The Lucas Bean Show

You ever notice the people saying both sides are equally as bad used to wear a red hat?

There is a psychological reason for that.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister at Florida State University spent decades studying how people protect their self-image when they are forced to confront being wrong. What he found was that the brain will do almost anything to avoid a direct admission of failure. Instead of accepting the full truth, it rewrites the story into one where nobody was right. That way the person never has to say I was wrong and you were right.

He called it Threatened Egotism.

Here is how it works.

Admitting Trump was a disaster is one thing. But admitting the other side was right the whole time is something else entirely. That means admitting you spent years defending a con man. That you fought with people you love for nothing. That the people you called stupid were right and you were wrong the entire time.

Their pride will not allow it.

They burned the house down. Now they are pretending they were not holding the match.

So they invented a position that requires no accountability. Both sides are bad. I am done with all of it. I am voting independent.

It is a lie they tell themselves so they never have to apologize.

They get to walk away from everything they helped cause without ever saying I was wrong. Without ever acknowledging the damage they did. Without ever having to step into the same reality as the rest of us.

We cannot move forward together unless you are in the same reality. You know that, right?

Nobody is asking them to be humiliated. What we are asking them is to be honest.

Because you cannot fix what happened to this country if the people who helped break it are still pretending both sides did it.

They voted for this. They cheered for this. They told everyone who disagreed to go to hell. And now they want a participation trophy for finally noticing.

That is not the center. That is a coward who broke this country and is too proud to admit it.

The Psychology Behind the Pivot

When a person’s deeply held beliefs are proven wrong, the mind does not simply update. It protects itself. Baumeister’s research on threatened egotism shows that when the self-concept is under attack, people redirect outward rather than revise inward. It is easier to claim the entire system is corrupt than to accept personal responsibility for being wrong about one part of it.

The “both sides” position is not a political philosophy. It is a psychological escape hatch.

It allows a person to feel principled while doing the one thing that requires the least courage: nothing. No accountability. No apology. No acknowledgment of harm. Just a clean exit dressed up as wisdom.

The brain is extraordinarily good at this. It will construct an entirely new narrative, complete with its own internal logic, that protects the self-image at all costs. The person is not lying consciously. They genuinely believe their new story. That is what makes it so difficult to challenge.

But difficult is not the same as impossible.

What the research tells us is that the path forward is not confrontation. It is not humiliation. It is the creation of conditions where honesty becomes less threatening than the alternative. That requires time, accountability structures, and a culture that rewards the admission of error rather than punishing it.

We are not there yet.

And until we are, the people who helped break this country will keep pretending they were innocent bystanders.

Sources

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.

Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil: Inside human violence and cruelty. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Baumeister, R. F., Bushman, B. J., and Campbell, W. K. (2000). Self-esteem, narcissism, and aggression: Does violence result from low self-esteem or from threatened egotism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9(1), 26-29.

Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., and Tice, D. M. (1993). When ego threats lead to self-regulation failure: Negative consequences of high self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(1), 141-156.

I have spent years getting into arguments with Trump supporters. At family dinners. Online. At work. And no matter how solid my point was, no matter how much evidence I brought, something strange kept happening.

They never actually argued with me.

They argued with a version of me that did not exist. They changed the subject. They attacked my character. They made up catastrophes that nobody predicted. They demanded I disprove things they never proved in the first place.

For a long time I thought I was losing these arguments. I was not. Nobody was arguing. They were running a playbook. And once I figured out what was in it, I could not unsee it.

These are not random responses. This is a set of techniques. Each one has a name. Each one has a psychological explanation for why it works. And each one is being deployed against you in every political conversation you have whether you know it or not.

Here are the five tricks the Trump cult uses to make sure a real argument never happens.

1. The Strawman Fallacy

The strawman is the most common trick in the playbook and the one most people fall for without ever realizing it.

Here is how it works. You make an argument. Instead of responding to your actual argument, the other person changes it into a weaker, dumber, scarier version of it. Then they argue against that fake version. And act like they defeated you.

You point out that Trump started a war with Iran without telling Congress, without a vote, without even warning American allies. Your MAGA friend says you hate America and want to see it destroyed. You never said anything close to that. But now you are spending the next ten minutes defending your patriotism instead of talking about an illegal war. And your original point is completely forgotten.

This happens because of something psychologist Peter Wason at University College London discovered in 1960. After running a series of reasoning experiments, Wason found that human beings do not evaluate arguments objectively. The brain is not looking for the truth. It is looking for the fastest way to protect what it already believes. When a conservative hears your argument their brain is not asking whether you are right. It is asking how to make you look wrong. And the fastest way to make you look wrong is to change what you said into something nobody could defend.

So they change it. Question the Iran war? You are siding with the enemy. Bring up Trump’s criminal convictions? You have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Ask about deportations to foreign prisons? You want open borders and you hate America.

