The Lucas Bean Show

Start with a scene most people recognize. A woman mentions her graduate degree at a dinner party, or corrects a statistic in a meeting, or simply holds her ground in an argument she knows she is winning. And somewhere across the table or the room, a man who had been perfectly comfortable a moment ago suddenly is not. He gets quiet, or he gets loud. He pivots to condescension. He finds a reason to dismiss whatever she just said.

You have seen this. You may have lived it.

In 2015, psychologists Christopher Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg at Princeton University studied how men respond when women demonstrate superior knowledge and competence in group settings. What they found was not subtle. Men with fragile masculinity showed measurable anxiety and hostility toward women who outperformed them intellectually. Not toward men who outperformed them. The hostility was specific. It was directional. It targeted women.

Psychologists call this masculinity threat.

The mechanism is not complicated. When a man’s sense of masculinity feels destabilized, his brain responds the way it responds to any perceived threat: with aggression, dominance behavior, and an urgent need to reestablish the hierarchy. The problem is that the hierarchy he is trying to restore was never based on merit. It was based on the assumption that he did not have to compete with women in the first place. When that assumption collapses, the response is not reflection. It is attack.

This is where conservative culture comes in.

The rhetoric that calls educated women elitist is not a policy position. It is a coping mechanism. When a man lacks the intellectual tools to engage with an argument, the next best move is to discredit the person making it. Call her out of touch. Call her arrogant. Frame her education as a character flaw rather than an asset. This does two things at once. It avoids the confrontation he cannot win, and it signals to other men that the old rules still apply.

Watch the pattern closely enough and it stops looking like politics. It looks like panic.

The same man who dismisses academic credentials as worthless will erupt when his own opinions are challenged with evidence. He does not actually oppose expertise. He opposes expertise that lives inside someone he was raised to see as beneath him. That distinction matters. His problem is not with universities. His problem is with what universities produce when women walk through the doors.

There is a generational dimension to this that does not get enough attention. Many of these men built their domestic lives around a particular arrangement. They chose partners who deferred to them, agreed with them, and organized their lives around making a man feel capable and central. That arrangement felt like love. It also felt like safety. Then the culture shifted. Their daughters went to college. Their colleagues became women with MBAs. The women they dismissed twenty years ago are now running the meetings. And the coping strategies that worked in 1987 do not work anymore.

Masculinity threat research is consistent on this point. Men with the most rigid gender expectations are the most reactive when those expectations are violated. A woman who shrinks is not a threat to that structure. A woman who corrects, leads, and refuses to perform deference is. And the men who built their entire identity on dominance have no psychological tools to handle her, because they never needed them before.

So they do what threatened people do. They mock. They dismiss. They vote for men who promise to put things back the way they were. They call it tradition. They call it common sense. They call it protecting the family.

What it actually is has a name. And now you have it.

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Sources

Karpowitz, C. F., and Mendelberg, T. (2014). The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions. Princeton University Press.

Bosson, J. K., Vandello, J. A., Burnaford, R. M., Weaver, J. R., and Wasti, S. A. (2009). Precarious manhood and displays of physical aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(5), 623-634.

Vandello, J. A., and Bosson, J. K. (2013). Hard won and easily lost: A review and synthesis of theory and research on precarious manhood. Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 14(2), 101-113.

The Psychology Behind Why Trump Supporters Will Never Admit They Were Wrong

There is a question that keeps coming up in my research, and I suspect it keeps coming up in yours too.

How do you watch someone do everything Trump has done, see the evidence, see the convictions, see the cruelty, and still defend him? Not reluctantly. Not with reservations. Aggressively. Personally. As if the attack on Trump is an attack on you.

That last part is the key. Because for a specific type of Trump supporter, it is.

This is not about policy. It stopped being about policy a long time ago, if it ever was. What we are watching is a psychological phenomenon that has a name, a mechanism, and a research trail going back decades. Understanding it will not make you feel better about what is happening to this country. But it will make you stop being confused by it.

How Narcissism Gets Built

Most people picture a narcissist as someone vain and self-obsessed. That is the surface. The research tells a more complicated story.

Heinz Kohut, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, spent his career studying how narcissistic personality structures develop in children. What he found was that narcissism at its core is not about ego. It is about survival.

When children experience specific patterns of parental failure, they cannot develop genuine self-worth. The internal architecture that allows a person to feel okay about who they are simply does not form. So the brain constructs a substitute. It builds a false self that performs superiority and invincibility, because the real self feels too broken and empty to present to the world.

Kohut called this compensatory narcissism.

There are five parental conditions that reliably produce it.

* Neglect as love. The parent withholds attention unless the child produces results. The child learns that they only exist when they achieve something, or when they cause enough trouble to be noticed. Think of the father who never showed up to anything but the championship game.

* Conditional acceptance. The parent praises only outcomes, never the child themselves. The child becomes a tool for the parent’s ambitions rather than a person with their own interior life. The kid who got straight A’s and still never heard the words I’m proud of you.

* Emotional abandonment. The parent is physically present but psychologically absent. The child’s feelings go unacknowledged so consistently that the child eventually stops trusting them. The mother who was always in the house and never in the room.

* Idealization followed by collapse. The parent builds the child up as special, destined for greatness, exceptional, then withdraws that projection without warning or explanation. You were told you were going to be somebody, until the day they stopped saying it and never explained why.

* Unpredictable responses. The same behavior earns praise one day and punishment the next, with no explanation. The child who learned to read the room before they learned to read, because getting it wrong had consequences.

