he'll also lose the power to persuade millions. Right now, he's got the attention of the nation every waking hour of every day, and he's taken full advantage of it. When he's an ex-president overtaken by his mountain of legal and financial problems, he won't have the command of the airwaves. And he only exists right now because he can command a camera to focus on him at any time, day or night. All of that will diminish when he loses, as the media won't care anymore. And when they don't care, he'll have far less air time and his viewers will gradually lose interest. Right now, they see him as the leader of a movement, and the fact that he's president commands a lot of deference to his every utterance. All of that will change, and soon. After he's out of power, his supporters will no longer view him as a god or a messenger from God. That only holds credibility when he's at the top of the authority heap. When he's out of power, folks will ask themselves whether he's a political or evangelical leader. They'll lose their focus, their Trump-fueled "mission."
The mass delusion is largely fueled by the gravitas of the position he currently holds. Without that authoritarian-like frame, his charisma and his power will diminish. And what will overshadow Trump's frantic hold on power is the Biden Administration's focus on COVID, the economy, the return of competency within the executive branch, the rebuilding of foreign policy, and a return to the US' dominance on the world stage. There are simply too many urgent issues to address, and Trumpy-Boy will get drowned out by all of the solutions to problems that HE CREATED.
So cheer up. We have to get past the election and all of Trumpy-Boy's cheap tricks before he's finally ousted from office. Then the serious work begins. I didn't know that there was such a psychological term as "delusional break," but I didn't come across all of the psychological terms in my five years of graduate training, and about 50 years of counseling and social service experience. I think what you mean is something called mass psychosis, a phenomenon that does exist, but only rarely, in the course of human endeavors.
In this instance, Trump was the instrument that plays the song. The song itself was lying in wait for the first willing "leader" to sing. So there was a large minority of the population ready to accept a break from reality because they had become disillusioned about their own chances for success and perhaps their own upward mobility. None of their dreams were coming true, so they were ripe for the mass psychosis that will wax and wane as the mood of the nation changes. They couldn't accumulate purchasing power, they were subjected to massive education debt, they were NOT getting raises commensurate with experience, their ability to become employed for their trade skills or their higher education was disappearing, and they found that their apartment rent was just as high as mortgage payments, except that they can't qualify for a home loan. So their willingness to believe in the confidence game of a master huckster seemed less problematic for them than most other times in the recent past. If Trump weren't ready and able to con all of them, they'd manufacture someone else who would do.
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