A decade into our collective Donald Trump nightmare, most of the reality-based population has given up on hoping MAGA voters will wake up and see the light. We’ve come to realize that he could eat a live kitten on TV and they, unwilling to admit his critics were right all along, would argue that kitten was “antifa” and liberals are the ones who are stupid for not seeing the threat the kitten posed to our safety. I predicted this miserable state of affairs back in 2017, after interviewing psychology experts on cognitive dissonance. For Trump voters, the pain of saying “I was wrong” is too great. They would rather burn the country to the ground than accept fault. If anything, the worse Trump acts the harder they cling to him because the psychic price of saying “liberals were right all along” grows steeper.
The situation can feel hopeless, especially in the face of events like the recent killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. A woman is dead because of Trump’s racist obsessions; children have lost their mother. But all his voters seem capable of doing is protecting their own egos by telling lies to justify the indefensible. Most them will go to their graves with this sin on their consciences, protesting until the end that they were good people even as they defended kidnapping, murder and fascism.