They never engaged with what you actually said. They built a fake version of it and destroyed that instead. And most people follow the fake argument and forget the real one ever existed. That is the trap. The strawman does not beat your argument. It buries it.

2. Whataboutism

Whataboutism is the second most common trick and the one that has the longest history.

You bring up that Trump fired his Attorney General for refusing to prosecute his political enemies. They say what about Hillary’s emails. You point out that Trump started a war with Iran without congressional approval. They say what about Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. You cite Trump’s 34 felony convictions. They say what about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Not one of those responses addressed what you said. Hillary’s emails do not change what Trump did with his Attorney General. Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal does not change the fact that Trump started a war without telling Congress. Hunter Biden’s laptop does not change 34 felony convictions. These are completely separate issues being dragged into the conversation for one reason only. To make you forget what you were talking about.

Soviet propagandists perfected this technique during the Cold War. Every time Western countries criticized Soviet human rights abuses, Soviet officials would pivot immediately. What about racism in America. What about poverty in the West. What about your history of slavery. They never addressed a single criticism. They just pointed somewhere else until the original point was buried under a pile of redirects.

Trump learned from the best. And his followers learned from Trump.

The reason whataboutism works is rooted in how the brain processes multiple competing ideas. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University spent decades studying human attention and found that the brain can only effectively track a limited number of ideas at the same time. The moment someone introduces a second problem into a conversation about the first problem, your attention splits. Introduce a third and a fourth and you have completely lost the original thread. Whataboutism is designed to exploit that cognitive limitation on purpose.

Every time a Trump supporter says what about, they are not making a point. They are running away from yours. Whataboutism is not a defense. It is a weak person’s confession that they have no defense.

3. Ad Hominem

Ad hominem is Latin for against the person. Instead of engaging with your argument the other person attacks your intelligence, your character, your mental health, or your motives. The goal is to destroy your credibility before your argument ever gets evaluated by anyone listening.

You say Trump is breaking the law. They say you have Trump Derangement Syndrome. You cite a federal judge’s ruling. They call you a brainwashed sheep. You present evidence. They say you hate America.

The law is still being broken. The judge’s ruling is still real. The evidence is still there. None of that changed. But now the entire conversation is about whether you are crazy or unpatriotic instead of what Trump actually did. Your argument is sitting right there untouched and nobody is looking at it because everyone is looking at you.

Psychologist Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University spent his career studying how people are persuaded and found something important. Human beings do not evaluate arguments in a vacuum. We evaluate arguments based on who is making them. We are far more likely to accept a message from someone we trust and far more likely to dismiss a message from someone we think is unhinged or stupid. Ad hominem attacks exploit this by making the audience question whether you are even worth listening to before they ever engage with what you said.

When they cannot beat the point they come after the person making it. And it works because most people stop defending their argument the moment they start defending their character. The moment you are explaining why you are not crazy the argument is over. They won without ever touching your point.

4. The Slippery Slope Fallacy

The slippery slope is the fear machine. It takes one reasonable idea and claims it will automatically lead to the most catastrophic outcome imaginable, with no evidence and no logical steps connecting the two.

You say the government should not be able to deport American citizens without due process. They say you want to open the borders and let murderers and criminals pour into the country. You never said anything about open borders or criminals. But now everyone is arguing about something you never brought up and the original point about due process is completely abandoned.

You say schools should teach accurate history about slavery and racism in America. They say you want white children to hate themselves and hate their country. You say a state should protect transgender people from discrimination. They say that will lead to the complete destruction of women’s sports.

None of those catastrophes happened. Not in America. Not in any country with similar policies. The catastrophe was invented. It was never based on evidence. It was based entirely on fear.

Psychologist Paul Ekman at the University of California San Francisco spent decades studying human emotions and found that fear overrides rational thinking faster than any other emotion. When your brain perceives a threat it stops evaluating evidence and starts looking for an exit. The slippery slope is designed to activate that fear response before your brain has a chance to ask whether the threat is even real. Once you are afraid you are no longer thinking. You are reacting. And people who are reacting are easy to control.

Conservatives use the slippery slope because fear is cheaper than facts. You do not need evidence to scare someone. You just need a vivid enough image of something terrible. And once someone is scared of where your idea might lead they will never evaluate whether your idea is actually good.

5. The Burden of Proof Flip

Charlie Kirk built his entire career on this trick. He would travel to college campuses, make wild claims with absolutely no evidence, and demand that students disprove him on the spot. When the students could not disprove him, Kirk declared victory and took the microphone away. He called it owning the libs. It was not a debate. It was an ambush on unprepared kids who did not know the rules of argument.

The rule is simple. The person making the claim is always responsible for proving it. If someone tells you there is an invisible dragon in your garage the burden is on them to prove the dragon exists. It is not on you to prove it does not. That is how science works. That is how courts work. That is how honest argument works.

