The group you referenced is the most difficult for me to understand. The long time MAGA loyalists have always been a personality cult with little regard for facts, norms, or truth. But now there is another group in the coalition. They are moderate, intelligent, and informed….but somehow choose Trump anyway. For some inexplicable reason, they see wokeness as the real threat while minimizing or ignoring the constant, egregious shredding of democracy by Trump administration. Matt Taibbi comes to mind. He’s talked about nothing but Russia gate for the last month with nary a peep about what the current FBI is doing right now. He genuinely seems to think that the democrats were so bad that Trumps outrageous behavior is somehow an improvement. I really don’t get it, especially because I never saw him as a partisan or a grifter. It’s really sad honestly
I used to appreciate Taibbi's writing and then during #MeToo it came out he had been abusive to women, and he showed his true colors by his efforts to promote the "Twitter Files." When there's a pattern of bad behavior that's it for me, and I have no problem writing the repeat offender off unless and until I see l evidence of a real change of heart.
That guy is worthless. He just does his little macho hit pieces against liberal women like AOC and Taylor Lorenz . I unsubscribed and haven’t looked back 🤣😳🤨😡😡
Love how you captured patriarchal orthodoxy, Mike, even without touching on the misogyny. Uncritical faith, strict obedience, purity tests: this is why the indoctrinated cultists will drop their previous obsession with the "Epstein files" and guess what, they ignored tons of publicly available victim interviews, legal allegations and court filings even before he told them to drop it. "Circus" was such an appropriate title you chose for your substack, Mike!
Finally a concise, clear explanation of my guttural instinct to abandon the few friendships I had with Trumpers. I've decided donate a gift to support your important work . Thank you
Beyond the tribal vibe, I find shadows of dysfunction that affect other areas as well.
Daddy is a trigger word a lot of times in abusive family life. The old saying "Whatever Daddy wants Daddy gets" conjurs up all sorts of ways Daddy can violate people at will. Look at the tap dance around pedophilia that is happening. Daddy said it was bad. Now Daddy says it is good.
The people you describe that chose the tribe over reason seem to have the "it can't happen to me" belief. Yet by all indications so far, Daddy has no bottom. Daddy is a giant ID lumbering around destroying and gourging on us.
This aspect of accepting all the immortality concerns me that there are a lot of people that follow him that are jealous of his ability to both do it and flaunt it. You can see this in the structures they are using for control (whitewashing history, Christian nationalism, violence etc.)
When people start talking about the acceptance of beating women into submission, disappearing Americans and glorifying slavery. I would say they definitely have Daddy envy.
Ivana called him "a rapist in the noncriminal sense". (What the "noncriminal sense" of rape is, I don't know.)
He avoided civil liability for raping E. Jean Carroll (he was found liable on other claims) only because she testified she felt no penetration. (I guess Marco Rubio was right about his hand size.)
He admitted on Howard Stern's show that as owner of the Miss USA pageant he would walk into dressing rooms while the models were in varying states of undress, and there have been allegations from Miss Teen USA participants that he did the same to them.
When asked about how young would be too young, he struggled to give an answer before saying that 12 might be too young.
As I recall, there was a story about how he once saw an eight-year-old girl at an airport and remarked that he wanted to date her in a decade.
When on The View in 2005 with his daughter to promote Ivanka's guest stint on The Apprentice, he was asked about the possibility of Ivanka posing nude in Playboy, and he said that he wouldn't be disappointed, that he finds her very attractive, and that he'd want to date her if she weren't his daughter. (I repeat: he said this with his daughter present on the show with him.)
He is, of course, a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, dating at least as far back as his wedding with Marla Maples.
And finally, his rhetoric toward my own country has been that of a classic domestic abuser: he loves us, he cherishes us, he'll always protect us, but if we don't do what he says he'll hurt us (with tariffs) while making veiled threats of further violence (51st state, which is invasion). Some Canadians of Ukrainian descent have observed that his rhetoric about Canada closely mirrors Vladimir Putin's rhetoric about Ukraine.
Donald Trump fits the abusive Daddy figure mould so well because he is an abusive Daddy figure.
This encapsulates many things I've been thinking since the Dubya era and says them so much better than I would have.
