The Toxic Loyalty of Trump's Hardcore Zealots (Jared Yates Sexton, Daily Beast)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-toxic-loyalty-of-trumps-hardcore-zealots?ref=home

Of the many factors that contributed to Trump’s unlikely win, cognitive dissonance played a prominent role. Regularly faced with negative stories and scandals about their candidate, his voters had an unconscious choice to make with every news cycle: further their support of Trump or accept the growing avalanche of criticism. In a masterstroke of maneuvering, Trump had inoculated much of his base to the media, which he demonized in his every speech, interview, and tweet, making sure his supporters stayed true to his fold and dismissed every report as dishonest manipulation.

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As the rest of the country turned on Trump and his approval ratings plummeted, his diehard base stayed firm. Roughly 30% of the voting public continued to support him, seemingly proving his assertion that they were so loyal he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody.” They’d weathered one scandal after another, watched Trump undermine journalists, threaten NBC’s broadcast license, trade barbs with the unpredictable head of a rogue nuclear state, and yet, they still seemed unwavering loyal.

That loyalty, however, towed them into deep waters.

In order to maintain that devotion they had to accept a toxic worldview—a worldview that made them susceptible to hate groups that had grown large and powerful with Trump’s ascent to power. His supporters defended him as he amplified hateful voices on social media, including anti-Semites and foreign fascists, and, perhaps most damningly of all, when he hemmed and hawed over the tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia that left a young woman dead after neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched into town carrying weapons and looking for a fight and eventually, disappointingly, referred to them as “good very fine people.”

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Looking forward to 2018, it is a matter of whether there is a bottom to this hole. Under Trump this base has not only stomached his breaches of democratic norms, they’ve cheered him on. Personally I’ve heard them float fascist desires, like jailing and murdering dissenters and members of the press, doing away with elections and provisions preventing cruel and unusual punishment, and with the midterms approaching the question is whether the Trumpification of the Republican Party will continue with a new slate of radical candidates who look more like Trump and Roy Moore than the traditional GOP who birthed them.

And then, there’s one of the pressing issues of our time, what will happen if Robert Mueller, special counsel charged with investigating Trump’s possible collusion with Russia, delivers evidence that a crime was committed?

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While Trump maintains his innocence, going so far as to tweet that he is the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt in the history of American political history,” the conservative media apparatus that helped his rise to power has fallen in behind him to construct his defense. It began on the far right, with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Breitbart News, which weaved a narrative that Trump’s presidency was under siege and being attacked by shadowy cabals helmed by globalists and Hillary Clinton, all of whom had their sights on destroying the administration. Jones took it a step further, as he always does, by claiming the plan was a coup and that there were discussions regarding having Trump assassinated if necessary.

Those narratives planted a seed among Trump’s base that not only was the investigation into collusion fruitless, but that it was part of a larger plot against the president. If it had ended there it would have been bad enough, but soon Fox News echoed these fringe parties as Sean Hannity and others questioned Robert Mueller’s integrity and accused him of conflicting interests. Recently, that rhetoric has only escalated as Fox has started to use the word “coup” as well, and recently contributor Kevin Jackson floated the possibility on air that the FBI might have planned to assassinate Trump.

Needless to say, this new development is incredibly dangerous. Trump’s base has proven susceptible to these wild conspiracy theories in the past and the attempt to protect Trump against these accusations could lead to truly horrifying consequences. Many of his supporters, after all, have been waiting decades for what they’ve been told will be the overthrow of the American democratic system, whether that’s by globalist overlords or Satanic forces, both of which have been cited by Alex Jones on a daily basis for the past year, and those Americans who have been convinced this will happen have taken measures to prepare themselves, including hoarding supplies and weapons.

The game of chicken being played by Jones, Breitbart, and Fox News is unfathomably perilous. It is, after all, bad enough that his base might support Trump firing a man charged with investigating him, but the talk among the fringe right, where many of his supporters can be found, is trending more and more toward armed insurgency.

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[pbmus]

1. The armed insurgency trend is more than frightening...

[skylucy]

2. This article is excellent....Excellent and frightening.