They Just Can't Quit Him

Why do decent people still support Trump despite evidence that democracy will die if he's elected?

We know it would be bad.

A Trump victory would incinerate government as we know it. America would have a self-described “dictator from day one” in the White House, who, thanks to the Supreme Court, could be immune from prosecution even if he chooses to assassinate his political enemies, which is a distinct possibility. Whatever government is left will be packed with cronies. Military troops will be used for domestic law enforcement, and there will no longer be an FBI or an FCC. And the U.S. may even have a Vice President so shameless she once took a rifle to her pet dog in a gravel pit—and then proudly wrote about it

We all know this, and yet half the country will vote GOP anyway.

For decades now, I have wondered how and why otherwise decent people align themselves with a party now characterized almost solely by unhinged cruelty and greed, a party led by a reprehensible Putin lackey with no one’s interest at heart but his own.

I have a much-loved family member whose identity I’d like to protect here, so I’m just going to call him Jason. Jason is a gentle soul, educated, loving and eminently decent. And yet he remains a proud member of the GOP, even in its current MAGA-dominated incarnation. I am convinced he believes that even a hell-scape run by a Republican is preferable to peace and prosperity under a Democrat.

At first blush, none of this makes sense.

For example, I recently asked Jason what he thought of Putin.

“He’s a sick dude,” he said.

“And the January 6 insurrection?”

“Terrible.”

“What about what Trump said about going after his enemies and being ‘a dictator from day one’?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Well?”

“Well, I like him more than Biden. What Biden would do is worse. Jill, have you seen the prices at the store? A jar of mayonnaise costs nine dollars!”

“But that isn’t Biden’s fault!” I protested. “That is a combination of corporate greed and the supply chain and the war in Ukraine and—” I had forgotten what else, but it didn’t matter.

“Yes it is his fault!” Jason interjected. “It’s all Biden, Biden, Biden!”

I gave up, as I usually do, flummoxed and frustrated and despairing.

I recently revisited an excellent book I read a few years ago called “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts,” by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. Their work has gone a long way toward helping me understand at least part of what might be going on with Jason and why he and legions of others will vote for the contemptible felon in November.

First, a little backstory.

Jason and I have been experiencing what I call “disconnects” for more than two decades, political conversations that go nowhere because we can’t agree on enough facts even to begin any kind of productive debate. I remember first clocking this not long after George W. Bush took office. We were discussing Dick Cheney’s energy task force, and I mentioned how I was wary of it, because Cheney was keeping so much of its activities a secret, a demonstrable fact that Jason at first questioned and then refused to believe. These kinds of impasses then started becoming more frequent. Jason or I would cite some fact the other disputed, which would eventually lead to the conversation just shutting down. I was always asking him, “Where did you hear that?” I don’t remember him being especially specific, and in the end it didn’t matter: I eventually figured out that I could usually find the source of his information if I Googled whatever it was, plus “Fox News.”

Not coincidentally, the beginning of this unfortunate turn of events was also the period when the pleasure I’d always taken in following politics began to evaporate. Before Gore and Bush went head to head in 2000, I was just another political junkie living in Washington D.C., where (inspired by repeated viewings of All The President’s Men, natch) I’d eagerly moved after completing journalism school in New York. That my first D.C. job was as a production assistant at C-SPAN was a dream come true. It was 1997. Fox News was not even a year old, and the internet was still so new that even at C-SPAN, any webpage typically took an unspeakably aggravating minute or more to load.

But by the time I left C-SPAN in 2000, the bloom was off the rose, and I’d begun to despise politics. In the aftermath of the Starr investigation and Clinton’s impeachment, the overall political climate had turned uglier and more polarized. I noticed that politicians seemed to have stopped discussing the nuances of issues and were speaking more and more in simplistic sound bites and talking points. That fall, I remember switching off one of the presidential debates, disgusted to see the candidates getting away with not answering the questions and just spewing dumbed-down, focus-grouped rhetoric, competing to see who could pull off the best zinger.

Helping shape this more superficial climate, of course, was the rise of the internet and the 24-hour news channels, which simplified complex issues for the sake of clicks and ratings and, especially in the case of right-wing media, shaped their brand around stoking anger and tribalism. Rush Limbaugh’s popular radio show and Fox News are just two examples of outlets that created biased and addictive content designed to reinforce appealing stereotypes characterizing Republicans as tough and patriotic “John Waynes” and Democrats as weak and self-righteous “Jane Fondas.”

As I learned in “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me),” this approach is almost a perfect formula for cementing beliefs and opinions in the brain—so intractably that changing them becomes virtually impossible.

Let’s break down this formula’s four main ingredients.

1. Bias. The brain naturally gravitates to biased information that reinforces already-held beliefs. This is because doing so takes less energy and makes a person feel validated. As Tavris and Aronson write, “If new information is consonant with our beliefs, we think it is well founded and useful. ‘Just what I always said!’”

2. Anger. Right-wing media outlets typically peddle content explicitly calibrated to make people angry. This is because anger can be addictive, and stoking it is a good way to keep people coming back for more.

3. Simplicity. But to be really ire-inducing, information must be simple, because nuance is a real buzzkill (which is probably why I could never get Jason to watch The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS). Such simplistic messaging is by now so familiar and ubiquitous in right-wing media, we all no doubt recognize the following tried-and-true talking points:

Illegal immigrants are bad.