But Kirk and every conservative like him flip this constantly. They make a wild claim with no evidence and then demand that you disprove them. And here is why you can never win once this trap is set.

You show them a court ruling. That judge is corrupt. You show them a peer reviewed study. That scientist was bought. You show them a news report. That outlet is fake news. Every piece of evidence you bring just gets added to the conspiracy. There is no evidence they will accept because accepting evidence was never part of the deal.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that once someone commits to a belief their brain treats every piece of supporting evidence as confirmation and every piece of contradicting evidence as proof of a cover up. The burden of proof flip works because it creates a closed loop that no evidence can break. Because inside that loop evidence itself becomes part of the conspiracy.

Kirk was never debating anyone. He was cheating. In a real debate the person making the claim has to prove it. Kirk never proved anything. He just demanded you disprove him and declared victory when you could not. That is not debate. That is a fraud dressed up as intellectual courage.

Most of these people have no idea what they are actually saying. They saw it on TikTok. They heard it on Fox News. They repeated it to you and called it an argument.

They are not trying to win a debate. They are trying to feel superior to someone they are secretly intimidated by. That is all owning the libs ever was. Deeply insecure people using borrowed tricks to feel powerful for five minutes.

Now you know every trick they have. And the second you name what they are doing, they have nothing left.

Sources

Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12(3), 129 to 140.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Cialdini, R. B. (1984). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Harper Business.

Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3 to 4), 169 to 200.

Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Theory driven reasoning about plausible pasts and probable futures in world politics. American Journal of Political Science, 43(2), 335 to 366.

Dunning, D. and Kruger, J. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121 to 1134.

You’ve seen it happening in real time.

The yard signs disappeared. The hats went in a box. The tweets got deleted. And suddenly, everywhere you look, people who spent the better part of a decade loud, proud, and aggressive about their support for Donald Trump are saying the same thing:

“I never really supported him.”

“I just voted against the Democrats.”

“I barely even followed politics.”

“I don’t talk about politics anymore sorry.”

Let’s be clear about what this is. It isn’t confusion. It isn’t growth. It isn’t some fascinating psychological phenomenon where the brain rewrites memory to protect the ego.

It’s lying.

They voted for him in 2016. They voted for him in 2020. They voted for him again in 2024. They put the signs in their yards and the hats on their heads and the posts on their Facebook pages. They defended him when he mocked a disabled reporter. They attacked anyone who pushed back. They said we were overreacting. They called us crazy for seeing exactly what was coming.

And now that the consequences are undeniable, the cruelty documented, the damage real, the history written, they want to walk away clean.

It doesn’t work that way.

What the numbers actually say

As of January 2026, Trump’s approval rating stands at 37%, down from 40% in the fall. By more than two to one, Americans say the administration’s actions have been worse than they expected rather than better. Only about a quarter of Americans say they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, down from 35% when he returned to office.

Adults under 30 have gone from 55% approving of Trump in February 2025 to 28% by summer.

These are the people who voted for him. These are the people who are now embarrassed. And embarrassment, it turns out, looks a lot like denial.

One former supporter put it plainly: “Secretly, I wanted Trump to win over Kamala. She’s too woke. Now I am so embarrassed.”

Embarrassed. Not wrong. Not sorry. Embarrassed.

There is a difference. And it matters.

The receipts exist

Social media is forever. Screenshots are forever. The comments sections, the shares, the profile picture frames, all of it is documented. The internet has a longer memory than the people who built their identities on it.

74 million people voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Not one of them, apparently, will admit it now.

That is not a coincidence. That is a coordinated, collective act of historical revision. And the people doing it aren’t confused. They’re embarrassed. They know exactly what they did. They’re just counting on us to forget.

We haven’t.

Why this matters right now

Trump’s approval among Americans earning $50,000 or less has fallen to 31%, with 65% disapproving. The working class voters who put him over the finish line are now among his harshest critics. And instead of reckoning with that, they’re rewriting the story.

This is the cycle. New bad idea. Full-throated support. Catastrophic outcome. Quiet disappearance. Repeat.

The only thing that breaks that cycle is memory. Ours. Not theirs. They’ve already proven they can’t be trusted with it.

So we hold it for them. We keep the receipts. We remember what they said when they were proud of it. And we make sure that walking away quietly is not the same as walking away clean.

Accountability is coming.

Sources

Pew Research Center. “Confidence in Trump Dips in 2026.” January 29, 2026. pewresearch.org

CNN Politics. “Trump voter regret might be setting in.” August 7, 2025. cnn.com

BuzzFeed News. “Ex-Trump Supporters Share The Reasons They Left In 2025.” December 9, 2025. buzzfeed.com

Brookings Institution. “The economy weakened support for President Trump in 2025.” January 16, 2026. brookings.edu

Newsweek. “5 polls that will worry Donald Trump as 2026 begins.” January 1, 2026. newsweek.com

There is a version of this conversation where I tell you Trump supporters are just misinformed. That if we explained things better, showed them the right facts, had the right conversation, they would come around.

