Trump Is an Open Book for Closed Minds

The mystery of 2024: How is it possible that Donald Trump has a reasonable chance of winning the presidency despite all that voters now know about him? Why hasn’t a decisive majority risen up to deny a second term to a man in line to be judged the worst president in American history?

The litany of Trump’s liabilities is well known to the American electorate. His mendacity, duplicity, depravity, hypocrisy and venality are irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of American voters.

Trump has made it clear that on a second term he will undermine the administration of justice, empower America’s adversaries, endanger the nation’s allies and exacerbate the nation’s racial and cultural rifts.

John Podhoretz, in a 2017 Commentary article, “Explaining Trump’s Charlottesville Behavior,” offered up one piece of the puzzle, addressing the question, “Whose early support for Trump itself played a key role in leading others to take him seriously and help propel him into the nomination?”

Podhoretz’s prescient answer: a conspiracy-oriented constituency with little regard for truth:

Trump, from the start, was operating in a universe separate from the traditional politics of the Republican and Democratic parties; he was operating in a world rooted in his 25 years in pro wrestling, in which people put up good money to watch fake “fights” they know in their hearts were fixed.

The pervasive denial of truth has, in turn, been crucial to Trump’s continued viability.

In “Popular Reactions to Donald Trump’s Indictments and Trials and Their Implications for the 2024 Election,” Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, argues that this denial — “motivated ignorance reinforced by a right-wing pundits and social media entrepreneurs” — helps explain “the tenacious loyalty of Trump’s MAGA followers.”