminist philosophy.

In 2024, Ichikawa published “Epistemic Courage” through Oxford University Press. The book won the Canadian Philosophy Association Book Prize in 2026. In it, Ichikawa argues that most of our culture’s focus on belief is negative. We spend enormous energy telling people what not to believe: do not believe without evidence, do not jump to conclusions, do not be gullible. These are what Ichikawa calls negative epistemic norms. Do not believe things you should not believe.

But Ichikawa argues there is an equally important and almost entirely ignored opposite mistake: failing to believe things you should believe. Refusing to commit to a position when the evidence is clear. Suspending judgment when you should take a stand.

He calls this failure epistemic cowardice.

Epistemic cowardice is not confusion. It is not genuine uncertainty. It is the deliberate retreat from a belief you already hold because defending that belief feels dangerous. Suspending judgment feels safe. It means you do not have to be held accountable. You do not have to defend anything. You do not have to face the consequences of being wrong.

This is not a minor academic distinction. Ichikawa argues that epistemic cowardice is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo. When people refuse to believe what the evidence shows, especially about injustice, inequality, or institutional failure, the result is that nothing changes. The refusal to commit becomes a form of complicity.

“Just Asking Questions”

The behavioral expression of epistemic cowardice has a name in rhetorical analysis. Researchers call it JAQing, short for “just asking questions.” Social psychologist Jovan Byford at the Open University published research in 2014 identifying this as a specific strategy used by conspiracy theorists to promote false claims while maintaining respectability.

The technique works in three steps. First, state the conspiracy as a question. “Why did Building 7 collapse?” “Why are so many athletes dying suddenly?” “What is really in the vaccine?” Second, let the implication do the work. The audience fills in the answer the question implies without the speaker ever having to commit to it. Third, when challenged, retreat into the question itself. “I’m not saying anything. I’m just asking.”

Byford found that this strategy opens up space for conspiracy thinking while allowing the person to avoid accountability. They get the rhetorical benefit of making the claim without the intellectual responsibility of defending it.

Communication researchers Matthew Jolley and Karen Douglas expanded on this in 2014, finding that even framing conspiracy theories as questions rather than statements was enough to increase conspiracy beliefs in audiences. The question format bypasses critical thinking because the brain processes questions differently than claims. A claim triggers evaluation. A question triggers search. The audience starts looking for answers, and the implied answer is already loaded into the question.

Tucker Carlson: The Master Class

Nobody in modern media has weaponized epistemic cowardice more effectively than Tucker Carlson.

Carlson built an entire media career on the technique. On his former Fox News program and now on his streaming platform, Carlson would state conspiratorial implications with maximum confidence and then retreat behind the word “questions” when confronted.

On Building 7 and 9/11: “If you say, like, ‘What actually happened with building 7? Like that is weird, right?’ If you were to say something like that on television, they’d flip out. Like, why can’t I ask questions about that?”

On vaccine mandates: “Were these also protests against the Biden shot mandates? We can’t say for certain. It certainly wouldn’t surprise us.”

On the 2020 election: He amplified narratives questioning the legitimacy of the results and promoted alternate accounts of January 6, including suggestions of federal provocateurs.

On the great replacement theory: He repeatedly invoked white supremacist conspiracy theory on his show, framing demographic change as an intentional plot.

In every case, the structure is identical. State the implication with total confidence. Let the audience absorb it. Then add the escape hatch. “I’m just asking.” “We can’t say for certain.” “It wouldn’t surprise us.”

This is not journalism. This is not curiosity. This is epistemic cowardice industrialized.

The ADL documented that Carlson regularly frames his role as “just asking questions,” which presents conspiracy theorists and antisemitic figures as authoritative while allowing Carlson to deny personal endorsement. He hosts the guests. He praises them. He amplifies their claims. And when confronted, he was just asking.

Why MAGA Runs on This

Epistemic cowardice is not a bug in the MAGA information ecosystem. It is the operating system.

The entire movement depends on claims that cannot survive scrutiny. The election was stolen. There is no evidence. Immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. There is no evidence. The deep state is running a shadow government. There is no evidence. COVID was manufactured as a bioweapon. There is no evidence.

Every one of these claims is stated with total confidence in rallies, on social media, in podcasts, on cable news. And every one of them collapses the second someone asks for proof.

The retreat is always the same. “I’m just asking questions.” “Do your own research.” “Who really knows.” “I’m not saying it’s true, but it’s suspicious.”

This is not a coincidence. The retreat is built into the structure of the claim. These are not beliefs that people hold and defend. These are performances designed to spread without accountability. The confidence is the delivery mechanism. The retreat is the escape hatch.

Ichikawa’s framework explains why this works so well politically. Epistemic cowardice rewards the speaker and punishes the critic. The speaker gets to make the claim, influence the audience, and spread the narrative. The critic has to do the hard work of disproving something the speaker never technically committed to. By the time the critic produces the evidence, the speaker has already moved on to the next question.

This is why fact-checking does not work on MAGA. You cannot fact-check a question. You cannot debunk a feeling. You cannot hold someone accountable for something they insist they never said, even though everyone heard them say it.

The Deeper Problem

Ichikawa’s most important insight is that epistemic cowardice is not just an individual failure. It is a structural one. When an entire culture rewards the refusal to commit, the result is that truth becomes optional. Not because people do not know the truth. Because they are too cowardly to say it.

This is what separates epistemic cowardice from genuine uncertainty. A genuinely uncertain person wants to know the answer. They ask questions because they are trying to learn. They adjust their beliefs when new evidence arrives. They engage with the response.

An epistemic coward does none of this. They do not want the answer. They want the implication. They ask the question and then walk away before anyone can respond. The question was never a question. It was an accusation with an escape route.