That is not what the science says.

What the science says is that Trump supporters are angry for three specific reasons. And understanding those reasons does not make them more sympathetic. It makes their behavior more predictable. And once you understand what is actually driving the rage, you stop wasting time trying to debate it.

Reason One: Their Brains Are Wired For Fear

Neuroscientist Geraint Rees at University College London studied how conservative and liberal brains process threat differently. He scanned the brains of thousands of people across multiple peer reviewed studies to see if there was a correlation between brain structure and political affiliation.

And what he found was wild.

Conservative brains have a larger, more reactive amygdala that never shuts off. The amygdala is the fear center of your brain. It processes fear, anxiety and rage. At the same time the part of their brain that pumps the brakes on fear, called the anterior cingulate cortex, is smaller in conservative brains. That is the part of the brain that controls proportionality and rational response.

Conservative brains run on fear. Liberal brains run on curiosity.

The amygdala’s job is simple. Detect threats and freak out. Fight. Flight. Freeze. When the amygdala is oversensitive, everything new feels dangerous. Immigrants moving into your neighborhood? Threat. Drag queens on television? Threat. A Spanish guy on a Super Bowl stage? Threat. Not because there is a threat. But because their amygdala manufactures a threat.

Rees called this threat hypersensitivity.

This means progressives literally have a more evolved brain. Built for complexity. Built for modern society. Conservative brains are stuck in caveman threat detection mode. Perfect for 50,000 BC. Horrible for a modern society.

This is why facts do not work on Trump supporters. You are not debating ideas. You are debating a terrified lizard brain. You present data. They feel attacked. You offer logic. Their nervous system screams danger.

Every immigrant rant. Every culture war panic. Every meltdown over a coffee cup at Christmas. It all traces back to the same thing. A hyperactive fear response that was never meant to operate in the modern world.

Reason Two: They Are Drowning In Shame

Psychiatrist James Gilligan at Harvard Medical School spent decades studying the most violent men in American prisons. His finding was the same every single time. Underneath every act of rage was one emotion.

Shame.

Gilligan found that men who could not process shame turned it outward. Into violence. Into rage. Into destroying anyone who reminded them of what they never became.

Most Trump supporters spent their lives falling short of who they thought they would be. They did not build the career they wanted. They did not earn the respect they thought they deserved. They peaked in high school. That gap between who they are and who they thought they would be produces shame. And shame that has nowhere to go becomes rage.

That is what you are looking at when you see a Trump supporter lose their mind over immigrants or college graduates. It is not politics. It is a person furious at their own life who needs someone to blame for it.

They are mad that you did something with your life and they did not. You actually did the work. They convinced themselves that real Americans do not need ambition. That hard work is for elites. And then they spent twenty years wondering why nothing changed.

The rage is not about politics. It never was. It is about a life that did not go the way they planned and a desperate need to make that someone else’s fault.

Reason Three: Trump Gave Their Shame A Target

Psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol studied what happens when people with no individual identity attach themselves to a group or leader. His finding: people who feel like personal failures and are filled with shame become ferociously aggressive when their group identity is threatened. Because the group is the only identity they have left.

Tajfel called this social identity theory.

Trump understood this better than any politician in modern history. He gave their shame a target. Immigrants. Liberals. The deep state. He told them the reason their lives did not work out was not their fault. It was those other people’s fault. The moment he handed them an enemy, something shifted. They stopped feeling like losers. They started feeling like they needed to punish people for their shame.

MAGA was angry, ashamed, and broken before Trump ever came along. He did not create their rage. He gave their shame a direction. And called it a movement.

What This Means

The next time you see a Trump supporter lose their mind over something that has nothing to do with their actual life, you are watching all three of these things happening at once. A brain wired to manufacture threats. A lifetime of shame with nowhere to go. And a movement that told them it was all someone else’s fault.

That is not a political position. That is a psychological profile.

And it is not going to be fixed by a better argument.

Sources

Kanai R, Feilden T, Firth C, Rees G. Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current Biology. 2011;21(8):677-680.

Gilligan J. Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: Grossman; 1996.

Tajfel H, Turner JC. The social identity theory of intergroup behavior. In: Worchel S, Austin WG, eds. Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago: Nelson-Hall; 1986.

Why All MAGA Supporters Seem Like They Peaked In High School And Never Recovered

There is a specific kind of person you recognize immediately.

They are in their forties or fifties. They still talk about high school like it was the best time of their life. They are angrier than anyone you know. They have strong opinions about immigrants, college graduates, and people who moved to the city and made something of themselves. And they cannot explain any of it without raising their voice.

This is not a coincidence. This is a psychological profile. And the science behind it is damning.

The Research

Psychiatrist James Gilligan at Harvard Medical School spent decades studying the most violent men in American prisons. He was not studying Trump supporters. He was studying murderers, career criminals, and men who had destroyed everything around them. And his finding was the same every single time.

