The Lucas Bean Show

Identity Fusion. 

Most people assume Trump supporters are angry because of politics. Because of immigration. Because of the economy.

The research points to something much deeper than that.

What Attachment Theory Actually Is

In the 1950s and 60s, psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth spent decades studying one of the most fundamental questions in human development. How do the relationships we have as children shape who we become as adults?

What they found changed psychology permanently.

They discovered that the way a child is treated by their primary caregivers determines how that child learns to handle emotions and relationships for the rest of their life. They called these patterns attachment styles.

Most people develop what is called secure attachment. Their emotional needs were met consistently. They learned that vulnerability is safe. That asking for help works. That expressing how you feel is normal.

But a significant portion of the population develops something very different.

What Avoidant Attachment Actually Does to a Person

Bowlby and Ainsworth identified a pattern they called avoidant attachment style. It develops in childhood when a child tries to express how they feel and gets punished for it.

These are children who grew up with authoritarian parents who saw vulnerability as a character flaw. Crying got them mocked. Asking for help got them punished. Showing weakness got them hurt.

So they learned the only way to survive was to shut it all down. Stop feeling. Stop expressing. Stop asking for help.

They grow up emotionally numb. Unable to talk about their feelings. Unable to be vulnerable. Unable to connect with other people on any real level.

But here is the critical finding. The emotions do not disappear. They get repressed. Buried deep. And repressed emotions always find a way out.

Research by attachment theorists Mikulincer and Shaver found that avoidantly attached people suppress fear, sadness, and shame for years. Decades. Sometimes an entire lifetime. Until the pressure builds to a breaking point and explodes as the one emotion that never required vulnerability.

Rage.

Why Rage Is the Only Safe Emotion

Anger is the one emotion that does not ask you to be soft. It does not expose you. It does not require you to admit weakness or need or pain. From the inside it feels like strength. Like power. Like finally being allowed to take up space.

From the outside, everyone can see what it actually is. A person who never learned to feel anything, finally feeling something. And the intensity of it is proportional to how long it has been buried.

What Trump Understood That Nobody Else Did

Trump did not build a political movement. He built a refuge.

He did not ask his followers to be vulnerable. He did not ask them to examine their feelings or sit with complexity or tolerate ambiguity. He gave them permission to be furious. At immigrants. At liberals. At anyone he pointed at on any given day.

For people who spent their entire lives in homes where expressing emotion was dangerous, a movement built entirely around rage is not politics.

It is relief.

It is the first time in their lives that their emotional reality was not only acceptable but celebrated. Encouraged. Rewarded with cheers from a crowd of people who feel exactly the same way.

Trump did not create broken people. He found the most emotionally damaged people in America and gave them the one thing they never had.

Permission to feel something. Too bad he pointed it at the wrong people.

The most emotionally damaged people in America finally found somewhere they belong.

Sources

* John Bowlby — Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment — Basic Books (1969)

* Mary Ainsworth et al. — Patterns of Attachment — Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (1978)

* Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver — Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change — Guilford Press (2007)

* Shaver, P.R. and Mikulincer, M. — “Attachment-related psychodynamics” — Attachment and Human Development, 4(2), 133–161 (2002)

You Didn't Boycott The 2026 Super Bowl. The NFL Fired You As a Customer. 

What DARVO is and how to stop is from happening. 

Most people assume Trump supporters are in denial because they are stupid or brainwashed.

The research tells a completely different story. What is happening inside their brain is one of the most well documented psychological phenomena in history. And understanding it is the only way to make sense of what you are watching.

The Experiment That Changed Psychology

In 1959, psychologist Leon Festinger at Stanford University ran one of the most famous experiments in the history of social psychology.

He brought in students and had them perform an hour of deliberately boring, pointless tasks. Turning pegs on a board. Moving spools in and out of a tray. Completely mindless work designed to be as tedious as possible.

After finishing, each student was asked to do one thing. Tell the next participant that the tasks were exciting and enjoyable. They knew this was a lie. They did it anyway.

Here is where it gets interesting.

Half the students were paid twenty dollars to lie. Half were paid one dollar.

When asked afterward how they actually felt about the tasks, the two groups gave completely different answers.

The students paid twenty dollars said the tasks were boring. They had a clear reason to lie, the money, so their brain stayed honest about their actual experience.

The students paid one dollar said something remarkable. They said the tasks were actually enjoyable. Not because the tasks changed. Because their brain did something extraordinary to resolve the contradiction of lying for almost no reason at all.

It rewrote reality.

Festinger called this cognitive dissonance.

