That is, unless people start pushing back against Trump’s narrative right now — and by “people,” I mean Republicans.

Think about that precious small percentage of Republicans who now say they would not support Trump if convicted. They are actually saying a lot more than that. These are Republicans who still regard the justice system as important and legitimate, who consider special counsel Jack Smith’s charges worthy of a jury trial and legitimate, and who for the moment think a guilty verdict, were it to come, would be legitimate. Can we count on them maintaining those views over the coming weeks and months if all they hear from Republican leaders and conservative media is that the trials are illegitimate acts of persecution? Do the people hoping to be saved by the courts think that these voters will conclude on their own that the trials are legitimate when their entire party is saying they’re not?

What they need to hear right now (and for the rest of the campaign) is that they are right, that the Biden administration is not a dictatorship, that the trials are not an abuse of power, and that if Trump is convicted, justice will have been done. And they do not need to hear this from Democrats and Post columnists. They need to hear it from their fellow Republicans, from Republicans they admire. At some point, some leading Republicans are going to have to display the courage to defend the justice system even though that will put them in direct conflict with Trump and his supporters.

When George Wallace made his first bid for Alabama governor in 1958, he lost the Democratic primary to an openly racist opponent who, Wallace later charged, had “outsegged” him. Wallace never let that happen again. He won the 1962 gubernatorial race with what was then the largest popular vote in the state’s history. Wallace’s winning message: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

The lesson in the story, at least for me, was not how unprincipled ambition changed Wallace from a racial moderate (by Alabama’s standards) into one of the nation’s most outspoken segregationists. Rather, it’s how well he succeeded when he chose to express and exploit the beliefs of White Alabamians.

Though polls continue to show Trump’s iron grip on his followers, mainstream outlets spend far too little attention on why and howMAGA member cling to demonstrably false beliefs, excuse what should be inexcusable conduct and treat him as infallible. Outlets should routinely consult psychologists and historians to ask the vital questions: How do people abandon rationality? What drives their fury and anxiety? How does an authoritarian figure maintain his hold on followers? How do ideas of racial purity play into it? Media outlets fail news consumers when they do not explain the authoritarian playbook that Trump employs. Americans need media outlets to spell out what is happening.

“Authoritarian, not democratic dynamics, hold the key to Trump’s behavior as a candidate now and in the future,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote. “The main goals of his campaign events are not to advance policy proposals but rather to prop up his personality cult, circulate his lies, and emotionally retrain Americans to see violence as positive and even patriotic.”

Plenty of experts are available to dissect the phenomenon. Expert Steven Hassan, for example, explained to the Atlantic’s Peter Sagal that, as Sagal wrote, “the MAGA movement checks all the boxes of his ‘BITE’ model of cult mind control — behavior, information, thought, and emotional control.” Sagal continued, “Like all cult leaders, [Hassan] argues, Trump restricts the information his followers are allowed to accept; demands purity of belief (beliefs that can change from moment to moment, as per his whims and needs); and appeals to his followers through the conjuring of primal emotions — not just fear but also joy.” (Another expert, Daniella Mestyanek Young, explained: “The first rule of cults is: you’re never in a cult. The second rule of cults is: the cult will forgive any sin, except the sin of leaving. The third rule of cults is: even if he did it, that doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”)

But her challenges to the front-runner are timid. “I think President Trump was the right president at the right time. I agree with a lot of his policies,” she assures every audience. “But, rightly or wrongly, chaos has followed him.”

Chaos follows Trump — through no fault of his own!

“You deserve an America without drama. You deserve an America that’s better than whether you have a couple of 80-year-olds running for president,” was as tough a critique as she offered.

She scolded the Trump administration (of which she was a part) of approving too many technology sales to China, and gently chided him for adding $8 trillion to the debt: “Under President Trump, everybody talks about how good our economy was. It was good, but at what cost?”

Still, Haley, for all her timidity, was at least implicitly offering a serious, viable, alternative to Trump. Hers is a traditional Republican message of balanced budgets, lower taxes, help for small business, a strong national defense. “The first thing I think you do is you send an accountant to the White House,” she told them. Woo-hoo! She made only a passing nod to the culture wars that so delight the MAGA crowd, briefly disapproving of “biological boys playing in girls’ sports.”

Where Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy are dark, even apocalyptic, Haley is sunny. She speaks plainly of her party’s need to reverse course. “Republicans have lost the last seven of eight popular votes for president,” she says, asking to “leave the negativity and the baggage behind.”

She points out that she polls better against Biden than the others, and it’s true. Were she the nominee, Republicans would likely win the presidency in a landslide. But this Republican electorate wants something different.

They want a guy who talks about being a “dictator” on day one, echoes Hitler in his rhetoric about ethnic minorities, demands absolute immunity from legal liability and threatens “bedlam” if he’s prosecuted.