Underneath every act of rage was one emotion.

Shame.

Not anger. Not hate. Not ideology. Shame. The deep, festering kind that comes from a life that did not go the way you planned. Gilligan found that men who could not process shame turned it outward. Into violence. Into rage. Into destroying anyone who reminded them of what they never became.

He documented this across decades of research inside American prisons. The pattern was so consistent that Gilligan concluded shame was not just a contributing factor to violence. It was the root cause.

What This Has To Do With MAGA

Most Trump supporters spent their lives falling short of who they thought they would be. They did not build the career they wanted. They did not earn the respect they thought they deserved. They did not get the girl. They peaked in high school and have been angry about it ever since.

That gap between who they are and who they thought they would be produces shame. And shame that has nowhere to go becomes rage.

This is what you are looking at when you see a grown man in a MAGA hat lose his mind over immigrants or college graduates. It is not politics. It is a weak man who is furious at his own life and needs someone to blame for it.

They are mad that you did something with your life and they did not. You built something. You became someone. They convinced themselves that real men do not need ambition. That hard work is for elites and people who think they are better than everyone else. And then they spent twenty years in the same town, the same job, the same bar stool, wondering why nothing changed.

Nothing changed because they did not change. But that is too painful to admit. So they found a movement that told them it was everyone else’s fault.

Why They Cannot Stop

Here is the part that makes this worse. Shame is not like anger. Anger burns out. Shame compounds. Every year that passes without becoming who you thought you would be adds another layer. Every time someone around them succeeds it feels like an attack. Every immigrant who builds a business, every college graduate who gets a good job, every person who moved away and made something of themselves is a walking reminder of what they never did.

So the rage never goes away. It just needs new targets. And Trump has been extraordinarily good at supplying them.

Immigrants. Liberals. The deep state. College professors. The media. Anyone who represents a world that moved on without them.

Their rage has nothing to do with politics. It never did. It is just a small man who never became who he thought he would be. And he needs you to suffer for it.

That is the whole story. That is all it has ever been.

Sources

Gilligan J. Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York: Grossman; 1996.

Gilligan J. Preventing Violence. New York: Thames and Hudson; 2001.

Something happened in America that we still haven’t fully reckoned with.

Ordinary people, neighbors, coworkers, family members, started doing things they knew were wrong. They supported policies that hurt people. They defended violence. They stormed the Capitol. They harassed election workers. They celebrated federal agents killing protesters in the streets.

And they didn’t care.

Not because they were monsters. Because they were trapped. And the trap was built using four of the most powerful psychological mechanisms ever documented by social science.

This isn’t a political story. It’s a psychology story. And once you understand how it works, you can never unsee it.

1. Cognitive Dissonance

In the 1950s, psychologist Leon Festinger discovered something that changed how we understand human behavior. He called it cognitive dissonance, the psychological pain that occurs when your actions contradict your values.

Most people, when they feel that pain, course correct. They change their behavior. They admit they were wrong. They walk it back.

But some people resolve it differently. They go all in.

When your actions contradict your values and you don’t want to face that, your brain does something remarkable. It rewrites the story. It makes the wrong thing feel justified. It tells you everyone else is doing it. It tells you they deserved it. It tells you it’s just politics.

And in that moment of rationalization, you cross a line.

Once you cross it, you have two choices. Admit you were wrong and face the guilt and the consequences. Or keep going and pretend it was justified.

MAGA supporters crossed that line early. Some defended the lies. Some defended the cruelty. Some cheered the violence. And once they did, turning back meant admitting everything. So they didn’t turn back. They kept going.

This is why so many Nazis refused to surrender when Germany fell. They knew what they had done was indefensible. Stopping meant facing it. So they didn’t stop.

That is how far gone some MAGA supporters are.

2. Escalation of Commitment

Psychologist Barry Staw studied this phenomenon in the 1970s and gave it a name: escalation of commitment. The more you invest in a bad decision, the harder it becomes to walk away from it.

Think of it as the Sunk Cost of Shame.

Every lie you defended, every cruelty you excused, every norm you watched get violated without saying a word, became an investment. And the larger the investment, the more you need it to have been worth something.

So you escalate.

Not because you believe more deeply. But because stopping now would mean the original act stands alone. Unforgivable. Unjustifiable. Criminal.

But if you escalate, it becomes necessary. Just the next step toward the next horrible thing. And the next thing after that.

This is how ordinary people commit extraordinary harm without feeling like monsters. They never make one giant leap. They take a thousand small steps, each one made easier by the last.

3. Mutual Destruction

Cults don’t just make you believe. They make you participate.

This is deliberate. Once you have committed crimes alongside other people, you are bonded to them by mutual destruction. They go down, you go down. Leaving doesn’t just mean abandoning the cause. It means turning on yourself.