The psychological pain your brain experiences when your actions and your beliefs do not match. And the extraordinary lengths it will go to make that pain stop.

Here is the key finding. When your actions and your beliefs conflict, your brain almost never changes the action. It changes the belief. Because changing what you believe is easier than changing what you did.

What This Looks Like In Real Life

A Trump supporter cheers for tariffs that raise their grocery bills. They cheer for healthcare cuts that hurt their family. They cheer for policies that gut their kids’ schools and eliminate their job protections.

Their brain cannot live with that contradiction. Admitting Trump hurt them means admitting they were wrong. That they were manipulated. That they cheered for someone who made their life worse. That pain is unbearable.

So the brain does what Festinger’s students did. It rewrites the story.

The media is lying. The numbers are fake. Give him more time. The grocery bills are Biden’s fault. The healthcare cuts are necessary. The schools were broken anyway.

They are not lying to you. They genuinely believe what they are saying. Their brain changed the belief because changing the behavior was too hard.

And we know that changing your mind takes courage. And cowards never do.

What Actually Breaks It

You cannot argue someone out of cognitive dissonance. Presenting more facts makes it worse because now the brain has to defend itself against you on top of defending itself against the truth.

The only thing that breaks cognitive dissonance is when the cost of maintaining the lie becomes higher than the cost of admitting you were wrong.

The tariffs. The grocery bills. The healthcare cuts. The promises that never came true.

Every day that reality diverges further from the story their brain is telling, the cost of the lie goes up.

And reality is very patient.

That moment is coming. It is already happening for millions of them quietly, in private, when nobody is watching.

They are taking off the red hats. Removing the bumper stickers. Taking down the flags.

Not because someone proved them wrong.

Because the price of the lie finally got too high.

Sources

* Leon Festinger and James M. Carlsmith — Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance — Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203–210 (1959)

* Leon Festinger — A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance — Stanford University Press (1957)

* Harmon-Jones, E. and Mills, J. — An Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance Theory — American Psychological Association (2019)

Something is happening inside the MAGA movement and you won’t hear about it on Fox News.

NBC News polled over 20,000 Americans and found that out of every 100 MAGA Republicans, 8 of them stopped strongly supporting Trump in a single year. The number of Republicans who identify as MAGA dropped from 57 percent to 50 percent in that same period.

They are leaving. Quietly. And saying nothing publicly.

You’ve probably noticed it already. Fewer red hats. Fewer bumper stickers. Fewer flags flying outside houses that used to wear them like a badge of honor. The visual footprint of the movement is shrinking in real time and nobody in that movement is talking about it.

There is a psychological reason for that.

The Science of the Silent Exit

Psychologists call it social desirability bias. It is the well documented human tendency to avoid public positions that invite social judgment or ridicule. In plain language: it is easier to quietly disappear from a movement than to stand up and admit you were wrong.

And admitting you were wrong about Trump is not a small thing.

It means admitting you were manipulated. It means admitting you cheered for cruelty. It means admitting you believed the lies, repeated the lies, and defended the lies to people in your life who tried to tell you otherwise. It means sitting across from a friend or a family member who is going to say the four words nobody wants to hear: I told you so.

Most people will do almost anything to avoid that conversation. So they don’t have it.

They stop posting. They skip the rally. They change the subject when politics comes up. They take the flag down and tell themselves it was getting weathered anyway. They remove the bumper sticker and don’t replace it. One quiet decision at a time, they walk away from something they were once willing to fight strangers on the internet over.

And they never say a word about why.

What the Silence Actually Means

This is not apathy. Apathy looks different. Apathy is never caring in the first place.

This is shame doing its work in private. This is the specific silence of someone who knows they got it wrong and cannot yet find the language or the courage to say so out loud. The exit is not a political calculation. It is a psychological one.

The movement is not losing members because people suddenly discovered policy documents or read an economics paper. They are leaving because the emotional contract has been broken. Trump promised them winning. He promised them strength. He promised them that their loyalty would be rewarded with results they could point to and feel proud of.

Instead they got chaos, cruelty, and a country that feels less stable than when he started. And pride, the same pride that made them so loud on the way in, is making them completely silent on the way out.

Why This Matters

The collapse of a movement does not always look like a dramatic moment. It does not always look like a resignation speech or a public break or a viral moment of someone throwing their hat in the trash.

Sometimes it looks like nothing at all. A quieter comment section. A rally that is slightly less full. A neighborhood with one fewer flag.

The MAGA movement is contracting and the contraction is invisible by design because the people leaving it are too proud to announce their departure and too ashamed to explain it.