These five conditions do not always produce the same person. But they all lead to the same place. A person who believes at their core that they are fundamentally empty or broken. A person who, without external validation, does not feel like they exist. So the brain builds a defense. It constructs a false self that acts invincible and superior. This defense becomes the survival mechanism. But it is fragile. It requires constant maintenance. Constant admiration. Constant proof that they matter. And it will destroy anyone who threatens to expose it.

Fragility Dressed as Strength

These are not strong people. They are fragile people who became very good at performing strength.

Roy Baumeister at Florida State University spent decades studying what happens when people with fragile self-images are challenged. His findings cut against the intuitive assumption that aggression signals confidence.

People with weak egos do not reflect when challenged. They react. The nervous system fires before conscious thought can intervene. Baumeister called this threatened egotism, and his research showed it is among the most reliable predictors of aggression in human behavior.

This is why showing a Trump supporter data does not work the way you expect it to. You are not delivering information. You are delivering a threat. Their brain processes the contradiction not as something to examine but as something to destroy. The anger, the deflection, the sudden attack on your credibility: none of that is irrational from their nervous system’s perspective. It is exactly the right response to an existential threat.

People who never built real accomplishment are particularly vulnerable to this dynamic. Real achievement creates a buffer. You can be wrong about something and still feel okay about yourself because you have evidence of your own competence. Without that buffer, every challenge to your worldview feels like a challenge to your existence.

This is why both Trump and the church became such powerful shortcuts for these men. Neither requires credentials, demonstrated competence, or earned respect. Both offer instant belonging, instant identity, and instant access to a community that will validate you unconditionally. The trade is your loyalty and your willingness not to ask too many questions. For people who have never felt that kind of belonging anywhere, it is an easy trade.

The Recognition Problem

Here is the part that most analysis gets wrong.

The assumption is that Trump supporters admire Trump. That they see him as aspirational. A winner. A strongman. If that were true, presenting evidence of his failures and crimes would create at least some friction. Admiration can be withdrawn when the object of admiration disappoints.

But William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin studied a different and deeper mechanism: identity fusion. What Swann found was that the strongest bonds between individuals and leaders do not form through admiration. They form through recognition.

When you do not just admire someone but see yourself in them, the fusion operates at the identity level. Any attack on that person is processed as a direct attack on your own self. You cannot separate your judgment of them from your judgment of yourself, because they have become the same judgment.

Trump supporters did not fuse with Trump because he represented something they wanted to become. They fused because he is structurally identical to what they already are. Same fragility underneath the bravado. Same cruelty used as a defense mechanism. Same borrowed power, handed down rather than earned. He is broken in exactly the way they are broken, and he became president. For people who have spent their lives feeling empty and undeserving, that is not just inspiring. It is vindicating.

This is why the indictments did not break the support. This is why the convictions did not break it. This is why nothing has broken it and nothing straightforwardly will. You are not fighting admiration. You are fighting self-recognition. Those are different problems with different solutions, and facts address neither of them.

The Wall the Brain Builds

Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance gets cited constantly, but there is a more specific mechanism at work here that is less discussed.

When people face evidence that would force them to confront their own responsibility for harm, the brain does not just experience discomfort. It builds a wall. Psychologists call this moral avoidance. It is not passive denial. It is an active process by which the mind constructs barriers to prevent self-examination before it can begin. The response is automatic, the same way your hand pulls back from heat before you have consciously registered the danger.

For a Trump supporter to genuinely reckon with what Trump has done, they would need to reckon with what they themselves have done in his name. The relationships they severed. The cruelties they endorsed. The lies they repeated with confidence to people who trusted them. That accounting is not just uncomfortable. For someone whose entire psychological architecture is built to avoid seeing themselves clearly, it is unbearable.

They are not protecting Trump. They are protecting themselves from the most dangerous thing they can imagine: an accurate mirror.

When Cruelty Becomes Righteous

Albert Bandura at Stanford spent decades studying how ordinary people justify causing harm to others. His research documented a consistent psychological process he called moral disengagement, in which people reframe cruelty as necessity, violence as self-defense, and hatred as righteousness.

What Bandura found was that this process is not limited to extremists or sociopaths. It is available to anyone whose psychological needs are being met by dehumanizing a target group. Once you have convinced yourself that the people you are hurting deserve it, the guilt disappears. And without guilt as a regulator, the behavior escalates.

This is the trajectory we have watched in real time. Language that would have been disqualifying ten years ago became mainstream. Mainstream cruelty normalized more extreme cruelty. For people who have never had real power or real accomplishment, watching their enemies suffer is not incidental to the movement. It is the point of the movement. It is the proof that they finally matter.

Stopping would mean admitting the power they feel is borrowed and temporary. That is not a concession any of them are willing to make.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

None of this is abstract. Broken narcissism at scale is not a psychological curiosity. It is a political force, and it is causing concrete harm to real people.

The mistake is treating these supporters as persuadable through evidence and argument. Most are not, and the research explains why. Facts were never the battlefield. Identity was. And people will reliably choose their identity over reality every time.

What the research actually points toward is harder and less satisfying than debate. The narcissistic structure that made these people vulnerable to Trump was built over a lifetime. It does not dissolve in response to a good argument. Some people do break through, usually through personal crisis, therapeutic intervention, or the slow erosion of relationships that finally forces self-examination. But that process cannot be engineered from the outside on a political timeline.

What we can do is stop being confused. Stop expecting the response that would come from someone with a secure sense of self. Stop treating bad faith as if it were good faith that just needs better information.

You are not dealing with people who are wrong about the facts. You are dealing with people for whom being wrong about the facts is the price of admission to the only identity they have ever been allowed to have.