Ichikawa argues that a virtuous epistemic agent exhibits epistemic courage: believing what you should believe based on the evidence, even when doing so is difficult, uncomfortable, or socially costly. This means committing to your position. Defending it. Accepting the consequences of being wrong.

MAGA does the opposite. Every claim comes with a built-in retreat. Every accusation comes disguised as curiosity. Every conspiracy comes packaged as a question that nobody is allowed to answer because the person asking it was never actually asking.

What They Are Actually Doing

They are not confused.

They know exactly what they are doing. They say it loud enough for everyone to hear. And the second someone asks them to back it up they disappear behind “maybe” and “who knows” and “I’m just asking questions.”

That is not curiosity. That is not skepticism. That is not critical thinking.

That is an overconfident coward with a microphone.

Sources

Ichikawa, J. (2024). “Epistemic Courage.” Oxford University Press.

Byford, J. (2014). “Beyond Belief: The Social Psychology of Conspiracy Theories and the Study of Ideology.” In Antaki, C. and Condor, S. (Eds.), Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Psychology. Routledge.

Jolley, D. and Douglas, K. M. (2014). “The Effects of Anti-Vaccine Conspiracy Theories on Vaccination Intentions.” PLOS ONE, 9(2).

Oswald, M. E. (2016). Research on rhetorical strategies in conspiracy discourse, cited in Jolley and Douglas (2014).

Kozereva, O., Wineburg, S., Lewandowsky, S., and Hertwig, R. (2023). “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens.” Current Directions in Psychological Science.

ADL. (2026). “Tucker Carlson: Backgrounder.” Anti-Defamation League.

Conner, C. T., Hannah, M. N., and MacMurray, N. J. (2024). “Conspiracy Theories and Extremism in New Times.” Rowman and Littlefield.

A MAGA cult fanatic just said the most progressive thing she has ever said on camera.

Mary Lou Kultgen is one of the most famous Trump supporters on the internet. She and her husband Bob have spent years on The Necessary Conversation podcast defending every single thing Donald Trump has done.

Their own children, Chad Kultgen and Haley Popp, could not get through to them. Millions of viewers could not get through to them.

This week Mary Lou looked at the camera and said abolish ICE.

Her son Chad asked her to repeat it. She said it again.

She said they are killing people. She said it needs to be shut down. She said she does not like people getting murdered that shouldn’t be murdered.

Chad said it was the biggest step forward she has ever taken in the history of the show.

So what happened?

Bob got sick. Mary Lou stopped watching Newsmax. And the second she stepped outside the right-wing media bubble, she started seeing what was actually happening in this country.

Since Trump took office, more than 60 people have died in ICE shootings or in ICE custody. ICE agents have fired at people in moving vehicles at least 39 times. They killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37 year old mother of three, in Minneapolis. They killed Alex Pretti, a US citizen, weeks later in the same city. This week they shot and killed a 26 year old Colombian man in Maine. Days before that they shot and killed a man in Houston. Witnesses in Houston disputed the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the killing, saying agents were never in danger.

ICE had to pause traffic stops because they could not stop killing people.

Six in ten Americans now disapprove of ICE. A Fox News poll shows record disapproval. Even among Republicans, cracks are forming. Forty percent of non-MAGA Republicans supported impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Mary Lou did not see any of this while she was watching Newsmax.

Psychiatrist Robert Lifton studied how authoritarian systems maintain control over their members. He identified eight criteria of thought reform. One of them is milieu control. It means controlling the information environment around a person. When you control what someone sees, reads, and hears, you control what they believe.

That is what right-wing media does. It does not inform its audience. It insulates them. It keeps them from seeing the things that would make them question what they support.

Mary Lou supported ICE because she never saw what ICE was doing.

The moment that information control broke, reality came flooding back in.

She did not change her values. She did not suddenly become progressive. She saw what was actually happening and responded the way any normal person would respond when they find out that a government agency is killing people in the streets.

She said shut it down.

The most important part of this story is not that Mary Lou changed her mind. It is why she did not change it sooner. She was inside a media ecosystem designed to keep her from seeing the evidence. The second she stepped outside of it, the evidence was overwhelming.

That is not a woman who was too stubborn to see the truth. That is a woman who was kept from seeing it.

And that is what a cult looks like when the signal cuts out.

Every MAGA supporter who watched Mary Lou say abolish ICE on camera should be asking themselves one question. What else are they not seeing?

The answer is everything.

Sources

Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. University of North Carolina Press.

Al Jazeera. (2026, July 14). ICE kills 26-year-old in Maine: What happened, and who else has ICE killed?

NPR. (2026, July 14). In the aftermath of deadly shootings, ICE pauses most traffic stops.

Axios. (2026, July 13). ICE deaths continue to climb in 2026.

Fox News. (2026, March 5). ICE disapproval hits record high; voters want funding cut: Fox News poll.

Marquette Law School Poll. (2026, February 4). New Marquette Law School national survey finds 60% disapprove of the work of ICE.

Navigator Research. (2026, February 4). Americans Continue To Sour On IC

If you watched the video, you already know the six psychological reasons Donald Trump cannot stop talking about Barack Obama. This Substack goes deeper into every one of them.

The Numbers

Before the psychology, look at the data.

CNN tracked every public utterance Donald Trump made during his first term. In 2017, Trump mentioned Barack Obama by name 200 times. In 2018, that number climbed to 395. By 2019, it hit 537. That is an average of 1.8 times per day. Every single day. The number increased every year he was in office.

He mentioned Obama 10 times in a single Cabinet meeting. All 10 were unprompted. Nobody asked him about Obama. Nobody brought up Obama. He just could not help himself.

In his second term, it has only gotten worse. In May 2026, Trump went on a three-hour overnight posting spree on Truth Social about Obama. It started around 10:14 p.m. and continued past 1 a.m. He reposted memes, shared AI-generated images, and boosted posts calling for Obama to be arrested. At three in the morning. About a man who left office nearly a decade ago.