MAGA operationalized this on January 6th. Thousands of people committed federal crimes together. They coordinated harassment campaigns against election workers. They participated in a seditious conspiracy in broad daylight, on camera, for the entire world to see.

And the leaders watched it on television.

That is the genius of the mechanism. The people at the top maintain plausible deniability while the followers implicate themselves beyond recovery. Leaving the cult now means admitting what you did. Staying means you have to keep going.

So they stay. And they keep going.

They started by supporting Trump. Then they defended his lies. Then they excused the cruelty. Then they stormed the Capitol. Then they defended federal agents killing protesters. Now they are defending PDF files in the Epstein Files.

Each step makes the next one easier. Each crime makes the last one more necessary to justify.

4. Dehumanization

To keep escalating indefinitely, empathy has to be shut down entirely. And the mechanism for doing that is dehumanization, the process of stripping people of their humanity so that harming them becomes psychologically possible.

Immigrants become invaders. Protesters become Antifa terrorists. Trans kids become groomers.

Once you stop seeing people as people, you stop feeling the natural resistance to hurting them. They become threats. Monsters. Enemies. And you become the hero defending against them.

Psychologist Stanley Milgram documented how powerful this dynamic is in his landmark 1961 obedience experiments. He found that 65 percent of ordinary people would deliver what they believed were fatal electric shocks to strangers if an authority figure told them it was necessary. Not because they were sadistic. Because they believed they had no choice.

The cult has convinced MAGA supporters that they are special. That they are winners. That they are defending America, fighting for freedom, standing as the last line of resistance against the destruction of everything they love.

They are not special. They are fools.

These are the rejects of society. The people who were never picked. The people who always felt like the world owed them something and never delivered.

MAGA didn’t radicalize good people. It gave antisocial, toxic people permission to finally be who they always wanted to be. They wanted to hurt other people. And now they think they’re doing it for a cause.

The problem with that cause is that it’s illegal.

The Way Out

When this is over, nobody is walking free. Not the leaders. Not the followers.

The leaders will try. They always do. But this time the crimes are too documented, too public, too numerous. And the followers, the ones who actually stormed the building, who actually harassed the workers, who actually carried out the orders, will be left holding the consequences alone.

If you are inside this cult right now, understand what is coming. You are not a patriot. You are not a hero. You are a person who has been manipulated into committing crimes on behalf of people who were watching it all on television.

Get out before you spend the rest of your life in jail for someone who will never spend a single day in one for you.

The door is still open.

Walk through it.

Sources

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

Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27-44.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.

Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House.

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 (pp. 33-47).

MAGA is not a political movement.

It is a support group for people who wanted power and never figured out how to earn it. And Trump is not their leader. He is their sponsor. The guy who got there first and is now showing everyone else how it is done.

This is not an accident. It is a pattern.

Weak people are consistently drawn to two institutions: megachurches and MAGA. The psychology behind both is identical. Show up. Pledge your loyalty. Receive power you did not earn and could not have gotten anywhere else.

Psychologist Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba spent decades studying exactly what kind of person gravitates toward authoritarian leaders. His finding, drawn from research across tens of thousands of subjects, was consistent: a specific personality type he called the authoritarian follower is drawn not to leaders who are competent or principled, but to leaders who make submission feel like strength. The arrangement is transactional. You give loyalty. You receive identity, belonging, and a sense of power you did not have before.

That is the entire value proposition of MAGA. And it is the entire value proposition of the American megachurch.

Consider what the megachurch actually offers. A 22-year-old with no degree, no credentials, and no track record can walk in, declare loyalty to the church, and walk out with a title and unsupervised access to other people’s children. Not because they demonstrated competence. Because they showed up and pledged allegiance. The institution hands out authority like a participation trophy. And the abuse scandals that have followed are not a coincidence. When people who could not earn power through normal channels are handed power anyway, they do not use it to help anyone. They use it to settle scores with everyone who ever made them feel small.

That is the born-again Christian lecturing you about morality while cheating on his wife. That is the youth pastor with a title he did not earn and access he was never qualified to have. That is the MAGA voter who never built a business, never studied economics, never created a single job, telling immigrants they do not belong in a country he did not build.

These are not people who worked hard and got somewhere. These are people who wanted the destination without the journey. School was too hard. Work was too slow. Earning real respect took too long. So they found a shortcut.

And then they found Trump.

Trump is the perfect leader for this group because he is one of them. He inherited his wealth. He inherited his business platform. He spent decades aggressively protecting the image of success rather than building actual success. He went bankrupt six times. He defaulted on contractors. He ran a fraudulent university. And through all of it, he curated the persona of a winner, because the persona was the only thing he actually knew how to build.

He has also spent his entire career doing what authoritarian followers do when they get power they did not earn: punishing anyone who reminded him of what he never accomplished. Mocking veterans. Humiliating subordinates. Weaponizing the federal government against perceived enemies. Not because it serves any strategic purpose. Because weak people with unearned power use it to punish. Every time.