That is a different problem. And it requires a different response.

Watch on YouTube

Sources

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.

Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press.

Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5-33.

Swann, W. B., Jetten, J., Gomez, A., Whitehouse, H., and Bastian, B. (2012). When group membership gets personal: A theory of identity fusion. Psychological Review, 119(3), 441-456.

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

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209.

Bandura, A. (2002). Selective moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101-119.

from google: “Religion can feel overwhelmingly narcissistic because it often mimics the psychological dynamics of a toxic, narcissistic relationship. This perception stems from rigid power structures, demands for unquestioning obedience, and the elevation of a supreme figure who often requires constant adoration.”

My thoughts: Narcissistic people in the past and currently often use religion to say, “If god be with us, who be against us?” Religious people are often delusionally narcissistic people with magical thinking wanting to feel special or, decreed by god to be more moral than all others.

Not all religious people are narcissistic but, most Narcissistic people are religious.

You have probably tried it before.

You show a Trump supporter data. Real data. Peer reviewed. From credible sources. Proving that something they believe is simply not true.

And instead of considering the information, they explode.

They call you a liar. They attack your credibility. They get red in the face and double down harder than before.

It feels irrational. Because it is. But there is a specific psychological reason it keeps happening.

The Research

Psychologist Roy Baumeister at Florida State University spent decades studying aggression and the relationship between self-esteem and behavior under threat.

What he found changed how psychologists understand why people reject evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

When people with fragile self-esteem have their beliefs challenged, their brain does not process the challenge as new information. It processes it as a personal attack.

And when the ego detects a threat, it does not think. It reacts.

Baumeister called this threatened egotism.

Threatened egotism is when someone’s fragile self-image is challenged and their brain automatically responds with anger and aggression instead of rational thought.

The key word is automatically. This is not a conscious choice. The nervous system fires before the thinking brain can intervene. By the time they are yelling at you, their rational mind is already offline.

Why Trump Supporters Are Especially Vulnerable

Trump supporters have built their entire identity around a set of beliefs that Trump has repeated thousands of times.

Immigrants are invaders. Democrats are evil. The election was stolen. Trump is a genius who was right about everything.

These are not casual opinions. For millions of his supporters, these beliefs have become the foundation of their identity. Who they are. What they stand for. What makes them part of a tribe.

So when you show them data that proves immigrants do not take jobs at the rate Trump claims, you are not showing them a fact. You are threatening the foundation of who they are.

Their ego experiences it as an attack.

And threatened egos choose anger over facts every single time.

So they reject the data.

They reject you.

They reject reality itself if they have to.

The Lie at the Center of Their Identity

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

Accepting the facts would mean admitting that their entire identity was built on a lie.

That they fought with their family over something that was not true.

That they lost friends defending something that was not real.

That they spent years angry at the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

That is not just embarrassing. For someone with a fragile ego, that level of admission is psychologically devastating.

So the ego protects itself the only way it knows how.

It rejects the evidence. It attacks the messenger. It constructs an alternative reality where the lie is still true and everyone telling the truth is part of a conspiracy.

This is not stupidity. This is a psychological defense mechanism operating exactly as it was designed to.

The problem is that the mechanism is being used to protect a lie instead of a truth.

What This Means for You

Stop trying to change their minds with facts.

Facts do not work on threatened egos. They make things worse. Every fact you present is another attack their ego has to defend against. Which means more anger. More doubling down. More entrenchment.

You are not dealing with a thinking brain. You are dealing with a threat response.

And you cannot reason someone out of a threat response with data.

The only thing that changes threatened egotism is when reality becomes impossible to ignore. When the consequences of the lie land directly on them in a way they cannot explain away.

Until then, they will keep choosing anger over truth.

Because their ego cannot survive the alternative.

Watch on YouTube

References

Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5 to 33.

Baumeister, R. F., and Bushman, B. J. (2017). Social Psychology and Human Nature. Cengage Learning.

Bushman, B. J., and Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced aggression: Does self-love or self-hate lead to violence? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 219 to 229.

Kernis, M. H. (2003). Toward a conceptualization of optimal self-esteem. Psychological Inquiry, 14(1), 1 to 26.

Twenge, J. M., and Campbell, W. K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press.

There is a trick so simple and so effective that it has worked on every institution in American life. The media. The courts. Congress. The public. All of them. Every single time.

And once you understand it you will see it everywhere.

In 2005 philosopher Nicholas Shackel at Cardiff University published a paper in the academic journal Metaphilosophy identifying a rhetorical strategy he called the motte and bailey fallacy. Shackel borrowed the name from medieval castle architecture. A motte and bailey castle had two distinct parts. The bailey was the open desirable courtyard where people lived, worked, and conducted daily life. The motte was a cramped dark fortified tower built on a raised mound. Nobody wanted to be in the motte. But when attackers came the inhabitants retreated there because it was defensible. The moment the attackers gave up and left the inhabitants moved back into the comfortable bailey and resumed normal life as if nothing had happened.

Shackel identified this same structure in argumentation. The bailey is the bold, controversial, emotionally powerful claim that does the real rhetorical work. It is the claim that moves people, radicalizes people, and plants ideas that are difficult to remove. The motte is the modest, defensible fallback position the arguer retreats to when challenged. The trick is that the arguer treats these two positions as if they are the same thing even though they are not. Advance the outrageous claim. Retreat to the modest one when pressed. Return to the outrageous one when safe. Repeat indefinitely.

No politician in modern American history has used this strategy more effectively or more deliberately than Donald Trump.

The pattern is consistent across every major controversy of his political career.