When reporters asked Trump about cost overruns on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation, his answer was: “Are you ready? Barack Hussein Obama.” The question had nothing to do with Obama.

He posted AI-generated images of the Obama Presidential Center depicted as a giant trash can. He posted side-by-side photos of himself and Obama as young men, except his niece Mary Trump pointed out that the photo Trump used was actually from his time at military school as a teenager, not the age he claimed.

In June 2026, Obama responded on the All the Smoke podcast. “You got to ask him what it is, the obsession,” Obama said. “I obviously have a room in his head. A suite in his head.”

Obama then pointed out something that makes the obsession even more obvious: “First of all, when I was president, the last thing I had time to do was worry about what somebody said or what my predecessor did. They’re gone. I’ve got work to do.”

A CNN/SSRS poll from June 2026 found that Obama’s favorability rating is 57 percent. Trump’s is 34 percent. The more Trump attacks Obama, the more popular Obama becomes and the less popular Trump becomes.

That is what makes this a clinical obsession and not a political strategy. It is hurting him. And he cannot stop.

The Loser

The script opens with Trump’s record of failure because the psychology does not make sense without it. The obsession is not about two equally successful men competing. It is about a man who lost at everything being haunted by a man who won at everything.

The New York Times conducted a massive investigation into the Trump family finances in 2018 and found that Donald Trump received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire. Not millions. Four hundred and thirteen million dollars. Much of it was transferred through what the Times described as “dubious tax schemes,” including instances of outright fraud.

Trump did not build a business empire. He inherited one. And then he ran significant parts of it into the ground. His six corporate bankruptcies between 1991 and 2014 wiped out thousands of jobs, hundreds of millions in investor money, and nearly destroyed the Trump brand entirely. His father had to bail him out multiple times, including one famous incident where Fred Trump sent a lawyer to a casino to purchase $3.5 million in chips with no intention of gambling, just to funnel cash to his son.

The list of failed businesses reads like a comedy sketch. Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump University, Trump Mortgage, Trump: The Game, Trump Ice, GoTrump.com, The Trump Network. Each one launched with enormous fanfare. Each one quietly disappeared.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama was raised by a single mother and his grandparents in Hawaii. No family wealth. No real estate empire. No $413 million head start. He worked his way into Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, a distinction earned entirely on merit. He served in the Illinois State Senate, then the United States Senate, then won the presidency twice with the popular vote both times. He left office with a 59 percent approval rating and zero criminal indictments.

The gap between these two records is not close. And the psychology that follows only makes sense when you understand that Trump knows this.

The Fragile Ego

The second section of the script is built on research by psychologists Mark Alicke at Ohio University and Constantine Sedikides at the University of Southampton. Their 2009 paper, published in the European Review of Social Psychology, is one of the foundational texts on self-enhancement bias.

Alicke and Sedikides define self-enhancement bias as the motivated tendency to maintain a self-concept that is more favorable than reality supports. People do this across every domain: intelligence, competence, morality, social skills, physical attractiveness. But the finding that matters most for understanding Trump is this: the people who perform the worst are the most aggressive self-enhancers.

This is not a minor distortion. Alicke and Sedikides found that self-enhancement operates through specific cognitive strategies. People selectively remember their successes and forget their failures. They attribute positive outcomes to their own abilities and negative outcomes to external forces. They choose comparison targets that make them look good and avoid comparisons that expose weakness.

Trump’s entire public persona is built on this. “The great businessman.” “The best dealmaker.” “Nobody has done more than me.” These are not statements of fact. They are self-enhancement operating at maximum intensity. And the research tells us that intensity correlates with actual performance deficits. The worse you are, the harder your brain works to convince you otherwise.

Self-enhancement bias functions as a closed system. It works as long as the person can control the information environment. But it has no defense against undeniable, publicly visible counter-evidence. Obama is that counter-evidence. He succeeded in every domain Trump claims to dominate, and he did it starting from nothing while Trump started with everything. There is no cognitive strategy that can neutralize a comparison that stark.

The Conspiracy Machine

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. His concept of identity-protective cognition, published in 2017, explains what happens when a person encounters evidence that threatens not just their beliefs but their identity itself.

Kahan’s central finding is that people do not evaluate evidence objectively. They evaluate it through the lens of their identity commitments. Evidence that supports their identity is accepted easily. Evidence that threatens it is rejected, attacked, or reinterpreted to neutralize the threat. The brain does not adjust. It defends.

What makes Kahan’s research particularly devastating is the finding about intelligence. Smart people are not better at overcoming identity-protective cognition. They are worse. They use their cognitive abilities to construct more sophisticated defenses against threatening evidence. Intelligence becomes a weapon for protecting the self-image, not for discovering truth.

Trump is not one of these smart people. His defenses are crude and transparent. Birtherism was not a clever conspiracy. It was an obvious lie that fell apart the moment Obama released his birth certificate. Spygate, the deep state, election fraud: all of them are easy to disprove and nobody outside the cult believes them.

But the crudeness of the defense does not matter. What matters is the function. Every conspiracy Trump has aimed at Obama serves the same psychological purpose: if Obama’s success can be delegitimized, then Trump’s failure is not real.

The timeline of birtherism reveals the mechanism in real time. In March 2011, Trump began appearing on television demanding Obama’s birth certificate. Obama released it in April 2011. Trump briefly acknowledged it, then immediately cast doubt on its authenticity. He then demanded Obama’s college transcripts, implying Obama did not earn his way into Ivy League schools. When one piece of evidence was neutralized, the attack shifted to another target. The goal was never truth. The goal was protection.

