Donald J. Trump assumed office on January 20, 2017. This article by Calum Marsh, an arts and culture reporter with the National Post,* a Canadian newspaper. His writings have appeared in such periodicals as the the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Republic, and the New Yorker, among many others. I googled “Calum March and Trump” and couldn’t find anything her wrote about him. Just about all of his column have to do with arts and culture.
This was published in three months after Trump was inaugurated. It is the only article of his which I could find which could be categorized as social psychology.
It is an especially interesting read now considering how Trump and his supporters reside in an alternate universe where up is down and down is up.
I’ve excerpted some parts that apply to members of the Trump cult and crossed out flat earth references and replaced them with the Trump word that fits.
This lunatic fringe is inflexible, tireless and cannot be persuaded by evidence or reason. Their dogma has long infected social media and contaminates the bored and gullible every day. Part trend, part cult, and part virus, the flat-earth Trump movement is as good a symbol as any of the diminished value of truth and intelligence in 2017 — and its constituency continues to grow at an alarming rate.
Obviously and disturbingly Trump-world isn't a fringe nor is it a trend.
Today the flat-earth Trump gospel thrives on Facebook and YouTube, shared by way of memes and image macros, and on websites that look like they were designed in the mid-1990s. Like other popular conspiracy theories, it beckons outsiders with a language of fraternity, suggesting that those who accept the truth become at once a part of an intimate, enlightened group; a fellowship of those in the know.
It doesn’t help to point out that the very purpose of science is to demonstrate the reality of that which we cannot perceive ourselves; that plenty of things which seem apparent to our eyes and our ears are not at all as they seem and never have been, and that the process of this understanding is the very narrative of our evolution as a species. These processes the Flat-Earthers Trumpers dismiss as propaganda.
The author finally gets to politics (in bold).
The particulars of flat-earth Trump devotion are easy to ridicule. But it isn’t difficult to understand why people are seduced by the tenor of the message. The flat-earth Trump movement, in its own peculiar way, appeals to the arrogance of the ignorant, arousing a dormant sense of being meant for something special. It empowers you to overcome confusion and conquer stupidity – not the hard way, by learning and understanding, but in a way that’s much easier, by redefining the things you don’t understand as wrong in the first place.
It’s the same quick-fix attitude that’s besieging our political landscape: information that doesn’t accord with your carefully manicured world-view is “fake news,” opinions that don’t cohere with your own are offensive, everything you dislike or that frightens you can be wedged between scare quotes and rejected out of hand. Never mind the “expertise” of “professionals” and “elites.” You still matter. You know everything you need to know.
Here’s a recent article:
The Flat Earth conspiracy is starting to feel like that annoying relative who always outstays their welcome at family events.
The more coverage that it receives, the more and more baffling it becomes to perceive that anyone would buy into this theory.
Low and behold, the belief that the Earth is flat and surrounded by some kind of ice wall continues to gather momentum.
Not only do they have their own Flat Earth Society, which has been mocked several times by Elon Musk, but their ideas are starting to connect with millennials.
A study conducted by YouGov of 8,215 US adults has discovered that just 66 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds are convinced that the Earth is round.
Now there is a strong chance that millennials are just trolling surveys as the likelihood of an Internet prank is not beyond the realms of possibility.
That being said this is still a worryingly low total, especially as nine per cent of those surveyed admitted that they always believed that our planet was round but have been more doubtful about this fact recently.
Much has been written about confirmation bias as it relates to Trump. The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that affirms one's prior beliefs or hypotheses is a reason why people who hold disproved beliefs are unlikely to change what they think. This VOX article was published only one month after Trump became president:
I would like to see a poll of Trump supporters and never-Trumpers which asked questions about demonstrably false beliefs. For example how many believe in the grassy knoll Kennedy gunman and other JFK conspiracies, the fake moon landing, that our own government officials planned the 9/11 attacks, and those listed below:
My hunch is that people prone to believing disproven stories tend to be more likely to support Trump. I’d be terribly disappointed if I was wrong.
Correction: I previous wrote that the National Post was Canada’s leading newspaper. These are the main papers in Canada. It is ranked number four on Wiki.