Black activists are suspect.

High taxes are unacceptable.

Union leaders are crooks.

Obama was a socialist.

Liberals want to take away guns.

And, most saliently, the Democratic Party is despicable.

4. Identity. This one is the kicker. Every day, in so many words, Fox News and other right-wing outlets tell its viewers they are smarter and tougher than the “snowflakes,” who are by definition naïve (if not downright stupid) and nauseatingly “woke” and easy-to-trigger. White male Republicans, even those who are urban and mild-mannered, are made to feel like savvy and patriotic “John Waynes,” part of a cowboy community that takes shit from no one (a community, incidentally, not unlike the one in Yellowstone, which attracts more than its share of red-state viewers). For Jason, I believe this messaging served to reinforce an identity he embraced long ago. Perhaps as a white man of a certain age from the American South, he appreciated seeing himself in this light and was maybe even influenced by family elders I know he admired.

   Once a person’s beliefs have become intrinsic to their self-image, changing those beliefs can be all but impossible. Psychology Today put it this way: “When one learns new information that challenges a deeply held belief…or acts in a way that seems to undercut a favorable self-image, that person may feel motivated to somehow resolve the negative feeling that results—to restore cognitive consonance.” This typically means rejecting such information out of hand.

All of this is to say that a Fox viewer, already predisposed to conservative ideology, will almost certainly find the network’s content appealing, simply because it’s biased, addictively ire-inducing and delivered in a flattering way that makes the viewer feel discerning and smart. And, as mentioned above, once a person’s mind is made up, it can be almost impossible to change it. Even the act to trying to persuade someone to “see the light” can make a person cling even tighter to the original belief. As Tavris and Aronson write: “So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief.”

Tavris and Aronson cite a study in which people for and against capital punishment were given two long and nuanced articles, one in favor of the practice and the other one against it. Rather than coming away from both articles with a fuller sense of the issue, the study’s subjects predictably tended to embrace the piece that corroborated their already-entrenched beliefs and found major problems with the opposing article. But there was another effect: “Not only did each side try to discredit the other’s arguments;” Tavris and Aronson write, “each side became even more committed to its own." The writers go on to say that “people who receive disconfirming or otherwise unwelcome information often do not simply resist it; they may come to support their original (wrong) opinion even more strongly—a backfire effect.”

The backfire effect is what happens when the brain wants to avoiding admitting that it might have been wrong. It doubles-down, especially when the conflict involves their self-identity and deeply held beliefs. Tavris and Aaronson write that “dissonance is bothersome under any circumstances, but it is most painful to people when an important element of their self concept is threatened…Once we are invested in a belief and have justified its wisdom, changing our minds is literally hard work. It’s much easier to slot that new evidence into an existing framework and do the mental justification to keep it there than it is to change the framework.”

Sadly, this means that some people will never be able to change their minds about illegal immigrants, welfare recipients, unions, minorities, gun control and, yes, the Democratic Party. During the Trump presidency, I checked in with Jason several times to gauge his reaction to the latest outrage—after the Muslim travel ban, when immigrant children were being kept in cages, after the Lafayette Park assault on Black Lives Matter protesters and when Trump made the comment about “good people on both sides” after a white-supremacist march in North Carolina—naively believing that surely this would shake him out of his Republican coma. No dice. Each time, Jason would basically toe the Fox News line. I remember, for example, sharing with him my anger over that fact that border officials weren’t keeping proper records, which meant that some refugee children might never be reunited with their parents. It turned out Jason was angry too—about some footage he’d seen of illegal immigrants waving a Guatemalan flag as they made their way north to the U.S.

If the goal of Fox News and its brethren was to create a viewership eternally loyal to their particular brand of spin, they have succeeded mightily. I believe these outlets are the reason Jason and others will vote for Trump in November despite disliking much of what the former president has done and says he will do.

Tavris and Aronson include an illuminating quote from the late comedian Lenny Bruce, comments that perfectly describe what we’re seeing today:

“I would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate and their comment would be, ‘He’s really slaughtering Nixon.’ Then we would all go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, ‘How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?’ And then I realized that each group loved their candidate so that a guy would have to be this blatant – he would have to look into the camera and say: ‘I am a thief, a crook, do you hear me, I am the worst choice you could ever make for the Presidency!’ And even then his following would say, ‘Now there’s an honest man for you. It takes a big guy to admit that. There’s the kind of guy we need for President.’”

This kind of irrational intractability revealed itself during the pandemic, when many COVID deniers continued to embrace misinformation they learned on right-wing media—right up until the moment it killed them. As a nurse in South Dakota told CNN in 2020, “The hardest thing to watch is that people are still looking for something else, and they want a magic answer. They’re filled with anger and hatred. Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening; it’s not real.'”

If people will avoid the truth even to the death, I don’t believe there’s any hope for changing the minds of Jason and so many of his fellow Republicans. They will vote for the man who has no problem ripping away Social Security, Obamacare and other provisions that constitute a social safety net, the man who would have no problem killing them off directly if he decided that doing so would be personally expedient. Just such an outcome may very well happen, albeit indirectly. Many of these voters could easily end up like the COVID victims, claiming the Democrats—whose efforts to save the social safety net, and Democracy, might have been their salvation—are evil, right up until the moment they die.

I hope Jason—and all he holds dear— isn’t among them.