And then came the Correspondents’ Dinner. On April 30, 2011, the same month Obama released his birth certificate, Obama roasted Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in front of the entire Washington establishment. Trump sat in the audience while Obama dismantled him with jokes about Celebrity Apprentice and birther conspiracies. The room laughed. Trump did not.

Trump political adviser Roger Stone later told PBS Frontline that the Correspondents’ Dinner was the night Trump resolved to run for president. Author Michael D’Antonio put it more directly: “This is a burning, personal need that he has to redeem himself from being humiliated by the first Black president.”

That is identity-protective cognition at its most naked. The evidence that Trump is inferior to Obama was delivered publicly, by Obama himself, to a room full of the most powerful people in the country. And Trump’s brain could not process it. So he ran for president. Not to serve the country. To destroy the man who humiliated him.

The Fake Tough Guy

Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson are psychologists at the University of South Florida. Their 2008 paper introduced precarious manhood theory, the finding that manhood, unlike womanhood, is perceived as a status that must be earned through action and can be lost through inaction or failure.

Their experiments demonstrated that men whose masculine status was threatened became significantly more aggressive, more anxious, and more likely to engage in compensatory displays of toughness. The threat did not have to be direct. It just had to imply that their version of masculinity was inadequate.

The contrast between Trump and Obama is the clearest possible example of this dynamic. Trump’s brand of masculinity is performative: loud, dominating, aggressive, boastful, sexually predatory. Obama’s is the opposite: calm, measured, educated, disciplined, dignified. In any rational framework, these are simply different styles. But in Trump’s framework, his version is supposed to win. The loud guy is supposed to beat the quiet guy. The tough guy is supposed to beat the composed guy.

Obama proved that wrong. He won the presidency, won public approval, won institutional respect, won international standing, and won historical legacy. All without raising his voice. All without grabbing anyone. All without insulting anyone at three in the morning on social media.

That is a precarious manhood threat of the highest order. Because if Obama’s model of masculinity works, then Trump’s model is unnecessary. And if Trump’s model is unnecessary, then the entire performance is exposed as compensation for something missing underneath.

The full name is the tell. “Barack Hussein Obama.” Vandello and Bosson’s research predicts exactly this kind of response. When masculine status is threatened, men attempt to reframe the source of the threat as other, as foreign, as not belonging. The middle name is designed to make Obama sound un-American. Because if Obama is un-American, then his success does not count, and Trump’s version of manhood is still the one that works.

Trump also demanded Obama’s college transcripts, implying that a Black man could not have earned his way into Columbia and Harvard. This is the same mechanism. If Obama earned everything, then Trump’s inherited advantages look even worse by comparison. The only psychological escape is to delegitimize the accomplishment entirely.

The Obsession

Sigmund Freud introduced repetition compulsion in 1920 in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” He defined it as the unconscious tendency to return to the source of a psychological wound, not to resolve it, but because the mind cannot let it go. Stopping would require accepting the pain as real and permanent. The repetition is not a choice. It is a compulsion driven by the inability to process the underlying trauma.

Modern trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk expanded on Freud’s concept, finding that people trapped in repetition compulsion do not consciously choose to repeat the behavior. The compulsion operates below conscious awareness. The person feels pulled toward the wound without understanding why.

The data on Trump’s Obama mentions proves this is not strategic. His advisors have told him to stop. His strategists have told him to stop. His own staff has told him to stop. The CNN data shows it is getting worse, not better. 200 mentions in 2017. 395 in 2018. 537 in 2019. And in his second term, three-hour overnight posting sprees and AI-generated attacks on Obama’s presidential center.

No political strategist would recommend this. It does not help with independent voters. It does not help with swing states. It does not help with anyone who is not already committed to Trump. In fact, the CNN poll showing Obama at 57 percent favorability and Trump at 34 percent suggests it is actively hurting him.

But he cannot stop. Every mention of Obama reopens the wound. And every attack reminds the audience of the comparison between them. The comparison is devastating, and it never resolves in Trump’s favor. The more he attacks, the more popular Obama becomes. The more popular Obama becomes, the more painful the comparison. The more painful the comparison, the more Trump attacks.

That is a textbook repetition compulsion loop. There is no exit because the wound that drives the compulsion is the truth itself: Obama won, Trump lost, and no amount of attacking can change that.

Patient Zero

Every section of this script traces back to the same foundation. A narcissist who was built, not born.

Fred Trump raised his sons with two rules. You are a king. And be a killer. Love was conditional. Success was rewarded. Failure was punished. Weakness was not tolerated. Fred Trump hit his children, installed surveillance and intercom systems in the family home to monitor them, and ran the household like a corporation where performance was the only currency that mattered.

Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, became seriously ill when Donald was two years old. She was hospitalized for months and never fully recovered. For critical years of Donald’s development, his mother was physically present but emotionally absent. His niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, described Donald as essentially abandoned during the most important period of a child’s emotional formation. When reporters have asked Trump how his mother showed love, he has had nothing to say.

His older brother Freddy was supposed to take over the family business. But Freddy was not a killer. He was sensitive, quiet, and drawn to flying rather than real estate. Fred senior crushed him for it. Donald joined in. The two of them ridiculed Freddy constantly, made fun of him for being weak, mocked him for not being tough enough. Two men tearing apart a man who was falling apart in front of them. Freddy started drinking. He left the business. He died of complications from alcoholism at 42 years old.

Donald learned the lesson. Be the killer or end up like Freddy. That is the factory that produces a narcissist: remove the love, replace it with demands, punish vulnerability, reward domination, and produce a person who cannot lose because losing means they do not exist.

The term for what Fred Trump built was coined in 1964 by Erich Fromm, a Jewish psychologist who fled Nazi Germany. Fromm spent decades trying to understand how someone like Adolf Hitler could exist. He published “The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil” and named the personality structure he had identified: malignant narcissism. He called it the quintessence of evil and the most severe pathology in human psychology.