He told a rally crowd that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. When the backlash came his team said he was talking about drugs and crime not immigrants themselves. That he was using a figure of speech. That critics were taking him out of context. Then two weeks later he said it again at the next rally.

He spent four years telling his supporters the 2020 election was stolen. Sixty courts found no evidence of widespread fraud. His own attorney general said the claims were not supported by the evidence. His own campaign staff told him privately the allegations were false. When pressed in legal settings his lawyers carefully avoided making the same claims they made in public because they knew the claims could not survive scrutiny. But in front of crowds Trump kept saying it. Kept planting it. Kept letting the bailey do its work.

He compared himself to Jesus Christ. To Nelson Mandela. He called himself the most persecuted man in American history. When challenged he said he was just pointing out similarities. That people were being too sensitive. That he was obviously not making a direct comparison. Then he made the comparison again the following week.

This is the mechanism. Say the most dangerous thing possible. Let it land in the minds of millions of people. When challenged retreat to the modest defensible version. Claim you were misunderstood. Then the moment scrutiny moves elsewhere walk straight back into the bailey and do it again.

The reason this works so consistently comes down to how media and public attention function. By the time Trump retreats to the motte the bailey has already done its damage. The outrageous claim has already been heard by millions of people. It has already been shared, debated, amplified, and embedded. The retraction or clarification reaches a fraction of the audience the original claim reached. The lie travels faster than the correction. Always. The emotional impact of the outrageous statement is never fully undone by the modest retreat that follows it.

This is also why holding Trump accountable through traditional means has consistently failed. Traditional accountability assumes good faith. It assumes that if you demonstrate someone said something false or dangerous they will retract it, defend it, or pay a consequence for it. The motte and bailey strategy breaks that assumption entirely. Trump never fully commits to the bailey in a way that can be pinned down and punished. He always has the motte available as an escape hatch. He never said that. He was taken out of context. It was a figure of speech. The critics are being unreasonable.

And then he goes right back.

The media spent a decade trying to hold him accountable using tools designed for politicians who operate in good faith. Fact checks. Corrections. Expert panels. None of it worked because none of it was designed for someone running the motte and bailey strategy at industrial scale across every platform simultaneously.

His supporters understand the strategy even if they do not have a name for it. They know he says things he cannot fully defend. They know some of it is performance. They do not care. Because the bailey is not meant to be defended. It is meant to be felt. And they feel it. Every single time he retreats to the motte they know he will be back. And he always is.

The damage is done. The lie is planted. And he walks away clean every single time.

That is not a bug in our system.

That is him breaking it on purpose.

Sources

Nicholas Shackel. The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology. Metaphilosophy, Vol. 36, April 2005. Cardiff University. Original paper coining the motte and bailey fallacy.

The Marshall Project. Fact-checking Over 12,000 of Donald Trump’s Quotes About Immigrants. October 2024.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Informal Fallacies. Overview of motte and bailey arguments in public debate.

Washington Post Fact Checker. Donald Trump’s False or Misleading Claims. Ongoing database of documented statements.

Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler. When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 2010. Research on why retractions reach smaller audiences than original false claims.

There are four psychological reasons. You probably have at least one of them.

I have been trying to understand this for years.

Why can I see so clearly what Trump is and yet 30 - 40 million Americans have fallen under his spell?

So I went back into the research on cults, authoritarian psychology, and con artistry to find out why certain people are completely immune to the Trump cult and to political propaganda in general.

Right now roughly 70% of Americans reject Trump. The other 30% still follow him blindly.

There is a psychological reason for that.

Here are the four psychological reasons certain people are immune.

1. Education and Exposure

The largest group of people who are immune got there through education and meaningful exposure to people who are not like them.

When you are educated, you learn how to evaluate evidence. You learn the scientific method. You learn how to spot logical fallacies. You learn from experts how to solve problems using facts, data, and peer-reviewed research.

You also learn that being wrong is not a catastrophe. If you do not study hard enough, you get a bad grade. You fix it and move on. Being wrong is part of learning. Admitting you are wrong is a strength, not a weakness.

But education alone is not enough.

You also need exposure to people who are different from you. Different races, different religions, different backgrounds.

In 1954, psychologist Gordon Allport published a theory that became one of the most tested ideas in all of social science. He called it intergroup contact theory.

The idea is simple. When you have real, meaningful personal contact with people who are different from you, it becomes much harder to dehumanize them.

Pettigrew and Tropp confirmed this in a 2006 meta-analysis covering 515 independent studies, 38 countries, and more than 250,000 participants. Greater contact with outgroups reliably reduced prejudice across virtually every demographic studied.

School is where most people get both. You learn how to think. You work alongside people from different backgrounds on group projects, in sports, at dinner. You realize they have the exact same problems you do. The same fears. The same basic needs.

So when Trump shows up claiming immigrants are the problem, or that he alone can fix it, you recognize those as lies immediately. You have actually sat across a table from the people he is talking about. You know them.

2. A Strong Moral Foundation from a Healthy Family

This group is immune because they grew up in families that actually lived their values. Not performative religion. Actual compassion, empathy, and integrity.

Their parents taught them to treat people with kindness and modeled that behavior themselves.

Research on moral development shows that children raised with warmth and consistency develop an internalized moral compass. These children learn to consider other people’s perspectives. They develop moral reasoning built on care and fairness, not fear and compliance.

They know cruelty is wrong. They know lying is wrong. They know humiliating people is wrong.

So when Trump mocked a disabled reporter on live television, when he calls people names, when he calls for violence at his rallies, this group was disgusted. Not because of bad policy. Because it violated something wired into them at a foundational level.

