Trump’s popularity is sinking to, well, Trump 2020 levels and below, so it’s time for the right wing to crank up the star-making machinery to annoint the new boss, same as the old boss. Part of this effort is the clever MAGAts playing the “Trump? I always disagreed with him” game. MTG was one of the first of the die-hards to engage in this obvious subterfuge. Tucker Carlson is the latest:
The Times says it so we all know it’s true.
The only thing that would truly torment Tucker Carlson is a black or hispanic person not treating him with the proper reverence when they serve him at his whites-only, no-Jews club, so I, for one, will not be overly worried about his mental anguish. I’ll leave that to the TImes, which seems to have infinite empathy for Republican haters and none for transgender humans.
There’s also an argument to be made that some never-Trumpers basically did the same thing as Carlson and MTG, only earlier and with more subtlety, but I’ll leave driftglass to make it. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this view, but in general I’ll welcome any ally who doesn’t ask Democrats to throw our core beliefs into the toilet in service of getting elected.
What’s under this veil of Carlson’s and MTG’s anti-Trump bullshit is the fact that the current Republican party — and especially the “thought leaders” therein — want power no matter what, and it’s clear that Trump is going to lead to them losing power. So, they need to wash the Trump stank off of their shitkickers as quickly as possible. Democrats, me among them, like to on occasion make fun of the malleability of belief that characterizes the average Republican true believer, calling it “cognitive dissonance.” The weird thing about the charge of cognitive dissonance is that it implies that there’s some sort of painful thought process involved. I don’t think there is.
Rick Perlstein addresses this issue in the first in his series on how right-wing authoritarian propaganda. This piece focuses on Glen Beck’s Blaze.
[After discussing Olaf Palme’s view that politics is pestering or teaching] I raise a negative connotation to politics as teaching. Our American authoritarians are so, so much better at an undemocratic version of it. At tutoring their followers how to process cognitive dissonance. How to denude the dangerous doubts of acolytes in the face of information that threatens to collapse their whole rigid, rickety system of loyalty. Rush Limbaugh was particularly good at it: at taking care of callers who had a hard time making sense of something a liberal—the Enemy—said, because that sounded attractive to them. (To an anguished caller the nigh after Barack Obama’s announcement at his first speech to a joint session of Congress that the stimulus he had just signed into law would give 95% of wage-earners a significant tax cut: “Pay no attention to what Obama says. He means the opposite in most cases. What he says in irrelevant.”) Con men consider that skill the most important part of their craft: “cooling the mark out”—managing their potentially dangerous rage in the face of the realization that they have been conned.
The whole thing is worth a read — it’s a typical Perlstein deep dive, by which I mean, really good.
The key political point here is that Trumps cratering approval rating means that we’re getting down to the true believers, the Blaze readers and similar Trump supporters. These people don’t experience cognitive dissonance about Trump because they’re so used to believing nonsense that they’ll be “cooled out” by the media they consume. (I’d argue that their inability to feel cognitive dissonance begins with the explanations they’re fed about why a just and loving God would give babies eye cancer, but I digress.) These people are unreachable. There’s no political strategy that Democrats can employ to convince them. But the polls are showing that there are many who are reachable, so we need to concentrate on them. And, no matter what, we don’t need to be gullible enough to believe that people like MTG or Carlson could ever be allies.