Malignant narcissism is a combination of four traits. Narcissism: the belief that you are more important than everyone else, combined with a desperate need for constant praise, built on top of a deep knowledge that the whole thing is a lie. The narcissist knows the success is not real, knows it was not earned, and spends every moment making sure nobody else figures it out. Antisocial behavior: the ability to lie, cheat, and manipulate without remorse. Paranoia: the conviction that everyone is conspiring against you. And sadism: the enjoyment of causing pain.

Fromm identified the same personality structure in Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, and the Roman Caesars. Researchers have since added Jim Jones to the list.

In 2020, psychologist John Gartner, a former faculty member at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, published his clinical assessment of Trump. His conclusion was specific: Trump exhibits all four traits of malignant narcissism as defined by Kernberg and Fromm. Over 200 mental health professionals signed an open letter warning the public that Trump meets the diagnostic criteria. They called him an existential threat to democracy.

A malignant narcissist can survive a lot. Losing arguments, losing deals, even losing elections, as long as there is a way to lie about the loss and reframe it as a win. The narcissist’s internal system holds together as long as the performance is maintained.

But it cannot survive someone who is the real version of everything the narcissist pretends to be. Someone who actually won. Someone who actually earned it. Someone the entire world respects without being asked.

Barack Obama is all of those things. And Donald Trump knows it. He has always known it.

The term malignant narcissism was invented to explain Adolf Hitler. Over 200 mental health professionals now say it applies to a man who cannot stop talking about Barack Obama at a rally in Ohio on a Tuesday night.

It’s a broken man staring at a picture of Obama, the one person he can never be and losing his mind over it.

Sorry Trump, Obama is just not that into you.

That is Obama derangement syndrome.

Sources

Alicke, M. D., and Sedikides, C. (2009). “Self-Enhancement and Self-Protection: What They Are and What They Do.” European Review of Social Psychology, 20(1), 1-48.

Kahan, D. M. (2017). “Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition.” Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper Series No. 164, Yale Law School.

Vandello, J. A., and Bosson, J. K. (2008). “Precarious Manhood and Its Links to Action and Aggression.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Freud, S. (1920). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”

Van der Kolk, B. (1989). “The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma: Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America.

Fromm, E. (1964). “The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil.”

Kernberg, O. F. (1984). “Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies.”

Gartner, J. (2020). Clinical assessment cited in “Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump.”

Open letter signed by 233 mental health professionals (2024). Organized through the Anti-Psychopath PAC.

Trump, M. L. (2020). “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

Barstow, D., Craig, S., and Buettner, R. (2018). “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father.” The New York Times.

Fuchs, S., and Petschauer, P. W. (2020). “The Abusive and Troubled Childhood of Donald Trump.” Clio’s Psyche, 27(1), 37-41.

Frischling, B. Trump Obama mention data tracked via Factba.se, cited in CNN (2019). “The Numbers Prove It: Trump’s Obama Fixation Is Getting Worse.”

Obama, B. (2026). Interview on All the Smoke podcast, June 24, 2026.

CNN/SSRS poll (2026). Presidential favorability ratings, June 2026.

Kirk, M. (2016). “The Choice 2016.” PBS Frontline documentary.

Shpancer, N. (2019). “The Psychology of Trump’s Preoccupation with Obama.” Psychology Today, September 2019.

There is a question that has haunted American political life for nearly a decade.

How does a man get caught on tape bragging about sexual assault, get found liable for sexual abuse in civil court, attempt to overturn a democratic election, walk away from four criminal indictments, and still have tens of millions of Americans convinced he did absolutely nothing wrong?

The answer is not political. It is psychological. And the research explaining it is decades old.

The Most Primitive Stage of Human Moral Development

In 1958, Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, published his doctoral dissertation identifying six stages of human moral development organized into three levels.

The most primitive stage he identified he called obedience and punishment orientation. At this stage, an action is wrong only if it results in punishment. If you got away with it, it was not wrong. The worse the punishment, the worse the crime. No punishment means no crime. No arrest means no wrongdoing. No conviction means innocence.

Kohlberg designed this stage to describe the moral reasoning of young children. A child does not avoid stealing a cookie because stealing is wrong. They avoid it because they will get caught and punished. Remove the punishment and the moral prohibition disappears with it.

Kohlberg and subsequent researchers also found something that has significant implications for understanding contemporary American politics. While preconventional morality is developmentally normal in early childhood, some adolescents and adults continue operating at this level throughout their lives. Moral development, it turns out, is not automatic. It requires specific social experiences, relationships, and the freedom to reason through moral questions independently. Without those conditions, development stalls.

Trump supporters are reasoning at the same level as a seven year old child. And the research tells us exactly why they got stuck there.

Why They Never Developed Past It

Bob Altemeyer, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba who spent over forty years studying authoritarian personalities, co-authored a book with former White House counsel John Dean in 2020 titled Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. The book draws on Altemeyer’s decades of research on what he called right-wing authoritarianism and documents the psychological profile of Trump’s base in precise detail.

What Altemeyer found is that Trump supporters score exceptionally high on measures of authoritarian submission. The tendency to defer completely to authority figures on questions of right and wrong. Not to question them. Not to evaluate them independently. To accept their version of reality as the only legitimate version and to follow them regardless of what they do.

This is not a random personality quirk. It is the direct product of authoritarian parenting.

Psychologist Diana Baumrind identified authoritarian parenting as the style in which obedience is demanded, questioning is punished, and emotional warmth is withheld as a tool of behavioral control. Children raised this way are never given the opportunity to reason through moral questions independently. They are told what is right. They are punished for asking why. The authority figure becomes the source of all moral truth. And that pattern becomes the template for every authority relationship that follows.

They grew up. Their moral reasoning did not.