But the polls are measuring what the silence is hiding.

Eight out of every hundred of them are already gone. And the ones still there are flying the flag a little less proudly than they used to.

The exit is happening. They just won’t tell you.

Citations

NBC News Poll. “NBC News Poll: Share of Republicans identifying as MAGA drops from 57 to 50 percent.” NBC News, 2024.

Crowne, D.P. and Marlowe, D. “A New Scale of Social Desirability Independent of Psychopathology.” Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1960.

Trump Supporters Believe They Are Both Superior And Victims At The Same Time. Science Explains Why.

Most people assume Trump supporters are motivated by economic anxiety. Or racism. Or a hatred of elites.

The research tells a completely different story.

In 2009, psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala at Goldsmiths University of London identified a specific psychological pattern she had seen in authoritarian movements throughout history. She called it collective narcissism. And what she found changed how researchers understood political radicalization entirely.

What Collective Narcissism Actually Is

Collective narcissism is not the same as individual narcissism. It is not about thinking you personally are superior. It is about believing your group is exceptional, entitled to special treatment, and destined for greatness. But also believing that nobody recognizes it. That outsiders are conspiring to destroy it. That the group is simultaneously the greatest and the most persecuted.

The superiority and the victimhood exist at the same time. And each one feeds the other.

Trump supporters believe America is the greatest country in the world. And that immigrants, minorities, liberals, and the media are actively destroying it. Both things simultaneously. That is not a contradiction to them. That is the entire point.

What The Research Actually Found

In 2018, Federico and Golec de Zavala published a landmark study in Public Opinion Quarterly using national survey data from the 2016 presidential election. They wanted to know what actually predicted a vote for Trump when you controlled for everything else researchers already knew about.

What they found was striking.

Collective narcissism was the second strongest predictor of voting for Trump in 2016. Second only to party affiliation. It was stronger than economic anxiety. Stronger than racial resentment. Stronger than sexism. Stronger than authoritarianism.

It was not about jobs. It was not about trade deals. It was about a group of people who needed someone to tell them they were exceptional and that their enemies were the reason they had not been recognized for it yet.

Trump gave them both. Every single rally. Every single tweet. Every single executive order.

Why This Makes People Dangerous

Golec de Zavala’s research found something even more disturbing than the voting data.

Collective narcissists will support a leader breaking the law, overturning elections, and using violence to stay in power as long as that leader keeps promising to restore the group’s greatness.

After January 6th, researchers surveyed Trump supporters about the Capitol attack. Collective narcissism was directly associated with support for the riot. Supporters described the rioters as true Americans motivated by love of freedom and justice.

January 6th was not a surprise to researchers who understood this psychology. It was a prediction that came true.

The Formula Is Always The Same

This is not stupidity. This is a specific psychological condition that has been used to radicalize populations throughout history.

The formula is always identical.

Tell a group they are exceptional. Tell them they are under attack. Give them an enemy.

Every authoritarian movement in history that used this playbook eventually collapsed under the weight of its own lies.

And this one will too.

Sources

* Agnieszka Golec de Zavala et al. — Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2009)

* Christopher Federico and Agnieszka Golec de Zavala — Collective Narcissism and the 2016 US Presidential Vote — Public Opinion Quarterly (2018)

* Keenan and Golec de Zavala — Collective Narcissism and Weakening of American Democracy — Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (2021)

Grab The PDF of questions here < < < This is the PDF

Grab The PDF of questions here < < < This is the PDF

Grab The PDF of questions here < < < This is the PDF

Grab The PDF of questions here < < < This is the PDF

You ever notice how someone can watch a person get hurt right in front of them and feel completely fine about it?

Not monsters. Not psychopaths. Regular people. Churchgoers. Neighbors. People you know.

There is a psychological reason for that. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

In the 1980s, psychologist Albert Bandura at Stanford spent years studying one of the most disturbing questions in human psychology. How do ordinary people commit harm without feeling like bad people? How does someone watch a child get taken from their parent and go home and sleep fine?

What he found was that it is not confusion. It is not ignorance. It is a specific psychological mechanism that switches your conscience off on purpose. He called it moral disengagement. And it works in three steps that are identical across every atrocity in modern history.

Step One: Reframe the Harm

Nazi Germany did not tell soldiers they were murdering civilians. They told them they were solving a problem. Resettlement. The Final Solution. Policy language that made mass murder feel like paperwork. The cruelty did not change. The words around it did. And that was enough to keep millions of ordinary Germans from feeling responsible for what was happening in front of them.