Reagan was a major daddy figure, too, but capable of compromise and not as broadly corrosive of the constitution (although there was that Iran-Contra thing and some back-tracking on civil rights relative to his gubernatorial days, largely to support the religious right leg of The Gipper's Stool. And perhaps some inappropriate props to the other two legs, although that was more in the policy domain and less in the constitutional damage domain)
What R-klans love is Control, and White Supremacy/Separateness provides the scaffolding and justification for Control. Fear feeds the need for Control. Separateness feeds Fear. If you are born and raised with the belief that Control Is Yours, that you have to be the director of your bubble’s Truman Show then you will try to dictate to others how to be human within your community. Daddy and the R-klans share this need for Control. That’s why they can’t quit him. What they don’t understand in a cosmic/soul sense is that this is all just a Truman Show.
Not only is he daddy, they think he is Badass Daddy. Ready to protect them and punish others. The Daddy they wish they had had. But as trump declines, this archetype is melting before us into a limp puddle of slime…
This is not entirely wrong, but there is quite a bit of projection here, as well as a failure to examine why otherwise rational people might see Democrats and the left as the bigger threat.
He is operating a memecoin from the Oval Office which has made him hundreds of millions of dollars. He flew on taxpayer dime to open his new golf course in Scotland. He's deploying military onto the streets. He's going after his political enemies with the DOJ. He was criminally indicted for election fraud, document theft, and financial crimes. He was found liable for sexual assault. His charity was shut down for fraud. His university was shut down for fraud. He stole classified documents and hid them from federal investigators. He tried to overturn a democratic election through fake elector schemes and inciting violence.
You want to sit here and tell me that people are looking at all of this honestly and simply concluding that the alternative would have been even worse? I don't think so. I think they love daddy.
If you think a cryptocurrency grift run from the Oval Office and weaponized federal law enforcement represent equivalent threats to democratic norms as universal healthcare proposals, then yes—you love daddy more than you love truth. There's no rational analysis that leads to that conclusion. Only tribal psychology that subordinates everything—evidence, constitutional principles, basic moral reasoning—to keeping the 'right' team in power.
The piece isn't projection. It's observation of people who've voluntarily abandoned the capacity for proportional threat assessment because acknowledging Trump's obvious criminality would require admitting they've been wrong about the most important political question of our lifetimes.
I'm a Trump voter, I know how awful he is, and yes, for me personally I'll take him over the Democrats because they're worse for me than a corrupt and incompetent executive. Are you familiar with Jon Haidt's research on conservatives being able to understand liberals but liberals being unable to understand conservatives? You should check it out if you haven't already, as you're displaying all the signs. Trump isn't "Daddy", he's chemotherapy, I hope he kills the cancer faster than he kills the patient.
Thank you for the honesty. You just admitted you're willing to destroy constitutional government because you think it serves your personal interests. You're not defending democracy or conservative principles—you're choosing authoritarianism because you calculate it hurts people you dislike more than it hurts you.
Your "chemotherapy" metaphor reveals everything: you view your fellow Americans as cancer to be eliminated, even if it destroys the country. That's not sophisticated political analysis—that's sociopathic dehumanization wrapped in pseudo-intellectual language.
The Haidt reference is particularly hollow. Understanding someone's reasoning doesn't make that reasoning legitimate. I understand your calculation perfectly: you'd rather live under a corrupt authoritarian than in a democracy where people you oppose have rights. That's not wisdom—it's moral bankruptcy.
You've proven the entire point of the piece. This isn't about policy disagreements or constitutional principles. It's about people willing to burn down democratic institutions as long as they think the ashes will bury their enemies first. You don't love daddy—you love what daddy does to people you hate.
At least you're honest about choosing fascism for personal advantage. Most Trump supporters still pretend they're defending something noble.
Put another way, this is just the next evolution of the Southern Strategy's Reagan variant as described by Lee Atwater. Any policy is acceptable so long as the group of people hurt by it contains disproportionately within it the voter's political enemies, so long as it serves to ensure that any ideology the voter finds anathema will be unable to enact its agenda should its adherents ever find themselves in a position of formal political power again.
It all goes back to shouting racial slurs to scare 1950s white voters. That's all it is, that's all it's ever been. They want Daddy to bring back the good old days when they could call non-white people various vile terms but they know they'd be metaphorically tarred and feathered for admitting it.