Once you know what good looks like, you tend to reject bad when it comes along.

3. Being the Scapegoat in an Authoritarian Household

This group is immune because they have seen abusive behavior before. Up close. From someone they were supposed to be able to trust.

If you grew up in a toxic household as the black sheep, you were targeted by the authoritarian parent. You were the one who was always wrong. Always too sensitive. Always the problem.

The authoritarian parent taught the rest of the family one thing: it is acceptable to hurt the scapegoat if the scapegoat does not comply.

Your refusal to fall in line exposed the central lie everyone had agreed to live by. The lie that the parent was always right. That made you dangerous.

Research on narcissistic and authoritarian family systems consistently finds that the scapegoat is typically the most empathetic and perceptive child in the family. They were not chosen randomly. They were targeted precisely because their empathy, curiosity, and willingness to question things threatened the authoritarian parent’s control.

To survive, they developed something psychologists call hypervigilance. Their nervous system learned to scan constantly for threats and manipulation. For patterns of control. For the gap between what someone says and what they actually do.

When Trump showed up, this group recognized him immediately. Not as a politician. As their abusive parent. The gaslighting. The cruelty. The demand for total loyalty. The punishment for any dissent.

But their siblings, the ones who learned that obedience meant safety, see something different. They see power. They recognize Trump as the authority figure they have been conditioned to submit to. And for once, they are on the side doing the forcing instead of being forced.

The scapegoat knows exactly how that feels and how wrong it is. They are not falling for it again.

4. Professional Experience With Con Artists

This group is immune because they have already been in the room with people like Trump. They have dealt with con artists professionally.

If you have built businesses, negotiated deals, or worked in sales long enough, you have seen every manipulation tactic there is. You know what it looks like when someone overpromises and underdelivers. When someone blames everyone else for their own failures. When someone takes credit for work they did not do.

Research by Luka Koning at the University of Twente, published in 2024, identified fraud knowledge as one of the strongest predictors of fraud avoidance. People who understood how con artists operate were significantly less likely to be victimized. The mechanism was direct: you cannot recognize a pattern you have never seen.

So when Trump showed up claiming to be a brilliant businessman while bankrupting casinos, promising to make America great again while manufacturing his own products in China, pledging to hire the best people while surrounding himself with criminals and yes-men, this group saw through it immediately.

They have professional experience spotting fake promises. They are not falling for it again.

What This Means

If you are one of the 70% who reject Trump, you probably fall into at least one of these four categories.

You are not crazy. You learned how to evaluate evidence. You have had meaningful exposure to people different from yourself. You were raised with a moral compass that actually works. Or you survived an authoritarian environment and came out the other side with a finely tuned radar for abuse.

Trump’s supporters do not see the abuse. They see an authoritarian parent whose power they have been conditioned to submit to.

And this is the part that is hardest to accept.

His supporters are not going to wake up. Not because they cannot. Because they do not want to.

The siblings who submitted to authority in childhood learned that obedience meant safety. That compliance was the only path to belonging. They have been looking for that authority figure ever since. Trump gave it to them.

For them, watching protesters get beaten is not disturbing. It is a relief. For once they are on the side doing the forcing instead of being forced. If you resist and win, it means they were cowards. So they need you to comply. They need everyone to comply.

The scapegoat refuses. The educated person refuses. The person with the working moral compass refuses. The person who has seen a con artist up close refuses.

That refusal is not just political disagreement.

It is a psychological immune response.

You were built for exactly this moment. And whether you know it or not, that is exactly what you are doing.

Holding the line.

Watch on YouTube Here.

Sources

* Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley.

* Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751-783. [515 studies, 38 countries, 250,493 participants]

* Kohlberg, L. (1984). The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages. Harper & Row. [foundational research on moral development in children]

* Baumrind, D. (1991). The influence of parenting style on adolescent competence and substance use. Journal of Early Adolescence, 11(1), 56-95. [research on authoritarian vs. authoritative parenting and child outcomes]

* Gemmill, G. (1989). The dynamics of scapegoating in small groups. Small Group Research, 20(4), 406-418.

* Rothschild, Z. R., Landau, M. J., et al. (2012). A dual motive model of scapegoating: Displacing blame to reduce guilt or increase control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1148-1161.

* Mandeville, R. (2020). Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Help and Hope for Adults in the Family Scapegoat Role. [clinical research on family scapegoating abuse and hypervigilance in scapegoated children]

* Koning, L. (2024). Fraud: Studies into Victimization and Prevention [PhD Thesis]. University of Twente. https://doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036563093 [identifies fraud knowledge as a key predictor of fraud avoidance]

If you have ever tried to show a Trump supporter a fact and watched them get angrier instead of more informed you already know something is deeply wrong.

You are not dealing with ignorance. You are not dealing with stupidity. You are dealing with something the research identifies as far more powerful and far more resistant to reason than either of those things.

You are dealing with identity fusion.

Psychologist William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin has spent decades studying what happens when a person’s sense of self merges completely with a leader or a group. His research, published in PS: Political Science and Politics and in Political Psychology, identified the mechanism with disturbing clarity.

When identity fusion occurs the boundaries between the self and the leader dissolve. The leader’s enemies become your enemies. The leader’s humiliations become your humiliations. The leader’s lies become your truth. Not because you chose to believe them but because disbelieving them would require dismantling your own sense of who you are.

Swann’s research tracked Trump supporters across three waves of data collection spanning the 2020 election through 2024. His finding was one of the most counterintuitive results in recent political psychology. The more fused Trump supporters were with Trump before the 2020 election the stronger their belief in the stolen election lie grew in the years that followed. Not weaker as evidence against the lie accumulated. Stronger.

