The cult of Trump
It will not go away when he does
For the last four years, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about why anyone would follow a mentally ill con artist. Why would 70 million Americans vote for someone who has nothing to offer but lies and empty promises? The answer is cognitive dissonance: the human brain lies to itself to protect deeply held beliefs about reality that are in fact not real at all.
Cognitive dissonance is the reason that religions have such sway over wide swaths of humanity, and cognitive dissonance is the reason that a life-long loser like Trump can convince tens of millions of people that he is the opposite of reality. They see what they want to see in him, rather than what actually is.
To anyone who has not already deeply committed to the idea that Trump is some sort of modern American messiah placed on earth by magical forces to protect middle-class white America, it is obvious that Trump lost the election because he is what he is: a loud mouth bully who cares only about stroking his own ego to…