When Trump tells them the election was stolen, it was stolen. When he tells them the FBI is corrupt, it is corrupt. When he tells them he is the victim, he is the victim. Moral criticism of the authority figure is not processed as information. It is experienced as an attack. And Altemeyer’s research confirms that no amount of fact-based argument, independent inquiry, or evidence presentation will change the minds of people operating from this psychological position. The mechanism that would allow them to evaluate the authority figure from outside the authority relationship has never been developed.

The Documented Record They Cannot See

The practical consequences of operating at the obedience and punishment orientation stage are visible in how Trump supporters process every documented fact about his conduct.

Trump bragged about sexual assault on tape. No criminal punishment followed. To a mind at this developmental stage, nothing wrong occurred.

Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in civil court. The Supreme Court upheld the decision. But there was no criminal conviction. No punishment in the terms their moral framework recognizes. Not wrong.

Trump led an attempt to overturn a democratic election on January 6th, 2021. He was impeached for it. He was never removed. He was never convicted. He walked away. Not wrong.

Four criminal indictments. No convictions. Not wrong.

Every time this man escaped consequences, his supporters did not update their view of him. They updated their definition of right and wrong. Consequences are the only moral compass they have. And Trump has spent his entire career engineering the escape from consequences. He did not create followers who think crime is fine as long as you get away with it by accident. He found them. And then he showed them exactly what getting away with it looks like.

They See Themselves in Him

There is one more layer to this that the research supports and that most political commentary misses entirely.

Trump supporters do not just defend him because he got away with it. They see themselves in him.

Research on authoritarian followers consistently finds that they are drawn to leaders who mirror their own psychological profile. The grandiosity. The victimhood. The refusal to accept accountability. The belief that rules apply to enemies but not to the in-group. The conviction that winning is the only moral standard that matters.

These are not traits Trump’s supporters merely tolerate. They are traits his supporters recognize. A man who never grew up either. A man who throws tantrums when challenged, who cannot admit fault, who redefines reality when reality does not conform to his preferred self-image.

For people whose own moral development stalled in childhood, Trump is not a cautionary tale. He is a permission structure. He is proof that you can operate at the most primitive level of human moral reasoning and still win. Still dominate. Still escape every consequence.

That is the psychological bond. And it is far more durable than any political coalition built on policy agreement.

The Only Thing That Breaks It

Altemeyer’s research is explicit on this point. Moral criticism does not work. Evidence does not work. Fact-checking does not work. The psychological systems at play are specifically designed to reject all of those inputs when they threaten the authority relationship or the group identity.

The only thing that has historically broken the spell of authoritarian followership is the collapse of the authority figure’s ability to project invincibility. When the consequences finally arrive. When the punishment becomes undeniable. When the authority figure can no longer credibly claim to be winning.

Trump has spent his entire career avoiding that moment. He may escape justice personally. Everyone around him will not. And when the consequences arrive for the people closest to him, the psychological foundation his movement is built on begins to crack.

No arrest. No conviction. Not yet.

He may escape justice. Everyone around him will not.

Sources:

Kohlberg, L. The Development of Modes of Thinking and Choices in Years 10 to 16. University of Chicago, 1958.

Altemeyer, B. and Dean, J.W. Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. Melville House, 2020.

Baumrind, D. Child care practices anteceding three patterns of preschool behavior. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 1967.

Monmouth University Polling Institute. Authoritarian Tendencies in the American Electorate, 2020.

MAGA Doesn’t Blame Trump. They Blame You.

Two psychological mechanisms that explain why Trump supporters redirect all accountability outward and why they will never stop.

There is a pattern that anyone paying attention has noticed.

Gas prices go up. They blame Biden. Tariffs destroy small businesses. They blame the media. Retirement accounts collapse under the weight of policies Trump enacted. They blame the deep state.

Never Trump. Never once Trump.

This is not stupidity. It is not tribalism, exactly. It is two specific psychological mechanisms working in combination, and understanding them is the only way to make sense of what is happening in this country right now.

The First Mechanism: Cognitive Dissonance

In 1957, psychologist Leon Festinger published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, one of the most influential works in the history of social psychology. His central finding was precise and disturbing.

When a person holds two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, the brain experiences a state of psychological discomfort Festinger called cognitive dissonance. The brain cannot tolerate that discomfort. So it resolves it. Not by examining the evidence. Not by updating the belief. By eliminating the contradiction in whatever way requires the least psychological cost.

For most people, being wrong about a politician is a manageable piece of cognitive dissonance. The politician was a choice they made. A preference. You can admit the choice was wrong and update. The identity stays intact.

For Trump supporters it went further than that. Voting for Trump did not stay a choice. It became an identity. Everything they told their families, their coworkers, their communities, their churches they stood for. The flag. The hat. The rallies. The bumper sticker. The arguments at Thanksgiving.

Admitting Trump was a catastrophic mistake does not mean they were wrong about one man. It means they were wrong about themselves. It means every argument they made, every relationship they strained, every compromise they accepted was built on a lie.

The brain will not allow that conclusion. The dissonance is too severe. So it does what Festinger’s research predicted it would do. It finds another explanation. One that keeps the identity intact. One that puts the source of the problem somewhere other than the mirror.

The Second Mechanism: External Attribution

In 1958, Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider published The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, the foundational text of attribution theory. Heider identified a basic split in how human beings explain negative outcomes.

Internal attribution means assigning the cause of a problem to yourself. Your choices. Your judgment. Your responsibility.

External attribution means assigning the cause of a problem to outside forces. The situation. The environment. Other people. Forces beyond your control.

Heider found that when outcomes are negative and personal cost is high, people have a powerful psychological tendency to shift toward external attribution. Not because the external explanation is accurate. Because it is protective. It removes responsibility from the self and places it somewhere that cannot be internalized as personal failure.