Think about what that means. Every court case that dismissed the fraud claims. Every recount that confirmed Biden’s victory. Every Trump ally who admitted privately the election was not stolen. Every piece of evidence should have weakened belief in the lie. Instead it strengthened it. Because the evidence was not being processed as information. It was being processed as a threat.

This is the mechanism that makes the Trump cult so resistant to facts and so prone to emotional explosion when confronted with them.

In a normal evaluative process your brain receives new information, compares it to existing beliefs, and updates accordingly. That is how learning works. That is how rational decision making works. Identity fusion short circuits that process entirely. When your identity is fused with a leader new information is not evaluated on its merits. It is evaluated on one question only. Does this information threaten the leader. If the answer is yes the information is rejected automatically and the person who presented it is experienced as an attacker.

This is why Trump supporters do not respond to facts the way you would expect a rational person to respond. You are not presenting evidence to an open mind. You are triggering a threat response in a brain that has fused its survival with the survival of Donald Trump.

The consequences of this go far beyond hurt feelings and social media arguments. Swann’s research on the January 6th insurrection found that identity fusion with Trump directly predicted willingness to endorse authoritarian actions against Democrats. Not as a political preference. As a survival response. People who were fused with Trump experienced Democrats not as political opponents but as existential threats to their way of life. And a brain that perceives an existential threat does not negotiate. It attacks.

The fusion also explains what looks from the outside like breathtaking hypocrisy. Behavior that would have been disqualifying in any other politician becomes acceptable or even admirable in Trump. Sexual abuse. Financial fraud. Incitement to insurrection. Documented lies about everything from crowd sizes to election results. None of it breaks the fusion because none of it is being evaluated through a moral framework. It is being evaluated through an identity framework. Defending Trump is defending the self. Criticizing Trump is attacking the self. The moral reasoning stops there.

This pattern is not new. Swann’s identity fusion research predates Trump by decades and has been applied to religious cults, terrorist organizations, and gang members. The psychological mechanism is identical across all of them. What makes the Trump version historically significant is the scale. Identity fusion has never before been documented at the level of tens of millions of people fused simultaneously with a single political figure in a functioning democracy.

Understanding this does not mean giving up. Swann’s research also shows that fusion is not permanent. It responds to compelling events. The more Trump’s failures accumulate in the real lives of his supporters the more the fusion weakens at the edges. People who lose their jobs to his tariffs. People who lose healthcare coverage. People who watch their retirement accounts shrink. Reality has a way of forcing itself through even the most fused identity over time.

But it does not happen through argument. It does not happen through fact checks. It does not happen through outrage or mockery.

It happens when the cost of the fusion becomes personal enough that the brain can no longer afford to maintain it.

That process is already underway.

A brain defending its identity will burn everything down before it admits it was wrong.

Until the fire reaches them personally.

Sources

Philip Moniz and William B. Swann. The Power of Trump’s Big Lie: Identity Fusion, Internalizing Misinformation, and Support for Trump. PS: Political Science and Politics, 2025. University of Texas at Austin and Northeastern University.

Francois Alexi Martel, Philip Moniz, Ashwini Ashokkumar, and William B. Swann. Identity Fusion and Support for Political Authoritarianism: Lessons from the U.S. Insurrection of 2021. Political Psychology, 2024.

William B. Swann, Jolanda Jetten, Angel Gomez, Harvey Whitehouse, and Brock Bastian. When Group Membership Gets Personal: A Theory of Identity Fusion. Psychological Review, 2012.

William B. Swann, Jack W. Klein, and Angel Gomez. Comprehensive Identity Fusion Theory. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2024.

Just a quick Sunday Thank You.

I really hope your Sunday is going well and you are enjoying this warm weather.

I am honored that you watch my videos and read my articles.

It truly means the world to me.

Here is a video of Joy Reid sharing one of my videos.

I couldn’t do it without you.

Thank you very much.

You’ve been in this argument. Maybe at Thanksgiving. Maybe in a comment thread. Maybe with someone you used to respect.

You bring the facts.

They scream fake news.

You bring the logic. They say you have Trump Derangement Syndrome. You bring the receipts, the video, the court ruling, the sworn testimony and somehow, inexplicably, you end up on the defensive.

You walk away feeling crazy. Like you lost an argument you should have won by a mile.

You didn’t lose because you were wrong. You lost because you didn’t understand the game being played.

The Law Nobody Taught You

In 2013, Italian software engineer Alberto Brandolini was watching a political debate on television when he noticed something that stopped him cold.

No matter how many facts the journalist presented, the politician just kept producing new claims. Faster than anyone could address them. The journalist was visibly exhausted. The politician looked completely comfortable.

Brandolini wrote a single observation on Twitter that would eventually be cited in academic literature on misinformation:

The amount of energy needed to refute b******t is an order of magnitude larger than what it takes to produce it.

We now call this Brandolini’s Law. And it is not an opinion. It is a structural feature of how information works.

Producing a lie takes zero effort. No sources. No research. No evidence. You just say it. Disproving that same lie requires sources, context, historical background, peer-reviewed studies, and a patient audience willing to follow every step, none of which you have in a thirty-second exchange.

Four Lies in Ten Seconds

Trump uses the same lies on repeat. Consider what he deploys in a single rally appearance:

He said no new wars on his watch. We are currently involved in active conflict abroad. He said he built the greatest economy in American history. Economists rank it behind several previous administrations. He said the 2020 election was stolen. Sixty-one courts, his own Attorney General, and his own Department of Homeland Security found no evidence of widespread fraud. He said violent crime is at an all-time high. The FBI’s own data shows crime rates well below their historic peaks.