So why are Democrats worse? Here's an opportunity to explain what the commenters here are trying to grasp. Is it the loose sexual morality; the belief in everyone's responsibility to look after their own success regardless of their life circumstances? Do rule of law and the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" only apply to citizens of a country or are they universal? Or maybe something else - Inquiring minds want to know...
This would go over better without the snark, makes it sound like I would be wasting my time explaining in detail all the ways that I think Democrats are the more dangerous authoritarians, how they've allowed themselves to be cowed by their left flank into taking extreme positions, the damage they've done to the cities and state I grew up in, etc. How about a thought exercise; can you imagine why someone might prefer Trump, without imagining that this hypothetical person is morally wrong or bad?
Devastating insight into the MAGA alt right movement. The traditional conservative rule of law republicans like Cheney and Joe Walsh actively left the party and campaigned for democrats. It’s all just loyalty to an authoritarian figure because they are convinced that the authority figure like trump is better than the evil socialists and they will do anything to stop the steal! Our only real choice is to have real alternatives on the left and I think voters in New York are showing us that people like Mandami can be that alternative!
I think this is also related to cognitive dissonance. So many within our population have been raised ("obedience training") with a pretty stripped-down sense of empathy. Their "tribalism" is the proto-human version of our species; full development is seriously curbed. We are all born with the same genetic endowment -- to be fully empathetic and robust protectors of all nature. But if circumscribed by obedience training, the full flourishing is lost. As a result, we recognize only what has been thoroughly reinforced, and persist in childish responses. You're right, intelligence can't overcome this epigenetic damage -- or at least, we haven't found a way (more focused on resolving other debilitating diseases). The solution lies in nurturing behavior, preferably at early stages of development when the damage of "obedience" can be avoided.
So on point, as always. Thanks for your clarity, Mike.
The group you referenced is the most difficult for me to understand. The long time MAGA loyalists have always been a personality cult with little regard for facts, norms, or truth. But now there is another group in the coalition. They are moderate, intelligent, and informed….but somehow choose Trump anyway. For some inexplicable reason, they see wokeness as the real threat while minimizing or ignoring the constant, egregious shredding of democracy by Trump administration. Matt Taibbi comes to mind. He’s talked about nothing but Russia gate for the last month with nary a peep about what the current FBI is doing right now. He genuinely seems to think that the democrats were so bad that Trumps outrageous behavior is somehow an improvement. I really don’t get it, especially because I never saw him as a partisan or a grifter. It’s really sad honestly
I used to appreciate Taibbi's writing and then during #MeToo it came out he had been abusive to women, and he showed his true colors by his efforts to promote the "Twitter Files." When there's a pattern of bad behavior that's it for me, and I have no problem writing the repeat offender off unless and until I see l evidence of a real change of heart.
That guy is worthless. He just does his little macho hit pieces against liberal women like AOC and Taylor Lorenz . I unsubscribed and haven’t looked back 🤣😳🤨😡😡
Love how you captured patriarchal orthodoxy, Mike, even without touching on the misogyny. Uncritical faith, strict obedience, purity tests: this is why the indoctrinated cultists will drop their previous obsession with the "Epstein files" and guess what, they ignored tons of publicly available victim interviews, legal allegations and court filings even before he told them to drop it. "Circus" was such an appropriate title you chose for your substack, Mike!
Finally a concise, clear explanation of my guttural instinct to abandon the few friendships I had with Trumpers. I've decided donate a gift to support your important work . Thank you
Amen and well laid out.
Beyond the tribal vibe, I find shadows of dysfunction that affect other areas as well.
Daddy is a trigger word a lot of times in abusive family life. The old saying "Whatever Daddy wants Daddy gets" conjurs up all sorts of ways Daddy can violate people at will. Look at the tap dance around pedophilia that is happening. Daddy said it was bad. Now Daddy says it is good.
The people you describe that chose the tribe over reason seem to have the "it can't happen to me" belief. Yet by all indications so far, Daddy has no bottom. Daddy is a giant ID lumbering around destroying and gourging on us.
This aspect of accepting all the immortality concerns me that there are a lot of people that follow him that are jealous of his ability to both do it and flaunt it. You can see this in the structures they are using for control (whitewashing history, Christian nationalism, violence etc.)