For Trump supporters, the negative outcomes are now impossible to ignore. Their grocery bills are higher. Their retirement accounts are down. Their small business costs have exploded because of tariffs their candidate enacted. The economic damage is real and it is in their lives every single day.

Internal attribution would require them to connect those outcomes to their vote. That path leads directly into the cognitive dissonance Festinger described. The brain cannot go there.

So external attribution kicks in. Biden did this. The media did this. The deep state did this. China did this. Immigrants did this. You did this. Anyone and anything except the man they voted for twice and are already defending for a third term.

The external target shifts constantly. But the internal source never gets named. That is not an accident. That is the mechanism working exactly as the psychology predicts.

Why You Are the Target

This is the part that most people who follow politics do not fully understand. And it is the part that explains why the anger directed at liberals, at journalists, at anyone who criticizes Trump feels so disproportionate and so personal.

They are not angry at you because you are wrong.

They are angry at you because you keep pointing at the damage. And the damage proves they did this.

Every time you cite a fact, share a statistic, point to a consequence, you are not presenting information. You are threatening the psychological architecture they built to survive admitting they were wrong. You are the external threat that the dissonance resolution mechanism needs to neutralize.

The anger is not really about you. You are just the nearest available target for blame that cannot be directed inward and cannot be directed at Trump without destroying the identity entirely.

This is why facts do not work. This is why evidence does not work. This is why the more damage accumulates, the angrier they get and the more they blame the people pointing at the damage.

What Comes Next

The psychological literature on cognitive dissonance and external attribution is consistent on one point. These mechanisms are not permanent. They are maintenance systems. They require constant reinforcement because the underlying contradiction never goes away. It just gets managed.

When the consequences become severe enough, when the damage becomes personal enough, when the dissonance can no longer be resolved through external attribution because the evidence is too overwhelming and too close, the psychological architecture cracks.

It does not crack gradually. It tends to crack suddenly. And when it does, the anger that was directed outward turns inward, sometimes into shame, sometimes into rage at having been misled, sometimes into a complete withdrawal from political identity altogether.

Right now everyone else is paying for their decision. And somewhere underneath the blame shifting and the external attribution and the identity protection, they know it. Accountability is not an abstract concept anymore. It is showing up in their bank accounts and their grocery receipts and their retirement statements every single month.

He may escape justice. Everyone around him will not.

And when the consequences finish arriving, the psychological mechanisms that protected this identity will not be able to hold.

I really thank everyone for watching my videos, it means the world to me.

Sources:

Festinger, L. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press, 1957.

Heider, F. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Wiley, 1958.

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There is a word that gets used carefully in psychiatry.

Delusion.

Not as an insult. Not as a metaphor. As a clinical term with a specific meaning. A fixed false belief that persists in the face of contradictory evidence and cannot be reasoned away.

By that definition, what is happening inside the MAGA movement is not politics.

It is a mass delusion. And the research to support that is more disturbing than most people realize.

How It Started

Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee spent years at Yale School of Medicine studying what happens when a psychologically dangerous leader gains mass influence.

Her finding was not what most people expected.

She found that a leader’s mental pathology does not stay contained to the leader. It spreads. Through emotional bonds. Through rallies. Through constant exposure to the leader’s worldview, his enemies, his grievances, and his grandiosity.

The psychiatric term for this is folie à millions. Madness of millions.

It describes what happens when a highly symptomatic individual is placed in a position of mass influence. The symptoms do not just inspire followers. They transfer. People who had no prior psychological vulnerabilities begin to exhibit the same delusions, the same paranoia, the same propensity for violence as the leader himself.

This is not a metaphor. It is a documented psychiatric phenomenon.

And it explains something that nothing else can fully explain.

62 courts ruled the 2020 election was not stolen. Trump’s own Attorney General said there was no fraud. His own Department of Justice confirmed it. Every court, every official, every piece of evidence pointed to the same conclusion.

And tens of millions of people still believe the election was stolen.

That is not stubbornness. That is not motivated reasoning. That is an induced delusion operating at a scale psychiatry has rarely seen.

Why The Delusion Feels So Good

Here is the part that makes this so hard to treat.

The delusion is not just a belief. It is a neurological experience.

Researchers studying the relationship between dopamine and delusional thinking found that excess dopamine in the brain contributes to what scientists call aberrant salience attribution. The brain starts finding deep meaning and connection in things that are not actually connected. Patterns appear where there are none. Conspiracies feel real because the brain is chemically rewarding the person for finding them.

Every rally reinforces it. Every speech reinforces it. Every attack on the enemy releases another hit of dopamine. Every moment of shared outrage with fellow believers deepens the chemical groove.

The belief system becomes neurologically reinforced.

That is the definition of addiction.

Researchers Rousselet, Duretete, Hardouin, and Grall-Bronnec published findings in Psychiatry Research showing that cult membership shares almost every characteristic with addiction disorders. The craving for the group experience. The withdrawal when separated from it. The inability to stop even when the consequences are destroying your life. Former cult members need support structures that are nearly identical to addiction recovery programs.

MAGA supporters are not making a political choice when they defend Trump after everything he has done.

They are feeding an addiction.

Why Nothing Can Change Their Mind

This is the part that frustrates everyone who has tried to reason with a MAGA supporter.

Facts do not work.

Not because the facts are wrong. Because the delusion is not operating in the part of the brain that processes facts. It is operating in the part of the brain that processes survival, identity, and reward.

You cannot fact-check your way out of an addiction.

You cannot present evidence that breaks a delusion. The brain does not receive the evidence the way a healthy brain would. It reinterprets the evidence as further proof of the conspiracy. Every contradictory fact becomes part of the cover-up. Every expert who disagrees becomes part of the enemy.

The more you push, the deeper they go.

Lee found that the only reliable treatment for shared psychosis is removing the exposure to the source.