Trump did not build a political movement. He built a refuge. A place where people who could not earn power through competence, discipline, or achievement could receive it through loyalty alone. Where showing up and saying the right things is enough. Where the only qualification is submission to the leader.

That is what MAGA is. That is what it has always been.

And the reason it will eventually collapse is the same reason every support group built around a single sponsor collapses: the day the sponsor is exposed as just as broken as everyone else in the room, there is nothing left to hold the group together.

That day is coming.

Sources

Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-Wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press. Altemeyer, B. (2006). The Authoritarians. Available free at theauthoritarians.org.

Barack Obama has not been president for ten years. And yet his name dominates political arguments more than any other former president. More than Bush. More than Clinton.

That’s not random. There are four distinct psychological reasons the MAGA cult cannot let Obama go. And none of them are actually about politics.

1. The Psychological Wage of Whiteness

In 1935, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois published his landmark study of American labor, Black Reconstruction in America. His finding was specific and uncomfortable. Even the poorest white Americans — people with no money, no power, and no political influence — held one thing no one could take away. A sense of social status rooted in racial hierarchy. A floor they couldn’t fall below.

Du Bois called it the psychological wage of whiteness. It wasn’t a paycheck. It was a status payment the entire system handed out automatically. The law enforced it. The church preached it. The culture normalized it. For 250 years, that floor held.

Then Barack Obama became president. He didn’t just change policy. He occupied the highest status role in the country. That cracked the floor. And when a status floor breaks, the people who depended on it don’t quietly adjust. They backlash.

Obama didn’t just win an election. He took something millions of people didn’t even know they were depending on. And they’ve never forgiven him for it.

2. Social Identity Threat

Psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol spent decades studying intergroup conflict. His finding was consistent. When a member of an outgroup outperforms the ingroup, the psychological response is not admiration. It is hostility. Tajfel called this social identity threat.

A failed Black president would have confirmed their worldview. Obama being polished, competent, scandal-free, and widely respected made the status threat impossible to rationalize away. They couldn’t call him incompetent. The record didn’t support it. They couldn’t call him unpresidential. He was disciplined and respected around the world.

The better Obama performed, the more threatening he became. Not because of his policies. Because his success directly contradicted everything they believed about the natural order of things.

He wasn’t supposed to be better. He wasn’t supposed to be a gentleman and a scholar. And he was. That doesn’t just go away.

When weak mediocre people see someone they believed was inferior reach the highest office in the country, they don’t get inspired. They become filled with rage. They feel lied to. And they need someone to blame. That target is Obama. Everything they could never be.

3. Scapegoating

Obama left office in 2017. But his name didn’t leave the conversation. Because Trump spent more than a decade making sure it wouldn’t.

It started before Trump was even president. As a private citizen and reality TV host, Trump spent years pushing the birther conspiracy. Claiming Obama wasn’t American. Wasn’t legitimate. Wasn’t one of us. That wasn’t politics. That was a deliberate effort to strip Obama of his humanity and plant him in the minds of millions as the source of everything wrong.

Then when Trump took office, the playbook continued. Every problem needed an explanation. Economy struggling? Obama. Crime? Obama. Anything going wrong? Obama.

Psychologists call this scapegoating. Assign one figure as the source of all threat and all anxiety collapses onto that single target. It feels like clarity. It feels like understanding. It isn’t. But it is addictive. And it works.

Trump didn’t just keep Obama’s name alive. He spent over a decade turning him into the villain of the story.

4. Cognitive Dissonance

Here’s what made the obsession permanent. MAGA couldn’t call Obama corrupt. There were no scandals. They couldn’t call him incompetent. The record didn’t support it. They couldn’t even call him unpresidential. He was polished, disciplined, and respected around the world.

Psychologist Leon Festinger at the University of Minnesota studied what happens when people are confronted with evidence that contradicts their deeply held beliefs. People don’t update their beliefs when confronted with contradicting evidence. They double down on their original beliefs. Festinger called this cognitive dissonance.

MAGA was left holding a belief system that Obama’s entire existence disproved. And instead of resolving that contradiction by updating their worldview, they resolved it by hating him harder.

The obsession isn’t just political. It’s psychological. And it has nowhere left to go.

The Conclusion

Obama is living proof that the psychological wage of whiteness doesn’t exist anymore. MAGA doesn’t just get to claim higher status over anyone anymore. That’s gone now.

And to weak people who never earned that status in the first place, it feels like an identity crisis. So they obsess more. Say his name more. Talk about him constantly.

They even have a name for it. Obama Derangement Syndrome.

And Barack Obama doesn’t lose a minute of sleep over any of it.

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 (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

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

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

There is a psychological reason for that.

And it is more disturbing than you think.

The Research

Political scientist David Moon at the University of Bath published peer-reviewed research on exactly this phenomenon.