They want a guy who, after all these years, still derides “Barack Hussein Obama” and “Pocahontas” Elizabeth Warren, as he did in Indianola on Sunday. They want a guy who threatens, as president, to “direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor because of their illegal, racist … enforcement of the law.”

And they want a man who promises: “We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmonger … We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that truly hates our country. We will rout the fake news media. And we will evict Crooked Joe Biden from the White House.” The crowd, in their MAGA caps and Trump 47 jerseys, cheered their candidate and broke into spontaneous chants of “Trump!” and “USA!”

Let there be no more excuses made that Republican voters haven’t been given an alternative. They had a choice — and they chose Trump.

Opinion | Iowa makes it clear that all Republicans are Trump Republicans - The Washington Post

One woman screamed and then the entire crowd erupted in cheers as Trump’s gleaming jet glided past the opening in the back of the hangar, a deep blue missile across the pale pink dusk sky. He was flying in from a stop-off in Philadelphia to unveil a line of gold-colored sneakers. A drumroll thundered over the loudspeakers, and the crowd broke into a Trump chant, but it was not time for his grand entrance yet — just the intro of James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti’s duet of “It’s a Man’s World.”

A young girl complained that she could not see over the standing mass, and her father assured her she would see later, when people sat down. “He goes on for hours,” he said.

“I don’t want to be here for hours,” she whined.

“Then go wait in the car.”

“I’m only 11, I don’t care about politics.”

“Shut up.”

When Trump did appear, it got only harder to see as people held up their hands to wave and record him on their phones. A woman in an orange sweatshirt stood on her chair, and a man behind her barked, “Hey, Orange! Sit down!”

“We’re not worried about the primary,” Trump said from under a red MAGA cap, gesticulating in black leather gloves as the crowd roared. “We want to win Nov. 5. We’re going to bring our country back from hell.”

“That’s right!” one person shouted back.

In one of his signature tactics, Trump spun the same accusations against him directly around on his opponents. Charged with trying to overturn the 2020 election, he called his prosecution a “threat to democracy.” Having named the critics he wants to punish in a second term, he described the array of civil and legal cases against himas all products of “bitterness and revenge and hatred.”

He assailed the $355 million fine issued the day before in a New York civil fraud trail against his businesses as an “atrocity” and a “disgusting charade,” calling the attorney general who brought the case and the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, who decided it “lunatics.”

“Treason!” a supporter shouted.

“Engoron’s a moron!” said another.

Trump polled the audience on which nickname he should use for Biden, “Crooked” or “Sleepy,” and some in the crowd shouted back their own suggestions. “Creepy Joe!” “Demented Joe!” “Suicide Joe!” “Traitor!” “Pedo!”

Trump derided the “fake news,” and the crowd turned around to jeer and throw up middle fingers at the press risers. He repeated his regular pledge to “drive out the globalists” and “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. They truly do. They hate our country.”

“We are like the stupid country,” Trump said. Without evidence, he accused migrants of coming from “insane asylums” and prisons.

“Deport the illegals!” a supporter cried out.

“Our cities, they’re falling apart. Our country is falling apart. We’re like a third-world nation,” Trump said.

The 11-year-old fell asleep on the floor, while her brother, wearing socks stitched with “Let’s Go Brandon” (code for a profane attack on Biden), stood on a chair for a better view.

“You’re freezing your ass off, right?” Trump said to more cheers and whistles. “But it’s warm because there’s love in this room. Right?”

“Yes!” the crowd shouted back.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/19/biden-trump-michigan-presidential-campaign/

So, why will so many vote for him anyway? For a significant segment of the Republican electorate, the white-hot core of the Trump movement, it is because they want to see the system overthrown. This should not come as a shock, for it is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary, it is as old as the republic. Historians have written about the “liberal tradition” in America, but there has from the beginning also been an anti-liberal tradition: large numbers of Americans determined to preserve preliberal traditions, hierarchies and beliefs against the secular liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. The Founders based the republic on a radical set of principles and assertions about government: that all human beings were created equal in their possession of certain “natural rights” that government was bound to respect and to safeguard. These rights did not derive from religious belief but were “self-evident.” They were not granted by the Christian God, by the crown or even by the Constitution. They were inherent in what it meant to be human.

This is the central tenet of liberalism. Before the American Revolution no government had ever been founded on liberal principles, and the vast majority of human beings had never believed in these natural rights — certainly not the Christian church in either its Protestant or Roman Catholic versions nor Islam nor Judaism nor Hinduism nor Buddhism. People might be equal in the eyes of their god, but no government or religious institution had ever been based on the principle of equal rights. Not even the English system was based on this principle but rather on monarchy, a ruling aristocracy and a contract between crown and subjects that was modified over the centuries but was not based on the principle of universal “natural” rights.