Trump uses the same mechanism. He does not say we are ripping families apart. He says we are enforcing the law. He does not say we are putting children in cages. He says we are processing arrivals. The moment harm gets reframed as policy, your brain stops processing it as something you are responsible for.

Step Two: Displace Responsibility Upward

At the Nuremberg trials, guard after guard gave the same answer when asked why they did what they did. I was following orders. My superior approved it. The authority above me made the decision. They genuinely believed that moral responsibility traveled upward to whoever gave the order, and that following it left them clean.

Trump’s supporters use identical logic today. He said it was okay. Congress allowed it. The court did not stop it. The moment you can point to a figure above you, your brain transfers moral ownership to them. You were just following the rules. The guilt has been reassigned to someone with a title.

Step Three: Dehumanize the Target

Before the Holocaust, Nazi propaganda spent years calling Jewish people rats, vermin, and a disease infecting the body of Germany. This was not accidental. Dehumanization is a prerequisite for mass cruelty because it removes the psychological barrier that makes harming another person feel wrong.

Trump has called immigrants animals, vermin, and an infestation. Those words are not careless. They are the same words, used the same way, for the same purpose. Once a group stops being fully human in your mind, harming them stops feeling like harm at all.

The Mechanism Is Always Identical

Bandura documented this same three-step sequence across every atrocity he studied. Guards at concentration camps. Soldiers committing war crimes. Regular people cheering deportations on their phones. The context changes. The psychology does not.

This is also why logic does not work on people inside this system. If you try to show them the contradiction between their values and their behavior, their brain rejects it instantly. Not because the argument is wrong. Because accepting it would collapse the separation they need to feel okay about what they are supporting. They are not going to let you bridge that gap. Trying harder does not help. This is not confusion. This is psychological self-protection doing exactly what it was designed to do.

What This Means

When loyalty to a leader matters more than consequences to a stranger, cruelty becomes casual. It does not require malice. It does not require awareness. It just requires the right language, the right authority figure, and enough repetition to make a group of people feel like less than human.

So next time someone watches suffering and shrugs, do not appeal to their conscience.

It has already been reassigned.

Sources

* Albert Bandura — Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (1986), Prentice Hall

* Albert Bandura — Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (2016), Worth Publishers

* Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Caprara, G. V., & Pastorelli, C. — “Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency” — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 364–374 (1996)

* Nuremberg Trial records — Yale Law School Avalon Project — avalon.law.yale.edu

* Trump dehumanizing language documentation — The Atlantic, “Trump’s Language About Immigrants” and associated press record

Most people assume that if you show someone proof of what they did, they will accept it.

A confession in court. A video of the act. Their own words on record.

That is not how the human brain works. And a single interview proves it better than any study ever could.

Jordan Klepper spent years interviewing Trump supporters on camera. He recently described a conversation with a man who participated in January 6th. This man drove from Pennsylvania to Washington DC. He tailgated. He drank. He marched to the Capitol. He punched a federal officer in the face on camera. He climbed through a window of the United States Capitol. He was arrested. He pleaded guilty in open court. He served time in prison. He liked it so much he got a tattoo of the Capitol on his body.

When Klepper asked him who did January 6th, he said Antifa.

There is a psychological reason for that.

In 2017, Yale Law professor Dan Kahan published research on what he called Identity-Protective Cognition. He gave participants factual information that directly contradicted their group’s beliefs. What he found was disturbing. The smarter the participant, the better they were at rejecting the facts. High-intelligence people did not use their reasoning ability to find the truth. They used it to protect their identity from the truth.

Here is what that looks like inside this man’s skull.

He can tell you every detail of what he did. He remembered it clearly enough to tattoo it on his body. But fully owning those actions means accepting that he was manipulated. That he drove hundreds of miles, assaulted a federal officer, and went to prison because a con man played him. That thought is annihilating. So his brain does what it was trained to do. It finds someone else to blame.

Trump built this in on purpose. Before January 6th he told his base that any loss was rigged, any evidence was fake, any convicted rioter was a political hostage. He did not just give them permission to reject facts. He made rejecting facts the proof of loyalty.

And a brain wired for Identity-Protective Cognition will sprint toward that exit every single time.

This man stood in a courtroom and said I am guilty. His brain filed it under coercion.

That is not stupidity. That is not lying.

That is a mind protecting itself the only way it knows how.

By making someone else responsible for what it cannot afford to own.

Sources

* Dan Kahan — Identity-Protective Cognition, Cultural Cognition Project, Yale Law School (2017)

* Jordan Klepper interviews — Interview on Modern Stoic.

* U.S. v. various January 6th defendants — Department of Justice court records