He called it kayfabe.

In professional wrestling, everyone knows the fights are fake. The outcomes are scripted. The rivalries are performed. And the fans do not care. Because they are not there for reality. They are there for the villain. The drama. The spectacle. The show.

Moon found that Trump supporters engage with politics the exact same way.

The Scorecard

He promised no new wars. We are in a war. He promised cheaper gas. Gas is over four dollars a gallon. He promised to lower bills. Every bill has gone up.

They do not care.

Because they were never voting for results. They were voting for the show. They were voting for their favorite pro wrestler.

The Heel

Here is where the psychology gets dark.

In wrestling, the villain is called the heel. And the heel is always two things at once. Unstoppable. And a victim at the same time.

Trump perfected the role.

He is the most powerful man in the world. And simultaneously claims to be the most persecuted victim in the world. His supporters hold both of those ideas at once. Without any conflict. Without any tension.

Because pro wrestling trained them to do exactly that. To suspend their sense of reality and enjoy the show. No matter who it hurts.

Why Facts Will Never Work

This is why policy arguments bounce off. You are trying to have a debate with someone watching professional wrestling. The facts are not the point. The facts were never the point.

These people would watch their own house burn down and an hour later sit in the rubble watching the footage for entertainment.

Their jobs are here. Their kids go to school here. Their parents collect Social Security here. And they applauded the man who torched all of it. Because the show was too good to turn off.

What This Actually Means

Our country is not a wrestling ring.

And when the show is finally over, the damage is real. The jobs lost are real. The rights stripped are real. The institutions gutted are real.

The people who did this knew exactly what they were watching. They just did not care.

That should be unforgivable. And the very least we can do is make sure they never get anywhere near power again.

Because next time there may not be anything left to save.

Sources

Moon, D. (University of Bath). Kayfabe and political performance: peer-reviewed research on pro wrestling logic in populist politics. Available through the University of Bath research portal.

There is a psychological reason for that.

And you are definitely not going to like the answer.

The Study

Researcher Scott Huettel at Duke University studied why people vote against their own interests and published his findings in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

What he found was this: people do not vote to protect their interests. They vote to express who they are.

He called it expressive voting.

When identity and policy compete, identity wins. Every single time. The ballot is not a policy instrument. It is a declaration of belonging.

The Number That Should Bother You

Here is the trend line on college-educated white women voting for Trump.

2016: 35 percent. 2020: 45 percent. 2024: 41 percent.

Yes, it is dropping. And yes, that matters. But 41 percent is still nearly half of educated white women choosing a man who eliminated their right to an abortion, was found liable for sexual abuse in civil court, and bragged on tape about grabbing women without consent.

Not uneducated women. Not women without access to information. Women with degrees. Women with careers. Women with the resources and the time to know exactly what they were choosing.

The number is going in the right direction. It is still a damning number.

Why

Their church said vote Republican. Their husband said vote Republican. Their community said vote Republican.

And the brain, when forced to choose between policy and belonging, chose belonging.

Here is why that is not surprising from a neuroscience standpoint. The threat of social exclusion activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. Being cast out of your community, your church, your marriage, your dinner table — the brain does not experience that as social discomfort. It experiences it as danger.

Losing your reproductive rights feels abstract until it is happening to you personally. Losing your community feels like losing everything right now.

So they voted to keep their people. Even as he was taking their rights.

What Expressive Voting Actually Means

They were not voting for a policy position. They were not voting for a value they hold. They were voting to avoid being left out.

That is the honest read of expressive voting applied here. The vote was not confused or uninformed. It was a calculated trade. Keep the community, let someone else absorb the cost.

And that is the part that is hardest to sit with.

These were not women who did not understand what was at stake. They understood. They just made sure it was other women — poorer women, younger women, women without their options — who paid the price.

What the Trend Line Actually Tells Us

The drop from 45 percent in 2020 to 41 percent in 2024 is real. Something is shifting. The Dobbs decision, which made the cost of expressive voting suddenly concrete and personal for millions of women, likely moved that number.

That is exactly what the research predicts. Expressive voting weakens when the cost stops feeling abstract. When losing your rights stops being a talking point and starts being a doctor telling you they cannot help you, the calculus changes.

The question is how much more personal it has to get before the number moves further.

Because 41 percent is progress. It is also still almost half.

Sources

Huettel, S. A. Expressive voting research, Duke University Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Edison Research / ABC News Exit Poll Analysis (2024). Gender gap and college-educated white women voting patterns 2016–2024. https://abcnews.go.com/538/gender-gap-tells-us-trumps-win/story?id=115996226

Pew Research Center (2016 validated voter study). White college-educated women vote share analysis. Reported in TIME, October 2018.

Center for American Women and Politics, Eagleton Institute, Rutgers University (2024). Gender Differences in 2024 Presidential Vote.

https://cawp.rutgers.edu