Four lies. Ten seconds. To fully address each one would take hours of documented research that nobody is going to read anyway.

And by the time you finish, he has said thirty more.

You are not having a debate. You are playing a game designed to exhaust you into giving up.

Why His Supporters Keep Falling For It

This is where most people get the analysis wrong. They assume Trump supporters are simply uninformed. That if you showed them the right information, something would click.

The research tells a different story.

In 1977, psychologists Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino published a landmark study on what they called the Illusory Truth Effect. They found that people rate statements as more likely to be true simply because they have heard them before, regardless of whether the statements are actually accurate. Repetition alone creates the feeling of truth.

Subsequent research has confirmed this effect across hundreds of studies. A 2019 meta-analysis in the journal Psychological Bulletin found the illusory truth effect is robust even when people are explicitly warned about it, even when the false statements contradict things they already know to be true, and even when the source is identified as unreliable.

Trump does not need to convince anyone. He just needs to repeat things until they feel true. The lying is not a bug. It is the mechanism.

This Was Built This Way

None of this is accidental. The firehose of falsehood, flooding the information environment with so many claims that no one can keep up, is a documented propaganda technique studied extensively by the RAND Corporation in research on Russian information warfare.5

The goal is never to persuade. The goal is to exhaust. To make the truth feel too complicated to chase down. To make both sides seem equally uncertain. To make the person trying to hold reality together feel like the unreasonable one.

When you understand that, the argument stops being confusing. It becomes predictable.

Trump doesn’t need to win arguments. He just needs to lie faster than you can keep up. And he has spent a decade proving that works.

What You Actually Do With This

Stop playing defense. You cannot out-fact a firehose and you cannot out-argue someone whose brain has been rewired by repetition to treat lies as truth.

What you can do is name the game. Point to the exhaustion tactic directly. Make the mechanism visible. Because the one thing Brandolini’s Law cannot survive is an audience that understands it is being used on them.

That is the only argument worth having.

Sources

1. Brandolini, A. (2013, November 11). [Original tweet]. Twitter/X. Cited in Williamson, E. (2019). Fantasy Island. Crown.2. FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program (2023). Crime in the United States. U.S. Department of Justice.3. Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112.4. Dechêne, A., Stahl, C., Hansen, J., & Wänke, M. (2010). The truth about the truth: A meta-analytic review of the illusory truth effect. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(2), 238–257.5. Paul, C., & Matthews, M. (2016). The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model. RAND Corporation.

If you have normal human empathy, watching what is happening in the United States right now is exhausting in a way that is difficult to explain to people who do not feel it.

You are not crazy. You are not weak. And you are not alone.

But I wanted to understand exactly what is happening here. Why some people seem to feel nothing while others are overwhelmed. So I went looking for the research. And what I found was more disturbing and more clarifying than I expected.

Empathy is the brake pedal on cruelty. Most people do not want to see other human beings suffer. That instinct is not naive. It is neurological. Research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found that our brains have dedicated circuits for registering other people’s pain. When we watch someone suffer those circuits fire. We feel it. Not as much as the person experiencing it but enough to make us want it to stop.

Authoritarian regimes have always known this. Which is why their first move is never force. Their first move is dehumanization.

Call them illegals. Call them invaders. Call them vermin. Call them animals. Once a group of people has been stripped of their humanity in the public imagination the brake pedal stops working. Neuroscience research shows that pain empathy is automatically reduced when we stop associating a group with our own species. The cruelty does not feel like cruelty anymore. It feels like pest control.

Trump’s movement did not invent this. Every authoritarian movement in history used it. But the research explains exactly why it works so consistently.

Researchers studying extremism and empathy identified what they call parochial empathy. Deep emotional attachment to the in-group combined with near total absence of empathy for anyone outside it. These are not people who lack the capacity for empathy entirely. They feel it intensely for their tribe. They just cannot extend it across the line the leader has drawn.

In a documented neurological study researchers found that people experience increased activity in their brain’s reward centers when members of a rival group suffer. Not neutral indifference. Active pleasure. That is what you are watching when Trump supporters cheer at deportation videos. When they laugh at suffering. When they celebrate the pain of anyone the leader has designated as the enemy. They are not broken. They are operating exactly as the psychology predicts.

Here is where it starts. Most of the people who appear to have no empathy today did not arrive there suddenly. Research on the authoritarian personality going back to Theodor Adorno’s landmark 1950 study found that authoritarian followers were shaped by specific childhood environments. Households where love was conditional, authority was absolute, and questioning the parent was consistently punished. Those children learned that safety comes from obedience and compliance, not from connection or honesty. They learned to suppress their own inner experience and conform to whoever held power over them.

The leader becomes the parent. The movement becomes the family. And the rules are the same ones they learned at home. Obey. Conform. Attack whoever the authority figure targets. Do not ask questions.

When a group fuses its identity to a leader, facts become hostile. Any criticism of the leader is experienced as a personal attack on every member of the group. This is why you cannot reason with them. This is why evidence makes them angrier not more reflective. The only language that functions inside that system is loyalty. And the price of disloyalty is exile.

Research on right-wing authoritarianism also found that high scorers on the RWA scale show measurably lower empathy toward dehumanized out-groups. The dehumanization and the reduced empathy feed each other. The more you dehumanize a group the less you feel for them. The less you feel for them the easier it is to dehumanize them further. That cycle is how ordinary people end up cheering for cruelty they would have found unthinkable five years ago.