When people start talking about the acceptance of beating women into submission, disappearing Americans and glorifying slavery. I would say they definitely have Daddy envy.
Donald Trump is an abuser.
Ivana called him "a rapist in the noncriminal sense". (What the "noncriminal sense" of rape is, I don't know.)
He avoided civil liability for raping E. Jean Carroll (he was found liable on other claims) only because she testified she felt no penetration. (I guess Marco Rubio was right about his hand size.)
He admitted on Howard Stern's show that as owner of the Miss USA pageant he would walk into dressing rooms while the models were in varying states of undress, and there have been allegations from Miss Teen USA participants that he did the same to them.
When asked about how young would be too young, he struggled to give an answer before saying that 12 might be too young.
As I recall, there was a story about how he once saw an eight-year-old girl at an airport and remarked that he wanted to date her in a decade.
When on The View in 2005 with his daughter to promote Ivanka's guest stint on The Apprentice, he was asked about the possibility of Ivanka posing nude in Playboy, and he said that he wouldn't be disappointed, that he finds her very attractive, and that he'd want to date her if she weren't his daughter. (I repeat: he said this with his daughter present on the show with him.)
He is, of course, a known associate of Jeffrey Epstein, dating at least as far back as his wedding with Marla Maples.
And finally, his rhetoric toward my own country has been that of a classic domestic abuser: he loves us, he cherishes us, he'll always protect us, but if we don't do what he says he'll hurt us (with tariffs) while making veiled threats of further violence (51st state, which is invasion). Some Canadians of Ukrainian descent have observed that his rhetoric about Canada closely mirrors Vladimir Putin's rhetoric about Ukraine.
Donald Trump fits the abusive Daddy figure mould so well because he is an abusive Daddy figure.
This encapsulates many things I've been thinking since the Dubya era and says them so much better than I would have.
Reagan was a major daddy figure, too, but capable of compromise and not as broadly corrosive of the constitution (although there was that Iran-Contra thing and some back-tracking on civil rights relative to his gubernatorial days, largely to support the religious right leg of The Gipper's Stool. And perhaps some inappropriate props to the other two legs, although that was more in the policy domain and less in the constitutional damage domain)
Reagan was a father figure. Trump never grew up 🤣😝
What R-klans love is Control, and White Supremacy/Separateness provides the scaffolding and justification for Control. Fear feeds the need for Control. Separateness feeds Fear. If you are born and raised with the belief that Control Is Yours, that you have to be the director of your bubble’s Truman Show then you will try to dictate to others how to be human within your community. Daddy and the R-klans share this need for Control. That’s why they can’t quit him. What they don’t understand in a cosmic/soul sense is that this is all just a Truman Show.
Mike, Thank you again for all you do.
Not only is he daddy, they think he is Badass Daddy. Ready to protect them and punish others. The Daddy they wish they had had. But as trump declines, this archetype is melting before us into a limp puddle of slime…
Searing yet right on point.
"This isn’t stupidity. It’s the deliberate subordination of truth-seeking to threat perception."
Many people would call this, "Stupidity." Count me one of them.
Please give us some names in addition to Taibbi.
This is not entirely wrong, but there is quite a bit of projection here, as well as a failure to examine why otherwise rational people might see Democrats and the left as the bigger threat.
Oh, they love daddy.
Do you have more than taunting?
He is operating a memecoin from the Oval Office which has made him hundreds of millions of dollars. He flew on taxpayer dime to open his new golf course in Scotland. He's deploying military onto the streets. He's going after his political enemies with the DOJ. He was criminally indicted for election fraud, document theft, and financial crimes. He was found liable for sexual assault. His charity was shut down for fraud. His university was shut down for fraud. He stole classified documents and hid them from federal investigators. He tried to overturn a democratic election through fake elector schemes and inciting violence.
You want to sit here and tell me that people are looking at all of this honestly and simply concluding that the alternative would have been even worse? I don't think so. I think they love daddy.
If you think a cryptocurrency grift run from the Oval Office and weaponized federal law enforcement represent equivalent threats to democratic norms as universal healthcare proposals, then yes—you love daddy more than you love truth. There's no rational analysis that leads to that conclusion. Only tribal psychology that subordinates everything—evidence, constitutional principles, basic moral reasoning—to keeping the 'right' team in power.
