I don’t know about you, but I’m still amazed at the alacrity, the sheer speed at which Donald Trump’s supporters have come out to defend him after the FBI executed a search warrant on his estate. You would think that, after this summer, with the January 6 Select Committee unveiling revelations week after week, Trump’s sincerest supporters would have slunk off to some morose corner, but instead they have been waiting for their cue to become active again.
I’d already previously pointed out part of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s strategy, with her rhetoric of a “national divorce” as a palatable euphemism for internecine war, is to appeal to some lost-boyhood of her target audience. She went to a similar well after the Mar-a-Lago search, posting a distressed American flag and bellowing for the defunding of the FBI, implying an irreconcilable division.
What really struck me, though, were the pundits who were very naked and plain with their assertions that any attack on Trump was an attack on each and every one of his supporters. The FBI action against Trump could be seen as an assault on every man, woman, and child.
The Twitter account for the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican members (led by Jim Jordan) said, “If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you.”
This is the same irrational and tortured logic that Tucker Carlson offered last year with his “Patriot Purge,” which equated the actions taken against January 6 insurrectionists as what would be done to everyday Trump backers. In that case, the argument was more along the lines of “these people support Trump to the utmost, and so do you, the viewer, so anything that happens to them could be seen as happening to you.” Now, the knee-jerk reaction among many in the right-wing news and blogosphere has the underlying message of “an attack on Trump is a direct attack on you.” It collapses the argument and makes a 1:1 equation of Trump and any one of his followers.
That’s the backbone of a cult.
We’ve been saying this for some time, that MAGA has elements of a cult. This has not been hyperbole; much of what goes on in that political movement can be seen through that lens. And what these outlets are doing, with their unifed, extreme response to the execution of a search warrant, is to build up Trump’s cult of personality.
Once believers begin to feel that what happens to their guru is reciprocated upon them on a 1:1 basis, that’s a metaphysical, mystical area of linkage. They feel at one with their charismatic leader and so any attack on him becomes a personal attack, not only on the group level of MAGA but also on the individual level, each to the man, the woman, and the child.
I find the reaction by the pundits disturbing in a couple of ways. One, for some time I’ve been saying that the Republican Party, if it wants to avoid the same pitfalls as their counterparts in Weimar Germany undertook, needs to try to find off-ramps. Right now, we are on a collision course for the United States to face a crisis of fascism; and according to Robert O. Paxton the conservatives of the Weimar Republic kept making choices and decisions that led them further and more inextricably toward fascism. There were off-ramps that appeared, but as time went on fewer and fewer of them made themselves known.
We’re passing our off-ramps. This summer has been full of the January 6 committee hearings, and Trump should be toxic by now. Certainly, his glee at releasing the statement about the execution of the search warrant is displaced from what he had hoped to do, how he had hoped to derail the discussion of the findings of the January 6 committee. He’s pleased to have the limelight back on himself, he’s in the comfortable position of being seen as the victim, and his surrogates in the media are reacting so uniformly and yet so extremely that they will make it seem to their viewers that their reaction is reasonable. He’s coaxing his supporters to remain vocally loyal.
After these hearings, rational Republicans should be making pitches to their own caucuses to make it clear how toxic Trump actually is. Instead, we see this off-ramp being deliberately shunted by those in the conservative camp, even though this is one of the very last major off-ramps we’re going to be given. The last one before this was second impeachment. The one before that was the interregnum between the 2020 election and January 6, where Republicans pooh-poohed Trump’s tantrum and asked what harm it did by humoring him. There have been several major options where the Republican Party could have chosen to save its own reputation as a party rather than to bind its destiny to Trump, and they have passed on each of those in turn.
Second, their embrace of Trump indicates that these pundits will actively help the audience identify themselves with Trump. This is aiding in the construction of Trump’s personality cult. That they’re reacting with such synchronicity means that the viewer will come away with the sense that these reactions are common and uniform. For those who are stricken with the need to conform to majority opinion (many fascists or would-be fascists suffer from this), the perception that knee-jerk support of an ex-president is popular, even though that support may come with the fact of overt criminality, means that the conformist can find support for their tendency to accept the MAGA line.
The position of the media allows the conformists to adopt extreme stances. That the positions are all skewed to one determination—defend Trump—means that the MAGA conformist is presented with what seems to be a unified conservative attitude and that of scattered opinion along other parts of the political spectrum. The clustering of opinion on the right-wing helps bring those who normally would run the gamut in terms of public opinion into the extremist camp. The very extremity exerts its own pull.
I’m still trying to put my finger on exactly what MAGA is, how it has become a successful social movement; it’s something I’ve been intensively studying for several years now. But I do know that Trumpism cannot be defeated without some destruction of his cult of personality. Some work was being done toward this end with the January 6 committee hearings; and we saw some measurable movement on some opinion scales in terms of how people viewed Trump’s actions that day. But this close-the-ranks reaction to the FBI search warrant story concerns me because, as long as that reaction is seen as the go-to one for the right-wing, they (and thus we) will never extricate the nation from Trump. Media in general is good at giving glamour; the last thing our national news media needs to do is actively construct the edifice of Trump’s cult status.