The symptoms begin to fade when the source is gone.

Which is exactly why Trump cannot stop holding rallies. He knows what happens when the exposure stops. The dopamine drops. The delusion starts to weaken. The fog begins to lift.

And some of them start to see what the rest of us have been seeing all along.

Why So Few Leave

But here is the cruelest part.

Even the ones who start to see it almost never admit it publicly.

Because admitting you were wrong about this is not like admitting you were wrong about a restaurant recommendation.

It means admitting you stormed the Capitol or cheered for people who did.

It means admitting you defended a man who had people killed in the streets.

It means admitting you destroyed relationships, lost friends, alienated family members, and humiliated yourself publicly for a delusion.

The ego cannot survive that admission.

So they stay. Not because the delusion still feels fully real. But because the alternative feels worse than the delusion.

The delusion feels better than their real lives do.

And they will burn everything down before they give it up.

What This Means

Understanding MAGA as a mass delusion rather than a political movement does not mean excusing what they have done.

A person in the grip of a delusion is still responsible for their actions. The man who stormed the Capitol is still a criminal. The person who excuses the killing of Americans in the streets is still morally culpable.

But understanding the mechanism matters because it tells you what actually works and what does not.

Arguing does not work.

Shaming does not work.

Presenting evidence does not work.

What works is what works for every addiction. Removing the supply. Weakening the social infrastructure that keeps the delusion alive. Supporting the people who are starting to doubt. And making the cost of staying in the delusion higher than the cost of leaving it.

The movement will not end with a debate.

It will end the way every addiction ends.

One person at a time deciding the delusion is no longer worth what it is costing them.

Sources

Lee, B.X. (2020). Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul. World Mental Health Coalition.

Lee, B.X. (2023). Folie à millions: Trump’s shared psychosis. Cultura y Psyché.

Rousselet, M., Duretete, O., Hardouin, J.B., & Grall-Bronnec, M. (2017). Cult membership: What factors contribute to joining or leaving? Psychiatry Research, 257, 27–33.

Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a state of aberrant salience. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13–23.

There is something you notice if you watch MAGA long enough.

The anger never stops.

It does not matter what the issue is. Immigration. Elections. Schools. Drag shows. Grocery prices. The anger is always there, always at the same intensity, always looking for a new target.

And it never gets resolved.

Because it was never about any of those things.

The Research

Psychologists Zachary Rothschild at Bowdoin College and Lucas Keefer at the University of Southern Mississippi spent years studying moral outrage.

What they found contradicted the conventional wisdom.

Most people assume that when someone expresses outrage about a moral issue they genuinely care about that issue. That the anger is connected to the injustice. That if the injustice were resolved the anger would go away.

Rothschild and Keefer found that is often not what is happening at all.

They found that outrage is frequently self-serving. That people express rage at external targets not because they are motivated by justice but because the rage temporarily relieves their own feelings of guilt and shame.

They called this defensive outrage.

The mechanism works like this. When a person feels guilty about something, that guilt creates a direct threat to their sense of being a moral person. Rather than dealing with the source of the guilt, they redirect the feeling outward. They find something or someone to be outraged about. And in that moment of outrage, the guilt temporarily lifts. They feel righteous instead of ashamed. They feel like they are on the right side of something.

The anger is real.

The righteousness is not.

What They Are Actually Guilty About

Here is the part that gets uncomfortable.

MAGA supporters are not, for the most part, bad people who woke up one day and decided to hate immigrants or scream at school board meetings.

Most of them are people whose lives did not turn out the way they expected.

Their job got automated. Their town got left behind. Their kids moved to a city and stopped calling. Their wages stagnated while everything got more expensive. The status they thought was coming never arrived.

They feel like losers. And feeling like a loser creates guilt and shame that is almost impossible to sit with. Because admitting your life did not turn out the way you planned means confronting the possibility that you had something to do with it.

That is an unbearable thought for most people.

So instead of looking inward, they look outward.

And they find a target.

Immigrants took their jobs. Liberals destroyed their culture. The elites rigged the system against them. The targets change but the rage stays exactly the same because the rage was never about the targets. It was about the guilt underneath them.

What Trump Did With This

Trump did not create this dynamic. Rothschild and Keefer’s research predates his political career. Defensive outrage is a documented feature of human psychology that has existed as long as guilt has.

What Trump did was recognize it and weaponize it at a scale no American politician had attempted before.

He understood that his base did not need solutions. They needed targets. He understood that the rage felt good, that it felt righteous, that it gave people who felt invisible and worthless a sense of power and moral standing.

So he gave them an endless supply of enemies.

Immigrants. Muslims. Black Lives Matter. Antifa. The deep state. The media. The Democrats. The globalists. The elites. The groomers. The woke.

The list never ends because it was never meant to end. An endless supply of targets means an endless supply of outrage. And an endless supply of outrage means his base never has to stop and look at their own lives.

That is not leadership.

That is exploitation.

Why This Matters

Understanding defensive outrage does not mean excusing the behavior it produces.

MAGA supporters have supported a man who tried to overthrow the government, called for violence at his rallies, and spent a decade pointing them at new targets so they never have to look at themselves.

They chose to follow him. That choice has consequences and costs and it should.

But understanding why they are so rage filled matters because it tells you something important.

The rage will not stop when Trump is gone.

It will find a new target. Because the guilt underneath it is still there. The lives that did not turn out the way they expected are still there. The shame is still there.

Trump did not create broken people.

He just found them.

And handed them someone to blame.

Sources

Rothschild, Z.K., & Keefer, L.A. (2017). A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity. Motivation and Emotion, 41(2), 209–229.

Rothschild, Z.K., & Keefer, L.A. (2018). Righteous or self-righteous anger? Justice sensitivity moderates defensive outrage at a third-party harm-doer. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48(4), 507–522.