Another great post by Tom Nichols, an Atlantic columnist, came my way the other day, with the headline "What are Trump supporters so afraid of?" and that column was a way for me to recalibrate my thinking about the many Americans (some my relatives) who just can't break away from the Trump Cult.
Here's his key graf:
I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Adam Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.
This made sense to me. Who wants to be forced to realize they have made a serious mistake and who wouldn't want to deflect the blame to someone else... anyone but them?
Fear has become the top motivator for most voters, maybe most PEOPLE, and perhaps across the planet. Fear of being show to be a fool has got to be powerful, and it seems normal that most people would try to avoid outright admitting that they were snookered.
"There's a sucker born every minute," said someone (not P.T. Barnum, though he is often associated with the memorable phrase). What we all want to do is brag about how smart and clever we are/were... not how silly, overmatched, and gullible we are/were.
Here's my idealistic hope: many people who are reluctant to publicly announce that they have been fooled for years but who are now confronted by all sorts of their political allies who can prove they WERE being fooled will cast their votes for someone other than those who played them for fools. The secrecy of the ballot box may allow reason and logic to return.
I know. I'm nutty just to imagine such a thing.
We have watched every minute of the January 6 Committee on the Capitol incursion hearings and both Kathleen and I have found them engrossing. It's like watching a trial without law enforcement involved and without a judge to oversee it all... everything is based on procedures the House of Representatives has developed over many years.
The mix of live witnesses and video clips and narratives from individual House members on the panel move things along and have been brilliantly organized to create cohesive arguments. At this point, anyone who continues to cheer for Trump has made a clear choice to remain ignorant and to deny reality, and I still think most Americans are not that far gone.
Ignorance and refusal to face reality can't be legislated against, and there have always been plenty of wackos in this country entertaining the most far-fetched ideas. Those people will never go away. But if we can just pry a few people away from the cult around the edges...
I could be proven wrong and all the cynicism people expressed about the committee hearings may turn out to be accurate, with nothing being done, but the hearings at least qualify as a manageable history of Jan. 6, 2021, and what led to the insurrection and what might be coming.
After all, a large percentage of Republicans still cling to the weird belief that the 2020 election was rigged in some way and that Trump got cheated. At least, that is what they say out loud.
Of course, the opposite is true. Trump and his cronies are the cheaters, the liars, the thieves, and the traitors. That last one is a stretch, perhaps, but what else can you call a person who tries to disrupt the Constitution and the peaceful exchange of power?
Lock him up!
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