Propaganda does not need to make you hate the targeted group. It just needs to make you stop caring about them. Once that happens fear and loyalty take over completely. The radicalization spreads through group reinforcement. Dehumanizing jokes. Slurs. Loyalty signals. Each one moves the line slightly further. That is why the rhetoric keeps escalating. Because escalation is the mechanism. It is not a side effect.

Here is the trap that makes this so hard to fight. If you try to hold the leader accountable his followers experience it as persecution of themselves. If you do not hold him accountable he escalates the cruelty because there is no cost to doing so. There is no winning move inside the system on its own terms. The only way out is to change the terms entirely.

People without empathy do not experience the pain you are feeling right now. They literally do not feel it. That is why they can celebrate when others get hurt. That is why the suffering of strangers registers as entertainment or as justice. That is not a performance. That is the psychology.

If you feel exhausted right now it is because you still have empathy. You feel the real world harm. The breakdown of human decency. The distance between what this country said it was and what you are watching it become.

That exhaustion is not weakness.

It is what it feels like to be a human being paying attention.

And the fact that it still hurts means they have not gotten to you yet.

Sources

Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. Harper and Row, 1950.

Bob Altemeyer. The Authoritarians. University of Manitoba, 2006. Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale research.

Bruneau et al. Parochial empathy predicts reduced altruism and the endorsement of passive harm. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2017.

Cikara et al. Us versus them: Social identity shapes neural responses to intergroup competition and harm. Psychological Science, 2011.

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Dehumanization and neural empathy response research. Oxford Academic, 2021.

Stephen Morris. Empathy as a hallmark of political orientation. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2020.

PMC. A hypothetical neurological association between dehumanization and human rights abuses. National Institutes of Health, 2016.

They talk about alpha males constantly. They post about dominance and strength and masculinity every single day. They mock men who show emotion. They mock men who go to therapy. They mock anyone who does not perform toughness the way they do.

And then they bow down to a man who tells them exactly what to think, who to hate, and when to be angry.

That contradiction is not an accident. There is a documented psychological reason for it. And the research goes back further than Trump.

In 1950 sociologist Theodor Adorno and his colleagues at Berkeley published a landmark study called The Authoritarian Personality. The research was motivated directly by Nazi Germany. Adorno’s team wanted to understand how ordinary people with no obvious predisposition to cruelty could submit completely to a fascist leader. What they found was a specific personality type they called the authoritarian. Someone marked by rigid adherence to conventional values, uncritical submission to authority figures, and intense aggression toward anyone the leader designated as an enemy.

They built a measurement tool called the F-scale. F for fascism. The higher you scored the more likely you were to follow a strongman, punish deviants, and abandon independent thought the moment a dominant authority figure entered the room.

Decades later Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba spent 40 years refining and expanding that research. He identified what he called the authoritarian follower and measured them on three core traits: submission to authority, aggression toward whoever the leader targets, and blind conformity to group norms. Altemeyer found this profile was not rare. It was widespread. And it was concentrated overwhelmingly on the political right.

Here is what makes this so important. The authoritarian follower does not generate opinions. He downloads them. He was not angry about immigration until someone told him to be. He was not angry about transgender athletes or drag shows or a Colombian pop star performing at the Super Bowl until the media ecosystem he lives inside told him those things were threats. The content of the belief is interchangeable. What stays constant is the posture. Submission to the leader. Aggression toward the target. Conformity to the group.

The alpha male performance is the tell. Research on hegemonic masculinity shows that men who feel most insecure about their status are the ones most likely to perform dominance loudly and publicly. The loudest man in the room is almost never the most confident one. Confidence does not need an audience. Insecurity does. The men who post constantly about being alphas, who measure their worth by how much they dominate others, who treat any sign of vulnerability as weakness, are men who have built an entire identity around hiding how frightened they actually are.

And the strongman leader is perfectly designed for them. He gives them permission to be angry without requiring them to think. He gives them a designated enemy so they never have to sit quietly with themselves. He tells them they are the real victims while simultaneously telling them they are the strongest people in the country. Both things at once. Persecuted and dominant. Wronged and superior. That combination is catnip for the authoritarian follower because it validates the fear underneath while feeding the performance on top.

When you challenge any of it the mask comes off immediately. The emotional meltdowns at rallies. The screaming at strangers online. The pearl clutching over a halftime show. These are not the reactions of men who are secure in themselves. They are the reactions of people who never developed the capacity to sit with discomfort because they outsourced their emotional regulation to a leader a very long time ago.

Altemeyer warned about this for decades before Trump arrived. He found that authoritarian followers were not just dependent on strong leaders psychologically. They were dangerous in their absence. When the leader falls they do not become independent. They look for the next one. The submission does not disappear. It just needs a new host.

Trump did not create these men. He found them. Millions of people whose need for a dominant authority figure had been sitting dormant, waiting for someone to activate it. He gave them permission to be angry. He gave them an enemy. He gave them an identity built entirely on his own. And in return they gave him the one thing he needed most.

They gave him their brain.

They do not follow Trump because he is strong.

They follow him because they are not.

Sources

Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. Harper and Row, 1950. Berkeley Studies in Prejudice. F-scale development and authoritarian personality research.

Bob Altemeyer. The Authoritarians. University of Manitoba, 2006. Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale and authoritarian follower research.

Matthew MacWilliams. The Rise of American Authoritarianism. University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2016. Predictive research on authoritarian personality and Trump support.

Alexander Yendell and David Herbert. Authoritarianism and the Psychology of War. Politics and Governance, 2025. Research on authoritarian submission, masculinity norms, and political attitudes.