The piece isn't projection. It's observation of people who've voluntarily abandoned the capacity for proportional threat assessment because acknowledging Trump's obvious criminality would require admitting they've been wrong about the most important political question of our lifetimes.
I'm a Trump voter, I know how awful he is, and yes, for me personally I'll take him over the Democrats because they're worse for me than a corrupt and incompetent executive. Are you familiar with Jon Haidt's research on conservatives being able to understand liberals but liberals being unable to understand conservatives? You should check it out if you haven't already, as you're displaying all the signs. Trump isn't "Daddy", he's chemotherapy, I hope he kills the cancer faster than he kills the patient.
Thank you for the honesty. You just admitted you're willing to destroy constitutional government because you think it serves your personal interests. You're not defending democracy or conservative principles—you're choosing authoritarianism because you calculate it hurts people you dislike more than it hurts you.
Your "chemotherapy" metaphor reveals everything: you view your fellow Americans as cancer to be eliminated, even if it destroys the country. That's not sophisticated political analysis—that's sociopathic dehumanization wrapped in pseudo-intellectual language.
The Haidt reference is particularly hollow. Understanding someone's reasoning doesn't make that reasoning legitimate. I understand your calculation perfectly: you'd rather live under a corrupt authoritarian than in a democracy where people you oppose have rights. That's not wisdom—it's moral bankruptcy.
You've proven the entire point of the piece. This isn't about policy disagreements or constitutional principles. It's about people willing to burn down democratic institutions as long as they think the ashes will bury their enemies first. You don't love daddy—you love what daddy does to people you hate.
At least you're honest about choosing fascism for personal advantage. Most Trump supporters still pretend they're defending something noble.
Put another way, this is just the next evolution of the Southern Strategy's Reagan variant as described by Lee Atwater. Any policy is acceptable so long as the group of people hurt by it contains disproportionately within it the voter's political enemies, so long as it serves to ensure that any ideology the voter finds anathema will be unable to enact its agenda should its adherents ever find themselves in a position of formal political power again.
It all goes back to shouting racial slurs to scare 1950s white voters. That's all it is, that's all it's ever been. They want Daddy to bring back the good old days when they could call non-white people various vile terms but they know they'd be metaphorically tarred and feathered for admitting it.
Wow.
So why are Democrats worse? Here's an opportunity to explain what the commenters here are trying to grasp. Is it the loose sexual morality; the belief in everyone's responsibility to look after their own success regardless of their life circumstances? Do rule of law and the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" only apply to citizens of a country or are they universal? Or maybe something else - Inquiring minds want to know...
This would go over better without the snark, makes it sound like I would be wasting my time explaining in detail all the ways that I think Democrats are the more dangerous authoritarians, how they've allowed themselves to be cowed by their left flank into taking extreme positions, the damage they've done to the cities and state I grew up in, etc. How about a thought exercise; can you imagine why someone might prefer Trump, without imagining that this hypothetical person is morally wrong or bad?
Devastating insight into the MAGA alt right movement. The traditional conservative rule of law republicans like Cheney and Joe Walsh actively left the party and campaigned for democrats. It’s all just loyalty to an authoritarian figure because they are convinced that the authority figure like trump is better than the evil socialists and they will do anything to stop the steal! Our only real choice is to have real alternatives on the left and I think voters in New York are showing us that people like Mandami can be that alternative!
I think this is also related to cognitive dissonance. So many within our population have been raised ("obedience training") with a pretty stripped-down sense of empathy. Their "tribalism" is the proto-human version of our species; full development is seriously curbed. We are all born with the same genetic endowment -- to be fully empathetic and robust protectors of all nature. But if circumscribed by obedience training, the full flourishing is lost. As a result, we recognize only what has been thoroughly reinforced, and persist in childish responses. You're right, intelligence can't overcome this epigenetic damage -- or at least, we haven't found a way (more focused on resolving other debilitating diseases). The solution lies in nurturing behavior, preferably at early stages of development when the damage of "obedience" can be avoided.
Just read the other comments. Man, do you have some high level brain cells commenting on your posts. Happy to be a part of it.
GO DEMOCRACY!