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Wednesday
Is there anyone in American political history who has elicited more loyalty from his followers than Donald Trump? It may be the case, as Never Trumper Rick Wilson puts it, that “everything Trump touches dies,” but even in “death” Trump supporters don’t abandon him. In fact, they seem to cling to him even more.
It appears that once you have declared love for Big Brother, there’s no going back.
I recently thought of this love after reading an “I was wrong” column by Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait. Exploring why he had overestimated Ron DeSantis’s prospect of dethroning Trump, Chait said that he had underestimated Trump’s attraction. “The personality cult is even cultier than I’d thought,” he writes, explaining,
I made the larger error of analyzing the primary as though it were a normal party nomination, when in reality DeSantis is attempting the far more difficult task of displacing the leader of a personality cult.
And:
[I]t wasn’t mere pugilism that Republican voters turned out to crave. Trump had redefined the party’s identity around loyalty to himself….His fans have grown accustomed to altering their beliefs about everything and anything to conform to their leader’s ever-changing line.
At one point in the article Chait points out that a declaration of Trump spokesman Steven Cheung– “Trump is always right”–echoes the horse Boxer in Orwell’s Animal Farm:
Boxer, who had now had time to think things over, voiced the general feeling by saying: “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.” And from then on he adopted the maxim, “Napoleon is always right,” in addition to his private motto of “I will work harder.”
Digging deeper into cult psychology, Chait quotes a rightwing pundit, who received the following from one of her listeners. It helps us understand why none of Trump’s GOP opponents can dent his popularity:
Keep in mind that supporting Trump came with costs never associated with supporting Bush, McCain, or Romney. Trump supporters lost friendships. Brothers and sisters stopped talking to each other. There are parents whose children disowned them, and grandparents who will never see their grandchildren again because they stood by Donald Trump.
Every Republican has these stories. Every Republican knows Republicans who have these stories.
Attacking Trump was effectively telling every Republican who made real sacrifices that they were stupid for doing so because Trump was just a poser.
In other words, Trump-worshipping parents and grandparents have chosen him over their children and grandchildren. It is a move reminiscent of 1984’s Winston Smith transferring his love from Julia to Big Brother. In doing so, his previous beliefs about himself are shattered:
‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you. ‘What happens to you here is FOR EVER,’ O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
To be sure, Trump supporters haven’t turned their backs on loved ones because they were threatened with face-eating rats. But they have their own fears—whether about race, gender, immigration, or LBGTQ+ folk—and these have overridden tender feelings. Ideology has trumped love, leading them to versions of Orwell’s final terrifying vision:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Why settle for blood kin when you can have a figure who makes perfect calls, one who is (for some) the reincarnation of Jesus himself? Why struggle with difficult familial relationships when you can fall, all doubts resolved, upon Big Brother’s loving breast? It’s so much easier than wrestling with one’s own confused heart.