The Founders knew these ideas were radical, that they were inaugurating, in their own words, a novus ordo seclorum — a new order of the ages — that required a new way of thinking and acting. They knew, as well, that their own practices and those of 18th-century American society did not conform to their new revolutionary doctrines. They knew that slavery was contrary to the Declaration’s principles, though they permitted slavery to continue, hoping it would die a natural death. They knew that established churches were contrary to those principles because they impinged on that most important of rights, “freedom of conscience,” which was vital to the preservation of liberty, yet a number of states in the 18th and 19th centuries retained all kinds of religious tests for office. In short, they knew that a great many Americans did not in fact believe in the liberal principles of the revolution. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, put it, “We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted.” They did not insist that citizens believe in those principles. One could be an American citizen whether one believed in the Declaration or not.

And a great many did not. Leaders of the slaveholding South called the Declaration “a most pernicious falsehood.” South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun called the very idea of equal rights a “false doctrine.” They believed in democracy, but only if it was an exclusively White democracy. When democracy turned against them in 1860, they rebelled and sought an exit from the system. That rebellion never ended. It has been weakened, suppressed — sometimes by force — and driven underground, but it has never gone away. Although the South was militarily defeated and deprived of its special advantages in the Constitution, its hostility to the Founders’ liberalism did not abate. As Southern writer W.J. Cash observed in 1941, if the war had “smashed the southern world,” it had nevertheless “left the essential southern mind and will … entirely unshaken” and Southerners themselves determined “to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were.” In 1956, almost a century after the Civil War, a fifth of Congress, almost all Democrats — signed the “Southern Manifesto” calling on states to refuse to obey the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision to end segregation in public schools. Nothing had changed. Are we so surprised that for many Americans, nothing has changed even today?

But what about the average Republican voter, the “normal” Republicans who happily voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney? Do they not see the difference between those Republicans and Trump — or do they not care? They, too, may feel their narrow interests are served by a Trump victory, and although they may not be Christian nationalists themselves, their views as White Americans make them sympathetic to the complaints of the anti-liberals. They, too, may feel they — or their children — are at a disadvantage in a system dedicated to diversity and wokeness. Their annoyance with a liberalism that has “gone too far” makes them susceptible to Trump’s appeal, and, more importantly, unconcerned about the threat he poses. Left to their own devices, they would not be interested in overthrowing the regime. But neither are they inclined to stand in the way of those who are.

Are these voters and GOP power players right to believe that they, like Dimon, will be just fine in a system no longer faithful to the Founders’ liberal ideals? Perhaps so. They will not be the first to suffer from a shift back toward a 1920s America. White Americans tolerated the systematic oppression of Black people for a century after the Civil War. They tolerated violence in the South, injustice in the courtrooms, a Supreme Court that refused to recognize the equal rights of Black people, women and various minorities. Will they rise up against a second Trump term infused by Christian and white nationalism, or will they acquiesce in the gradual dismantling of the liberal gains of the past eight decades?

The shame is that many White people today seem to have conveniently forgotten how much they and their forebears have depended on the Founders’ liberalism to gain their present status as fully equal members of American society and to enjoy the freedoms that they take for granted.

Most White Republicans, after all, do not have the “legacy European” lineage that Tucker Carlson praises. They do not have ancestors who stepped off the Mayflower or fought in the revolution. The ancestors of the great majority of “White” Americans today were not considered “White” when they first set foot on American shores. Irish Americans may no longer remember that the Thomas Nast cartoons of the late 19th century depicted the Irish as apelike creatures. Many Italian Americans may not recall that a riot made up of “New Orleans’ finest” lynched and murdered 11 Sicilian immigrants and were never charged.

Many Catholics seem to have forgotten that they were once the most despised group in America, such that one of the Founders, John Jay, wanted them excluded from citizenship altogether. Most White Americans were at one time members of despised immigrant groups. They were the victims of the very anti-liberalism they are now voting back into power. They climbed to equality using liberalism as their ladder, and now that they have reached their destination they would pull away the ladder and abandon liberalism. Having obtained their equality using the laws and institutions of liberalism, their passion for liberalism has faded.

The Founders understood, and feared, that the fervor for rights and liberalism that animated the revolution might not last. Writing in 1781, two years before the end of the war, Thomas Jefferson predicted that once the war ended, “we shall be going down hill.” The people would return to their quotidian lives, forgetting their passionate concern for rights, intent only on “making money.” They might never again come together “to effect a due respect for their rights,” and so their government would stop being solicitous of their rights. Over a half-century later, Lincoln, in his famous Lyceum address, lamented that the original spirit of the revolution had dissipated with time, leaving Americans with only the normal selfishness of human beings. The original “pillars of the temple of liberty” had “crumbled away.” A little over two decades later, the nation fell into civil war.

If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.

Opinion | Robert Kagan: Will Trump voters destroy America’s radical democracy? - The Washington Post