Trump Showcased Right-Wing Politics’ Inability to Talk to Normal Humans Last Night

It’s a cult.

No, really. I can hyperlink to all sorts of academic papers and reporting detailing how Trumpism has endless cult-like aspects to it, but nothing will summarize it better than Donald Trump did last night when talking to real voters in a Univision town hall. A former registered Republican told him that Trump lost his vote, and he said he would like to give the former president the opportunity to win him back. Trump responded with his typical bombast and deflection that stems from the natural assumption that everyone likes him and thinks he’s a very special boy, and all assertions are reverse-engineered to fit that fundamental construct at the base of this intellectually bankrupt ideology.

Voter: I am a Republican that’s no longer registered. Your inaction during your presidency was a little disturbing to me. What happened during January 6th and the fact that you waited so long to take action while your supporters were attacking the Capitol. Coronavirus, I thought… pic.twitter.com/Z6JFVUouZX

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 17, 2024

Trump opened by reframing the question around a lie, falsely asserting that 97 percent of his administration supports him when he has only been endorsed by half of his cabinet. Then he said about the January 6th rioters that “they didn’t come because of me, they came because of the election, they thought the election was a rigged election,” then when talking about the January 6th rioters in his next breath, a man with his brain clearly seeping out of his ears at a faster pace than the spray tan melting off his face repeatedly used the word “we” to refer to them while asserting “that was a day of love.”

The only thing Trump offered to address the actual questions posed to him was tepidly saying at the end that “all I want is honest elections.” Let’s check the tape and see if Trump won this guy’s vote back by the end of this rambling non-answer.

Screenshot via Univision

I’m gonna guess that’s a no.

It’s not often that we get to see the right-wing echo chamber come into direct contact with reality anymore. The mainstream media has made the right-wing their assignment editor in their intense desire to burnish their bothsides credentials more than their journalistic ones, and we are forced to endure endless fake panics like this lie about an immigration “crisis” because their unreality has subsumed so much of our shared one.

But a direct appeal like this—“buddy you lost me, now here’s your chance to get me back”—is inescapable. It forces the right-wing to meet on terms other than their own deranged ones. They are forced to venture outside their safe space for bigots and act like an adult for once in their lives. Trump proved this ideology is incapable of doing so here. Even when incentivized with an opportunity to improve their ability to take power, Trumpism simply cannot accept that even a small facet of its extremely narrow conception of reality may be wrong and would rather lose a winnable vote than admit that. This broken worldview is centered around the assumption that most of those who disagree with their assessment of reality are “enemies within” America as Trump recently said, leaving no middle ground to meet in for anyone not already drunk off their Kool-Aid.

This cultish ideology that defines the right-wing demands subservience, an acceptance that their unhinged view of the world is empirically true, and the only reasoned discussion they will allow for is what kind of white grievance to extrapolate from these hallucinations. The fake news cannot be trusted (they do have a point there, I’ll give them that), and the real arbiters of truth are anonymous Twitter accounts like EndWokeness and Autism Capital. This echo chamber has so wholly encapsulated the entire right-wing that aged Fox News viewers are ostensibly more online than their children are, as they are exposed to a torrent of lies from Elon Musk’s $44 billion disinformation platform and other traditional sources of right-wing misinformation like 4chan.

Trump is fundamentally incapable of operating in any kind of shared reality due to his world-historic vanity and staggering levels of insecurity, and his cult of personality has followed their dear leader. This may be an effective strategy to whip up rage and win primaries while building media empires off lead-based supplements and crypto scams, but it’s a counter-productive track to take amongst normal humans, as demonstrated by that questioner’s face and new cultural developments in the age of Trump like right-wing men’s bleak dating lives. Trump’s cult followers can delude themselves and each other all they want when safely ensconced inside their safe spaces, but this has made them weak and wholly unable to relate to anyone resembling a normal person.